Legend of Heroes: Sen no Kiseki review

After 135 hours including who knows how many hours of looking up archaic Japanese, I finally finished this bloody long game. This is my second Legend of Heroes game, after Zero no Kiseki Evolution. Sen no Kiseki is the eighth story in this super long running series and the first one to go full 3D. Besides Legend of Heroes and Bravely Default, I can't think of any decent old school style turn based RPGs out there.

THE GOOD

- Same old Legend of Heroes battle system with minor tweaks. Still nowhere as good as Grandia 2's battle system though.

- More enemies that you could not backstab. My problem with Zero no Kiseki was backstab = instant win = boring. Still easy to do it though.

- After playing the no effort/budget all fanservice game Extetra, its nice to play an RPG that made me go, wow, they really put a lot of effort into this game.

- References to Zero no Kiseki.

- Cliffhanger ending that made me want the sequel now.

THE BAD

- Boring generic school story with way too many moe anime cliches like too much talking during battles while enemy just watches and cringeworthy school festival concert storyline. There's a reason I haven't touch Valyria Chronicles 2 after all this years.

- Really sporadic voice acting. For example a couple of lines may be spoken at the beginning of a cutscene but its all quiet until the end and maybe only one character's lines are spoken.

- After you clear the game, you get to choose 5 points of stuff to carry over to a new game and swimsuits cost 2 points when other costumes cost 1 point. Why Falcom, why???

- The real difficult final battle is actually set a bit before the easy final battle which was a letdown until the awesome cliffhanger.

THE UGLY

- Every character has mommy/daddy issues.

- Learning all the useless Japanese words which cannot be used in real life.

- Huge slowlydown on the Vita when you get to the huge and more populated places.

SUMMARY

While I will definitely get the sequel to have my revenge on C, character wise its so bland and generic. There's an exciting political story in the background though. Its an OK game but unfortunately, there are not many old school RPGs out there today.