In very vague terms, it's just a Dragon Quest clone, where the story beats aren't as strong and bittersweet as in DQ games. But it does so much more.
- Proto Pokemon: You get these capsule monsters, which you can feed weapons and stuff, and then they develop to more-or-less related monsters. Maybe more like Digimon, just not that wild. It's pretty rudimentary, you can't enter commands, feeding is simple, they often flee or defend, but they work nice as damage sponges and sometimes use their cool abilities.
- Expanded Casion: DQ always had these casinos, which are probably gone by now, in the later games. But they are always just slots and one different game, I guess? Here you get slots, some bingo variant, Black Jack and even a Poker. I had a bit fun with that, even if the implementation is weird.
- Dragon Balls: Yeah, they are called eggs, and there are eight, but you bring them to a dragon and get a wish granted. It's a nice motivator to make you find all the treasures in a dungeon, and from the casino, you get a tool that tells you how many closed chests are still in a dungeon.
- Changing Party Members: Similar to FF IV and XIII, it will be quite some time until you have your final party. For at least half the game, you get different party compositions, with the most stark the one where you have no good mage and healer. It's way simpler than in the FFs (which shows you how much more complex the characters in those games are - here, a character boils down to mage, fighter or hybrid, FF IV does manage to differentiate way better.
- Puzzles / Dungeon Design: This game has some of my favourite dungeon design in an RPG. I love how they are designed with Puzzles in mind, and how you are so strongly encouraged to explore every path, to find all the chests. The puzzles simply make the exploration more interesting, than what you get so, so often in RPGs. Granted, thematically they are boring, but I really like how there is some Zelda puzzling there.
- Visible monsters: In dungeons, you see every monster, and they move only when you move. You can paralyze them with an arrow, a tool that you find at the very start of the game. Meaning you relatively easily never fight a non-boss monster in a dungeon. Not recommended, of course, but I love that it's possible.
- Ancient Cave: There is basically a separate game in there, which is essentially a rogue-light (as you do find equipment that you can keep outside of the dungeon). I might try a few times, but a run takes hours.
I'm actually surprised that I have to say so much about it, but I love how many things this game does. I do have a critisizm - while there are a few nice story beats, it is very lackluster, as is the world building. Plot points are brought up without much thought - we need to get an elf (because we know that from the first game), and because they are all about living with nature, we decide that the scientists hurt nature in some way. But as soon as they know, they can fix it. There is a country apart from the rest of the world. At the very end only is it mentioned, because we need an engine from it, and learn that it tries to take over the world. Like, this could be a running theme from the game, but it isn't.
I bring this up, because after a certain point, I lost interest. It was still fun, but I felt like I was just going through the motions, not caring about the characters and the story, and I'm sure that lacking strength of story and worldbuilding is the problem. It is still a fun game, and it is, as mentioned, a DQ clone (in essence, at least), so it's not something I really fault the game for. Just wished that was a bit stronger in there.
Anyway, great game, was a lot of fun. One of the (not so) secret best RPGs on the SNES.
