Throughout the game’s development cycle I was informed that completing the game could take upwards of 40 hours for each character. Considering that there are seven playable characters the game, in theory, will provide you with over 280 hours of game play. Now that’s pretty damn good and to be honest, that estimate isn’t really too far off. It’s just too bad that you’ll spend the majority of your hours wandering through an endless parade of (you guessed it again) menus. When you’re not being frustrated by the menus you’re being antagonized by the game’s insane difficulty level. I’ve never seen a game be so hard and punishing on the gamer. You won’t receive much sympathy from the game. Forget about tissues, the game’s all about doling out right hooks to the kidneys.
Visually the game is a tale of two cities. In the first city, let’s call it standstill city, the game looks absolutely gorgeous. Everything in the game has an amazingly sense of style and flair that ranks amongst the best of what the PS2 has to offer. Unfortunately sooner or later you’ll have to step into the other realm, animated city. It’s after this point that the game’s visuals lose all sense of style and quality and essentially fizzle down into a glorified slideshow. When characters are set into motion (if one could call it that) they look absolutely atrocious. Animation this horrid hasn’t reared its ugly head since the days of 16-bit gaming. Games like
Golden Sun II and
Legend of Zelda for the Game Boy Advance feature animation that is light-years ahead of this game. It’s putrid, you could probably count the frames of animation that accompanies each action on one hand.
It probably won’t come as a surprise to find that the game’s saving grace comes in the audio department. Take the musical scores from
Final Fantasy X, kick them up a notch and you’ve got the excellent soundtrack that accompanies
UNLIMTED Saga. Calling it beautiful would be an understatement. I once had a girlfriend who asked me how a person could be moved by something so lifeless, something that was so inhumane and something that could not have a palatable effect on the human psyche. I wish I had
UNLIMITED Saga around for her to listen to, it’s not the pinnacle of orchestration in a video game but it’s pretty damn close. If you decide to pass this one up, make sure to at least check out the soundtrack.
Everything else in this department fares quite well thanks to the inclusion of Dolby Pro Logic II support. It’s an RPG so one shouldn’t expect to be greeted by thunderous blasts or smatterings of random effects. What is here is pretty damn good though and rivals some of the best that the genre has to offer. Too bad the voice acting is your standard poorly translated fodder though. Not exactly
Resident Evil level but it’s right within tactical striking distance.
It’s just a shame that the rest of the game doesn’t fare quite as well. It’s not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the game, it has the core elements needed to build a successful game. The problem is that it doesn’t go beyond incorporating the bare necessities into the grand scheme of things and because of this, the end result is ambitious effort that must be commended but in the end, is one that should be avoided at all costs.
F
It’s not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with Square’s latest offering, it’s just that there isn’t anything fundamentally right about it either. It’s a game that takes chances but in the end, those chances surmount to nothing more than an excuse for you to wade through another set of menus. If you value your sanity avoid this one at all costs.
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