Long Gone Days

[h1]Summary[/h1] Long Gone Days is a game where I mostly tolerated the gameplay in order to experience the story. Despite advertising itself as a modern JRPG, I would say the moment to moment gameplay was subpar compared to titles thirty years prior such as Final Fantasy I. While the story was intriguing enough to keep my playing, the short length made wanting a little more as not all the characters were as arc'd out as I would have liked. Overall, I would give Long Gone Days a 6/10. Given the length of the game and its bog standard gameplay, I would say the game is worth approximately $10 to me. [h1]Review[/h1] Let's quickly talk about gameplay before we get into the game's story. Despite being a JRPG, Long Gone Days has no exp or leveling with the majority of your stats coming from your equipment and a smaller amount from temporary buffs during battle. Abilities are only gained at certain moments in the story. Additionally, HP and MP are not ever recovered except through the usage of items or abilities. When you combine all of this, it results in fairly monotonous battles as you spam basic attacks because you either have no useful abilities or want to conserve your MP for boss battles. Items such as grenades do help to compensate for the lack of abilities early on and while the game is generous in giving you more items, because there are no shops or ways to readily acquire more of the same items, you're always unsure if you should be wasting that particular item or not. Perhaps a way to barter items you have an abundance of for items you're lacking would fit thematically. The one somewhat interesting mechanic of battles is the ability to target enemy body parts. Aiming for their torso will result in less damage but a higher chance of landing a hit while aiming for their head will result in the opposite. You can also aim at their arms for a chance to paralyze enemies and have them skip their turn entirely. However, I quickly learned that the chance of paralyzing an enemy is so low that it's never worthwhile to target their arms and the increased damage of hitting their head greatly outweighs the reduced hit chance. Weirdly, one of the things I did enjoy about combat was being able to see each character's facial expressions throughout the battle. Seeing their determined expressions really made me feel for each character and the struggles they were going through. Now onto the story. I adore how the game handled multiple languages and I especially loved how you couldn't understand certain NPCs until you acquired a party member that was capable of speaking said language. Rather than create characters that were walking stereotypes to reflect their nationality, using linguistics in this manner allowed the characters to shine through with their own, unique personalities. I enjoyed the themes that Long Gone Days presented and many of them are relevant in our present day. Totalitarian governments, propaganda, and following orders, some of them hit a little too close to home. The characters were also a delight with it being funny at times seeing how Rourke and Adair were experiencing life outside of The Core. While I am a fan of shorter games, I do think that Long Gone Days suffers a bit from pacing and could have benefitted from being longer. For example, the game begins in medias res, but we reach that particular point in the story again so quickly that it makes me wonder why we didn't just start the story from the very beginning as opposed needing a flashback. Additionally, the twist where Rourke learns the truth of their mission happens honestly surprised me. Not because I didn't see it coming, but because it happened so quick that I was flabbergasted that the reveal was already here. It's almost as if characters are a little bit TOO emotionally mature, overcoming their trauma and making life-changing decisions before I've even had a chance to get fully invested in their arc (if they even have an arc). So yeah, while I did enjoy Long Gone Days, I do think it could use some gameplay improvements as well as a few more moments to develop the characters. For example, the various ship and train rides would have been great moments for the party to simply talk to one another and shoot the shit. Get us invested into the merry little band. While we're here, let me just list a few quality of life things I wish Long Gone Days had: - The ability to see what buffs your party and enemies currently have - The ability to see hit chances for basic attacks - The ability to see hit chances for debuffs - The ability to see exactly how much HP an enemy has - The ability to sort items by type - In-game explanation for what each stat does

Great story, engaging dialogue choices, interesting characters. A few specific things I liked: -There are a fixed number of potential battles and no random encounters -Being able to pick dialogue choices that visibly improve morale -The balance between a linear story and free exploration aided by optional side quests

No romance option in a game I feel should have and especially when it focuses so much on the interactions with the group. Played it way back in beta, so the numbers of hours I have right now is not indicative, idk why they don't record the hours I have back then too, but whatever. The game's biggest strength is its storytelling and dialogues between people, at least it should have. I feel like most dialogues are so unnatural, and tone deaf towards certain situations. Relationships I feel should've developed, not necessarily romantic, never developed... be it between the casts or outside npcs. For a game centred around war, I wanted to see more bloodshed, especially ones focused around the main casts. There's way too many situations where we spare people and are not cold enough. It's like they're not aware of the situation they're all in sometimes, or their initial resolve to rid the world off a hidden evil is just forgotten...