Artifact Adventure Gaiden

This game is pretty great. It's a nice action RPG with a very retro style. The gameplay of building your character and make choices is really engaging, and made it worth playing through multiple times. I was skeptical after playing the first one, because of how different it looks, but it recreated a lot of the same types of fun, and is great addition to the series. Visually, I'm not a huge fan of the graphics, but I understand they are trying to reproduce the original Game Boy style. For what it is, things are perfectly readable, there was only one spot where I got confused between a wall and a path. After a while it grew on me, and the more complex combat graphics are where it really shines. The music and sound effects are fine, nothing amazing, but it fits the Game Boy style and doesn't feel out of place. The gameplay is where things really pick up. In combat, melee is just walking into enemies, but with all of the different weapons and effects and how the enemies handle knock back, I was constantly having to adjust my speed and change how I engaged the enemy. Adding the extra stats and passive effects, plus the active skills, and I was changing something every other fight to try and optimize my build. It kept things interesting through three playthroughs. Out of combat, the choice-based quests were fun. It wasn't as simple as just picking a different menu option to get a different reward. Some were that simple, sure, but there were plenty that had different dungeons depending on your choices, or extra tasks you had to complete to get the reward. Some of the choices weren't obvious, like just not finishing some quests can lead to a different outcome with different rewards, and finding all of those was a blast. If you're expecting it to play just like the first one, you will be surprised and maybe disappointed. If you're looking for something that recreates the fun of finding all of the secrets and uncovering all of the different build options that the first one gave, this game definitely fits the bill.