Despite my negative post here I kept playing and beat the game.
On 1980's difficulty on my first time through. The Final Boss took me 4 rounds. My team was bad. Like really bad. (Werewolf, Troll, Cultist)
What can I say? I'm a certified bona fide CRPG genius. Fuck, I rule so much. When it comes to playing RPGs, anyway.
Comments:
The game is as badly made as I made it out to be. However, there's still that... well, nostalgic charm. I get why you guys are so positive about it even when it has glaring flaws: we don't see anything like this. It's natural to thus be a little more kind to it. I get that but it shouldn't make you overlook the glaring issues: the slow combat speed, the massive amount of glitches, etc, etc.
But I shouldn't be such a dick. I did, despite my harsh attitude, like it enough to finish it, grudgingly. I liked that there were so many abilities. I do feel like my party was terrible but I still made it through the hardest difficulty so either I am amazing or I accidentally the best party. I find that hard to believe though. For instance, the werewolf is ostensibly a melee/buff class. Only I never used any buffs as they didn't feel good enough. Nobody in my party had any status effects so most of the time I was facing Running Slashes to the face that would annihilate lesser men. But God of CRPG gameplay as I am I cunningly max'd out DEF and HP so that I could at least get a Nil Vortex off, or an Overdrive, or usually, all of them, and Heart of Fury on top because apparently this game's approach to a high difficulty is to give everything 10000000 HP.
Now, most of the battles were pretty bad and it's a little sad how the only viable strategy (at least in my difficulty was) to "stall + DOTs". This never changed, except in a few rare multi-minion fights where one had to balance AOE's with DOTs. Not that they did much in this difficulty. Even my hilariously buffed Werewolf with his 9 ranks of Advanced Offense still did 0 damage against most things on the first few hits. And if the battle went on long enough for you to deplete their armor it was either an easy battle anyway or you were dead or about to die. However, I want to positively note the very last battle for it's surprisingly nice music - which reminded me positively of Secret of Mana 2 - and, particularly, the battle just before that.
Now THAT was a battle. I had to try it at least 10 or 11 times before I could come up with a strategy and kill order that would allow me to finally beat the game. That was a good fight and the game should have had more encounters like that. Frustrating, yet fun.
My game clock at the end was 15:00. Yes, I'm amazing. Praise me.
Overall, despite my initial misgivings, it's well-worth playing for an older school RPG fan and I will give it... mmm, 5/10. It can't get more, it's just too badly made: bugs, typos, writing issues everywhere. But despite all that I think most people here will get some (or a lot) of fun out of it.