Last Dream

This game is exactly what it appears to be: A turn-based RPG in the vein of the original 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games. While there's no real surprises to those who're familiar with RPG Maker-esque games, it presents a good story, an interesting world, and fun turn-based combat. Your choices of class are solid and diverse, and purely from the point of view of combat, you should be all right with just about any combination, though some, like an all-magic-user party, will obviously be more difficult to beat the game with than others, and there's two classes that are all but required to get the best possible result. That is actually my one complaint about Last Dream: half your roster is basically spoken for if you want to complete the game. You need a Thief to unlock treasure chests without having to fight the guards, and an Engineer is necessary, not only to traverse the mining tunnels that serve as shortcuts throughout the game map, but also for a section of the game's main plot to get the good ending. Neither of these classes are bad, and I enjoyed having them in my party, but I resented these classes being required in order to truly succeed at the game. However, that's a fairly minor gripe in the face of how much I enjoyed my time with the game, and with its sequel, Last Dream: Worlds Unknown. I highly recommend this game to any fan of old-school RPGs.

Great backstory. Somewhat of an Isekai protagonist. OPTIONS. Lots of options and menus, including a very useful Map and battle Macros to speed things up! Great music selection for the cut scenes and BGM. One of the few games that really takes me back to the old JRPGs on the older consoles.

its really good

All time favorite game! Such a compelling world of characters, side quests, mystery - perfect recreation of my childhood yet much more depth and sophistication. I plan to replay it on Steam!

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3/10

Despite the wacky balancing, I just hate the fact that there are quality of life classes. Want to ride a monster to move faster on the overworld? > Use a hunter. Want to use these shortcuts which are everywhere? > Use the engineer (which is needed if you don't wanna fail a specific quest, it seems). Wanna open all the chests in towns without having guards up your butt? > Use the (otherwise completely useless) thief. No... sorry... that sucks the fun out for me so hard. What about using a standard party of Knight, Thief, White Mage & Black Mage? Have fun traversing the overworld, where you needlessly have to run around some things because you can't use the shortcut. And do it especially slow, since you can't run on the overworld and you don't have the Hunter. I can't stress enough how much I despise this system. I've started this game so many times... but no... I either use the party I want and crawl my way through the game, or I use the party I need and have extremely disadvantages in battle, since the utility classes are a piece of crap in battle.

Overview: You play as your standard amnesiac that washed up on a beach near the town of Oakwood and were nursed back to health by a man named Dante, one of the town’s more successful residents. Your journey starts when Dante’s daughter is mysteriously abducted and taken to a local run down keep and he asks you to rescue her. After doing so he informs you more about the circumstances he found you in and tells you that an old friend across the sea might know more about how to return you to the world you came from. As he knows you’ve had the feeling that you just didn’t belong where you’ve found yourself. So your journey begins into mystery, tragedy, and the toll of time. Presentation: This is your standard looking and controlling RPGmaker game. It has some ideas but as far as interacting with it… its not very complicated. What makes this game a little different is what is under the hood. That being said the game is going on 11 years old so some of the controls are a little stiff and the game stutters a bit, and I couldn’t find a way to fix it. There are some precision control puzzles that may have been doable at one point, but at least for me I just couldn’t get the controls to cooperate long enough to solve the puzzles. At least they were side puzzles that didn’t affect the game too much. The game is still playable though. Game-play: This is where the developer was ambitious with what they have tried to stuff into a RPGmaker game circa ten years ago. There are eight basic classes (Knight, Grey Mage, Monk, Thief, Hunter, White/Black Mage and Engineer) that the player can chose from to create their party of four. While this may not be that important in most of these games, it is in this one. You can either have a very limiting team that can make it hard to access the various story choices or you can have one that lets you access most of what is in the game relatively easily at the cost of losing out on some of the higher level weapons and spells. My group was the Grey Mage, thief, hunter and engineer. This is the jack of all trades group that gave me the most options when it came to the story choices. It is still possible to make the choices you want with other groups, but it might require thinking outside of the box within the game world to do so. To the developers credit, they accounted for this in most circumstances. That being said it can also cause some issues since this game for the most part does not have to be played in a linear fashion even though the developers did their best to show the consequences of what choices you do make when your going out of order. Usually this is in the form of the player just made it much harder to do A because they went right to D. For example eliminating the leader of the thief’s early in the game might not be the smartest choice when you need their skeleton keys to make the mid game a little easier. Their prices go waaay up if you do that, so letting them be is probably the smarter choice even if removing them seems like it would help the kingdom they reside in. Of course this is the problem of unintended consequences which this story likes to play with. The story has a lot of interconnected bits that are like that, it’s not always clear who influences what and the end game can be surprising depending on what the player chose to do or not do. I’m still not sure how to avoid some of the major plot points even though the epilogues at the end seem to suggest it’s possible. The combat side of this game is its strength, but also one of its weaknesses since the developer kinda missed the sweet spot. The combat is fun because the players can more or less become steamrollers very quickly, until they hit certain bosses anyway, but that makes the combat very repetitive until a certain point in the story where the enemies get much harder and start using status effects constantly. Then it becomes a game of One Punch man where if initial salvo doesn’t wipe out the monsters or disable them the party is probably going to get wrecked. This is very annoying if your playing on what amounts to classic difficulty. Which is a shame since there are plenty of options and skills that can be learned and the character classes can be upgraded. Maybe it’s a limitation of the RPGmaker software, who knows. The puzzles, oh boy, the puzzles. There are some simple ones some challenging ones, some I guess you had to be there in 2014 and some ok, guys I know you were college students at the time but that was a long time ago for me. They aren’t really required but they do usually give you some nice equipment or higher level healing items that come in handy. Finally the sound / music is decent. It’s all royalty fee, no copyright stuff, but some of those remixes they have are rocking. Summary: This is one of those games I picked up a long time ago on a sale and kind of forgot about until I was plumbing the depths of my back log and decided to give it another try. I was about to give up on it until what the developers were going for finally clicked. This game is kind of a “demaster” of games like Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, or any other open world fantasy game that features player choice and customization. They stuffed a ton of mechanics in here and while it looks weird and takes some imagination to figure it out since they really couldn’t show things very well with the platform they were using. If they did a remake with the unity’s and unreal’s of now I imagine this might be something more people would pay attention to. I would recommend to those who like old fashioned JRPG’s with a few tweaks and those that just want a RPG that they don’t have to think too much about if they don’t want to.

I tried to enjoy this but, I fell asleep repeatedly. This isn't play time - it's snooze time.