False Skies

An absolutely fantastic turn-based RPG which plays like a mixture of Dragon Quest and Etrian Odyssey. False Skies relies purely on the design of its enemies, encounters, weapons, and player classes to make battles interesting, and succeeds wonderfully at doing so. The class system is my personal favorite iteration of such in any game I've played, allowing a huge amount of flexibility without offering so much freedom that every party member ends up feeling the same. Each character can only have one class from each tier, and only from either tiers 1-4 or 2-5, but you can enter any class in the next tier from any class in your current tier. Your characters will have specific roles in your party, but with well over 8000 possible combinations of classes [strike]I'm pretty sure that's how the math works out[/strike], you can make those roles be exactly what you're looking for, whatever that may be. Even if you don't know with certainty what various skills will do before you choose a class, the more standard skills follow a standardized naming scheme, and you can learn what an amount of the other skills do by paying attention to enemies or reading through bestiary entries. For the most unique of skills, finding out what they do is part of the fun. Going "What could 'Negative K.' possibly be?" certainly had a significant impact on my playthrough of the game. I played on hard mode, and was largely satisfied with that difficulty. The game was perfectly willing to destroy me for not knowing what was going on, but seeing a fight, dying, and then creating a plan was enough that very few fights took me more than two tries. Ultimately, I'd say gameplay is where False Skies shines brightest. A few additional notes on gameplay, I do always appreciate when battle items are useful, and False Skies has some very useful battle items indeed. "Fast person who can use items at the start of the turn" is not just a passable character, they were quite the valuable member of my team, reminiscent of Shir from Phantasy Star 2. The damage dealing items did fall off after a bit, aside from enemies who seemed to exist purely to keep them relevant, but I didn't make use of the class which boosted the power of said items, so I can't speak on how effective that class is at using them. The buffing and debuffing items, on the other hand, remain fantastic throughout the entire game. It would be nice if consumables were returned upon losing a battle and respawning instead of loading a save, but that's a pretty minor inconvenience for casual play. (It's much more problematic as a speedrunner, but games shouldn't be designed around speedrunners, so...) Graphically, I'm just a tad too young to have much nostalgia for the Game Boy Color, which seems to be the obvious aesthetic inspiration here. That doesn't stop False Skies from looking fantastic. The characters are expressive, the environments are varied and visually appealing, and the enemies are as interesting and cool visually as they are mechanically. I'm not much of a graphics person, so I don't really have much to say beyond "It's good." Musically, False Skies is quite good. I very much enjoyed most if not all of the soundtrack. The tunes fit the mood, and the high-energy songs are suitably catchy. I don't think the soundtrack would sell anyone on the game by itself, but I think you'll certainly enjoy what you hear. Narratively, False Skies is solid. I'm not a fan of silent protagonists, but the characters around your party do a pretty good job of picking up the slack of the lacking leads. The Army of Garm's a fun group to have the story actually be focused on, and the more minor characters are pretty fun to see as well. False Skies has pretty solid pacing, even doing most of the side content, which is always a plus. The lore is neat, but lore is not story, and False Skies' story, while fun, is ultimately pretty simple. It serves well enough to enhance the experience, but I don't imagine many are going to find it particularly profound or life-changing. So, yeah. If you have even the slightest bit of interest in traditional turn-based RPGs, I would [b]highly[/b] recommend False Skies. Just a truly wonderful experience.