Developer: Square-soft Publisher: Square EA System Requirements: Playstation, epsxe or Cvgs emulator I Recommend : Playstation or Cvgs (epsxe has sound difficulties)

Crazyface Award!

There is no experience points or levels in this game, your stats increase slightly when you defeat a certain boss, but the weapons and armor themselves have stats as well. There is six classes of creatures you will encounter in your journey, Human,Beast, Undead, Phantom, Evil, and Dragon. If you attack only dragon based creatures with a knife. The knifes power towards killing dragons will increase, while it will no longer be as affective towards other creatures.This requires you to carry a weapon for each creature class which is a first a little awkward, but it adds allot of depth to a already complex game. If you know your in a cavern filled with undead, you switch to you "Undead" class weapon. If you outside, you switch to your "Human" based weapon.

You can create and your own weapons and armor in workshops which are scattered across the game. There is hundreds of blades, hilts and armor that can be combined to make better equipment. You can spend hours and hours making all types of cool stuff.

There is also gemstones that you can add to a weapon or shield that will increase you stats. For example, lets say you have to fight a water elemental, you could equip a fire based gemstone on your best phantom based weapon and a water protection based gemstone on you shield. You could even cast some fire based magic to do some massive damage. The battle should be easy, but if you didn't know what to equip you would probably gotten wasted. This makes the game a little frustrating, you never know when you are going to fight a boss and they give no hints what there weaknesses are. Sure you can try to cast the "analyze" spell to try get that information but it fails 70% percent of the time. This forces you to change your weapons, gemstones and equipment until you find a combination that dose some damage. But usually you'll die first. Forcing you to start at your last save space. That would be OK if their where more of them, But usually the last savespace you used is ten minutes from the boss that just whipped your butt. This can be quite annoying after the fourth try at a boss. Mabey they make it hard to force you to purchase a strategy guide to complete this game. (Something I didn't have, too expensive) Despite the annoying boss battles, you feel rewarded when you actually defeat them.

The graphics are breathtaking, I never seen so much detail in Playstation game. Even the most 'boxed' shaped room in this game, looks like a work of art when you switch to first person view mode. The world is filled with exquisite lighting effects, marvous architecture, intensely animated spells, flying snow flies, babbling waterfalls, walking corpses... the attention to detail is remarkable. a dungeon hack never looked so good. The detail of the 3d models is at it's max. If god is in the detail, then he probably made the graphics in this game.

The sound is passable, the sound of swords hang, the bones of the undead chatter, it's all good. But the best part in the sound department is the music. To the rockish sounds of the underground caverns, To haunghting symphony of the undead in the sinner's corner. It rocks! Moody and atmospheric, it absorbs you into the game world and remains strong through the entire game.

With a great story, challenging bosses, and a outstanding battle system makes it one exciting product.

Buy this game.

-Chip Scheppel