Saturday, June 8, 2024

A Fantasy of Cosmic Proportions: A Review of Cosmic Fantasy 2 (TurboGrafx CD)

 Introduction

From being one of the first RPGs to feature fully animated cinematic cutscenes, to being the game that initially put Working Designs on the map, to being labeled as Electronic Gaming Monthly’s Best RPG of the Year in 1993: it's Cosmic Fantasy 2. Developed by Nihon Telenet, Cosmic Fantasy 2 is an RPG for the TurboGrafx CD and is seen as a cult classic in the niche gaming market. It was one of the best-selling games on the console and was popular enough for NEC to consider making the game a pack-in title for the TurboGrafx CD.


In addition to everything else I just mentioned, it also recently received the honor of being played by me. And while I can see why it was very well-received back in the day, my thoughts on the game as a complete package are a little more complicated. So let’s not waste any more time and start talking about Cosmic Fantasy 2!


A Cosmic History

Cosmic Fantasy 2, known in Japan as Cosmic Fantasy 2: Adventure Boy Van (コズミック・ファンタジー2 冒険少年バン lit. Kozumikku Fantajī: Bouken Shōnen Ban), was released in Japan on April 5th, 1991. Afterward, the game was localized and published by Working Designs and released in North America on June 9th, 1992. Up until January 2024, it was the only Cosmic Fantasy game available in the West until the first two games were brought to North America on the Nintendo Switch courtesy of Limited Run Games and Edia.


But first, let’s go a bit back to the series’ roots for a moment. The concept of Cosmic Fantasy came to life by Nihon Telenet, the same company behind Exile and Valis. Valis in particular was somewhat of their flagship title at the time. You see, the CD-ROM² was an add-on for the PC Engine—the Japanese TurboGrafx—that was released in Japan on December 4, 1988. It allowed for the core versions of the console to be able to play PC Engine games in a new CD-ROM format in addition to standard HuCards. 




In fact, it was one of the first home consoles with that capability, releasing before the Sega CD and long before any Nintendo system would use a CD format. In this context though, this new CD-ROM format allowed for animated cinematic cutscenes and higher quality sound work. In a lot of these games, it gave off the impression that you weren't just playing a video game, but experiencing an interactive anime series. 



Back to Valis, Telenet’s first game in this format was Valis II. This game featured brief animated cutscenes and spoken dialogue, and was notable for being one of the first games to include these animated cutscenes, and left a strong impression on Japanese players.


At the same time, RPGs were gaining a foothold in Japanese gaming, with titles like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star were sweeping the market. Nihon Telenet wanted to combine the cinematic aspects of Valis with the RPG elements found in other JRPGs and so in 1989, their subsidiary, LaserSoft, began development on a new series of games that would change the landscape of JRPGs for the PC Engine: Cosmic Fantasy. A series that would include themes of science fiction, adventure, raunchy comedy, and even light erotica!


There isn’t a lot I could show, but some of the cutscenes in these games really skirt

the line of what could be considered ecchi.


During the development of this game, they enlisted the help of the talented manga artist, Kazuhiro Ochi, who was hired as the director, designer, and planner of the series. Kazuhiro Ochi’s other works include, but aren’t limited to: Fist of the North Star, a few episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam, the Gekiganger scenes in Martian Successor Nadesico, Urusei Yatsura, Sailor Moon S: The Movie, and some portions of the Mazinger series, which is referenced in Cosmic Fantasy.


Mazin-GOOOOO!   


Ochi’s work on the game was notable enough to credit him on the title screen of the games, which is something that I don’t see that often in Japanese games. Usually, specific people aren’t typically mentioned much outside of the end credits, and the only real exception to this is how Shigesato Itoi is mentioned in the title for the Mother/EarthBound games. Whereas in Western games, it was pretty common especially back in the Atari era, when it was just one guy who worked on the game such as Dave Crane’s Pitfall or Howard Scott Warshaw’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. In fact, these games also included full bios of the game devs in the manuals and stuff, but as the culture of gaming shifted during the 80s, this kind of went away.



In addition to Ochi, many highly qualified voice actors were brought on board to lend voice work to many of the characters in the game. Voice actors from many popular anime series back in the day ranging from Ranma to Detective Conan, to Lupin III, to Dragon Ball. 


Image taken from IMDb

Story

My explanation of the game’s story will be rather brief, and I won’t get into some of the more finer details and aspects. One of the game’s biggest selling points is its story, and if you want to play the game, I feel I would be doing a disservice by telling you everything that happens. I simply want to provide a bit of a brief premise, so you’d know what kind of beats to expect and briefly understand the characters.


In any case, the game starts with our hero Van, who’s very much your average Shōnen protagonist. He’s an adventurous boy who lives on Clan Island on Planet Idea (pronounced: /ˈɛ.deɪ.ə/) and lives alongside his childhood sweetheart, Laura. 



Van discovers an explosion in a neighboring village, and at the village, he learns that the village was attacked by a Wizard named Wizda, a henchman of the evil sorcerer, Galam. And a quick aside, something that I find pretty funny is how many sorcerer antagonists have names that start with “Ga.” You have Galam, Ganelon (Warsong), Ganon (Zelda), Ghaleon (Lunar), and Gharnef (Fire Emblem).


But anyway, you learn that Laura is the secret princess of Idea, and Galam is looking for her, as she possesses magical powers that grant immortality to the person she marries, which Galam wants to use to conquer the world. While Laura is being abducted, Van tries to rescue her, but Wizda is quickly able to dispatch him and take her leave. 



Once Van comes to, he looks around and eventually finds an old wizard named Darva. He explains that Galam was once one of his students and once Galam learned the secrets of Black Magic, he became obsessed with harnessing its power for his own personal gain. 



Galam betrayed Darva and sought to take over the world. Under Darva’s guidance, Van is instructed to go on a number of quests. In addition, Van trains himself and makes his way to Galam's fortress in order to defeat Galam and save Laura. Once we reach the top floor of Galam's Fortress, we see Laura who's been mind-controlled and married to Galam, and in anger, Van fights Galam. However, Van is still too weak and gets the shit beaten out of him… again… 



Galam, rather than just killing Van, opts to warp him 20 years into the future just to fuck with him and show him the world after Galam has taken over. The game then switches to the point of view of another character named Babette, who is named Rim (リム) in Japanese, and "Babs" in the battle menus. She's a brash and tomboyish cadet of the Cosmic Hunters, an intergalactic police force set to protect underdeveloped planets from threats such as the Cosmic Pirates. 



She opts to explore planet Idea after receiving a distress signal from the planet. She eventually finds out that the signal was sent by a talking cat from the planet Siam-EzE, named Pico. Pico is an adventurous young cat who has a knack for finding himself in trouble. A certain popular Newgrounds character is also named after him. 



Babette rescues Pico, and eventually, after some shenanigans, Van joins the two of them, and they set out to stop Galam. Eventually, they're joined by the protagonists of the first Cosmic Fantasy game, Cobra (ユウ Yuu or Yu in Japanese) and Sayo (サヤ Saya in Japanese), as well as Pico's father, Nayan (ニャン Nyan), and a green tanooki/motorcycle named Marley (モンモ Monmo). 



Once everyone is together, they storm Galam's fortress, defeat him once and for all, and save the world! After the ending, Van decides to join Babette, Nayan, Cobra, and Sayo in becoming Cosmic Hunters, and they go on adventures to protect the galaxy. 



Gameplay & Review

The gameplay of Cosmic Fantasy 2 is very barebones. When I say that, I typically mean that a game plays very similarly to earlier entries of the same genre with little to improve upon those mechanics. So a barebones RPG would be like Dragon Quest, a barebones platformer would play something like Donkey Kong or Super Mario Bros, a barebones sports game would play like Pong or something like that, and so on. However, Cosmic Fantasy 2 is almost more barebones than the oldest RPG games. 


The game only really has one gameplay loop; you go to villages, talk to NPCs, buy the most up-to-date items, clear a dungeon, maybe fight a boss, get your reward, and then go to the next village, rinse, and repeat. The game is also quite linear, with hardly any secrets or optional quests. The most exploration you get is finding extra healing items in dungeons and stuff. Not that those are very necessary: the game is really easy. Though there are some difficult bosses here and there, you won’t have too much trouble reaching the end of the game.


You traverse to the new locations via an overworld map similar to most early RPGs, and this is kind of where my first criticism lies. While traversing through the overworld map or a dungeon, you’ll run into many random battle encounters… a lot of them… an excessive amount… The encounter rate in this game is very high, you’ll run into an enemy every couple of steps. It makes EarthBound Beginnings look like a joke. 


Many of these battles aren’t usually simple one-enemy battles either. When you run into enemies, you’ll usually have to fight anywhere from one to four enemies, even at the very beginning.      


In my playthrough, let’s just say that I’m…“The King of the Pirates,” so I didn’t have this issue, but if you played this on original hardware, you also had to deal with loading times when it came to loading enemy encounters.


In battles, you have multiple different options for how you can handle an enemy encounter. You can choose to Fight, which uses a physical attack; use Magic, where you can select between a variety of healing or offensive magic spells gained via level-ups; use a variety of Tools or items; “Defnd,” which lets you defend against an enemy attack; Run, which lets you flee an encounter, though the chances of fleeing are lower than your chances of getting struck by lightning; and “Abort,” lord knows what that does.


When you commit to an action, your turn order is completely up to you. You select a character you want to fight with and have them do whatever you want them to. After everyone has acted, the enemies will attack you. 


Speaking of enemy attacks, that’s another issue I have with the game. Enemies aren’t very strong—they’re essentially just roadblocks that slow the game down. If you’re adequately leveled and have the most up-to-date equipment, enemies will do next to no damage. Additionally, enemies almost always have enough HP to never really die in a single turn. More often than not, they'll take about two or three turns to kill.


Enemies also just lack any sort of magical attacks, they all just lunge at you with the same standard physical attack. Even when you encounter enemies like Magicians and Sorcerers, they will only ever attack you physically. Likewise, despite having a large array of status-restoring items and spells, not a single enemy can inflict any kind of status move. No sleep, no paralysis, no poison, and no silence. I get the impression that this aspect isn't even supposed to be an intentional design quirk, but a genuine mistake. The game gives you a ton of these status-restoring items, and they’re all virtually useless!  



The game also lacks any sort of accuracy system; you will land every attack you select, and the enemy will also land every attack they select. Furthermore, the game lacks a crit system: attacks will always do the same amount of damage. Some weapons have a low percentage chance of doing extra damage, which is your closest thing to a critical hit, but for the most part, everything is extremely predictable. 


The game also doesn’t have an Auto-Battle option or anything like that, even though the first Cosmic Fantasy game had that feature. This almost feels like a sick joke, because the random enemy encounter rate in the first game is much lower, so you have less of a reason to use an Auto-Battle feature in that game. 


 


Something else that bothers me is the fact that after you have a character attack or something, the cursor doesn’t automatically move to the next person in your party in order to have them attack. You have to manually move your cursor to select the next person to have them perform an action. This sounds like a petty thing to complain about, I know, but when you hear the battle theme more often than you hear your own mother’s voice, the minor nitpicks add up a lot. 


When it comes to equipable items, something that caught me off guard was the fact that anyone could equip any kind of item or weapon. Like, in most RPGs, you have one character who can only use swords, so you buy and equip them with swords. Then, you may have an archer who can only equip and attack with bows. Then, you may also have a sorcerer who can only use staves and magic attacks. But in this game, anyone can virtually use any weapon. So there’s no real reason to get anything aside from multiple copies of whatever is the strongest set of equipment at the moment. 


In my playthrough of the game, I had a realization during an attempt to fight a boss in the latter half of the game: Space Pirate Captain Barlock. His attacks straight up one shot all of your characters if you're not a significantly higher level, so I was getting frequent Game Overs against the boss, seeing the dreaded “Valiant to the end…” message. 



After many attempts, I eventually found a solution. I learned the ever-elusive revival spell... was literally just any regular healing spell. If you use a healing spell on a fallen party member, it just brings them back to life. After discovering this, this one particular threat was nullified, and the rest of the game got much, much easier for me.


For me, considering how many people have fond memories of this game from when they were kids and the very simplistic combat, this game almost feels like “Beginner’s First RPG,” similar to something like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest or Pokémon. It’s fun enough, and a game to play when you want to shut off your brain and not think too much, but hard to recommend for many other people nowadays.


One of the things I love the most about the game though is the art style. It’s very vibrant, colorful, and expressive. The characters all have appealing and memorable designs, and I'm a big fan of the late 80s and early 90s anime style. Even the enemy sprites are all nice and pretty to look at.


Aaaaahh! Annie is so cute!


The animated cutscenes also bring out a lot of these strengths as well. It’s not a surprise why this game was so revered back in the day: the animations are stunning. For reference, this game came out in the same year as Sonic 2, Final Fantasy V, and Street Fighter II. CD-quality animated cutscenes in gaming were not common at all at the time.



The story, while nothing too extraordinary, has its fair share of twists and turns. The ending is pretty unique for a game that came out in 1992, and the time skip aspect of the story is an interesting aspect. Throughout the game, you’ll meet many party members who will come and go, and it’s nice being able to come back to those same characters 20 years later to see how time has treated them. 


Since a lot of RPG games feature mostly medieval or high-fantasy-type settings, games like this one and Phantasy Star are nice changes of pace. I admired the futuristic space theme they have going on, although this isn’t really explored much until near the end of the game where you join the Cosmic Hunters, and fight enemy robots. The villages and locations you visit throughout the game are still very standard, and mixing the standard fantasy setting with the futuristic sci-fi setting would have made the world a lot more interesting if they had leaned more in that direction. 


The Golem looks like some shit Dr. Hell would create to destroy Mazinger in the previous town.


The game does a good job of tying the game into the events of the first Cosmic Fantasy. Despite the connections between the games, the story in the sequel is isolated enough, to not require you to play the first game to understand anything. This is especially nice since before very recently, there was no way to play the first game in English.


I’m also a big fan of the unique names that a lot of the spells and magic have. A lot of aspects like that make this game’s world feel like its own, and give you a greater sense of exploring another world instead of just alluding to names you’re already familiar with like “Heal,” “Fire,” “Heal2,” etc.


 

However, this has the side effect of making it hard to figure out what spells do since there’s no in-game description. 

I had to refer to the game’s manual frequently.  


Something that’s loosely related though is the localization and my criticisms regarding it. While the brunt of the criticisms regarding Working Designs’ localizations is usually on the jokes and added difficulty, a lot of my issues are mainly towards the semantic errors. This was one of Working Design’s earliest works, and it’s very apparent. There are a lot of obvious mistranslations, typos, and grammatical mistakes littered throughout the script. If you told me this was a fan translation made by an amateur in the late 90s in his garage with one other online friend, using nothing but a hex editor and a tbl file, and posted it onto Archaic Ruins's Piña Consolada page… I’d believe you.


 

“but” should be “buy,” a comma is also missing after the “Sorry.”


The ‘V’ in “van” should be uppercase.


A lot of the errors I found were with a lot of the enemy names, which is crazy to think about since I’d expect the battle text to be the text you’d see the most during playtesting.


There is an enemy called “Guard Robot,” but the game spells it as “Gaurd.” 

Apparently, that’s a common misspelling.


“Kelvelos” is clearly meant to be “Cerberus.” Though that reminds me, Fire Emblem Gaiden's fan translation has the same mistranslation. A miniboss in the final chapter named ケルベス (Kerubesu), which is meant to be a contraction of ケルベロス (Keruberosu) or Cerberus, is called “Kelves” in the fan translation. Likewise, a miniboss named バデス(Badesu), which is a play on ハデス (Hadesu) or Hades, is interpreted as “Bahdess” in the fan translation.


There is also an enemy called “Iron Angla,” even though I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be “Iron Angler.” 

You know WD, I used to admire you from a distance, when all I played was Vanguard Bandits and Popful Mail, 

but now that I’m balls-deep in your catalog, I’m starting to notice the errors.

I’m also not a fan of the big blue font used in the overworld dialogue, it’s very ugly when you compare it to the cleaner and smaller font used in the 2024 localization or even the original Japanese version.




I will say though, something I do enjoy about this localization, and most Working Designs’ localizations is how they’re generally free from censorship, especially compared to their contemporaries. If you read my Exile review, you’d know how much the Sega Genesis version of that game was censored compared to the TurboGrafx version. In this game, the most that was censored was removing Babette’s middle finger scene in her opening cutscene, although the shower scene was perfectly fine, lol. 


Image taken from The Cutting Room Floor


In Cosmic Fantasy, there are enemies called Blood Lords, which feature a lot of blood all over their bodies, Harpies with exposed chests, the aforementioned shower scene wasn’t removed or anything like that, and references to death are left intact. If this was on a Nintendo system back in the 90s, all of those aspects would have been censored.









The voice acting is serviceable—not the best, but serviceable all the same. It’s about on par with any other anime dub that came out around the time. Because the Japanese game featured a lot of professional voice actors, the English dub was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They mainly worked with Working Designs employees, and the voice work kind of pales in comparison to the Japanese voices. However, I did very much love the voice of Babette’s computer system, Robert (pronounced: /rō-bĕr/), who was voiced by Blake Dorsey. He has a very strong stereotypical accent Français, and it’s hilarious.


There weren't many songs in the OST that really stood out to me. My favorite song is probably the boss theme, and even then it’s about as good as the regular battle theme in any other game, in my opinion. The game itself also just has a very low number of songs to begin with, the OST is literally comprised of ten songs. For reference, Final Fantasy I has 21 tracks. 


There’s the title theme, the happy town theme, the sad town theme, the overworld theme, the battle theme, the boss theme, the dungeon theme, a more uplifting theme called “My Beloved One,” and two ending themes. I assume this was because a lot of the voice acting and cutscenes took up a lot of the space needed to make more music, which is a shame.   


Additional Media

After Cosmic Fantasy 2, Cosmic Fantasy Stories was released on the Mega CD in Japan. This was a compilation of Cosmic Fantasy 1 and 2, with some visual upgrades and gameplay improvements.


  


There was a user online named MikeeB84, who was working on an English fan translation of this game last year and included some impressive screenshots. However, once the Switch ports of Cosmic Fantasy 1 and 2 were announced and brought to English, this patch was discontinued and instead shifted their focus to working on an English patch for Ninja Warrior for the Mega CD, which is neat.


 


Afterwards, Cosmic Fantasy 3: Adventure Boy Rei, was released in Japan in 1992 for the PC-Engine Duo. It follows the adventures of a new protagonist named Rei and takes place 25 years in the past before the events of Cosmic Fantasy 2. One of the antagonists, Gardo, wants to go back in time and prevent the creation of the CSC and the Cosmic Hunters, so the Space Pirates can plunder and attack planets unopposed. …I feel there must be a less convoluted way to achieve the same goal, but I digress. 


With the new power from the Duo add-on, the cinematics and graphics were greatly improved and the animated cutscenes were greater in numbers and took up more of the screen. 


When I first saw this box art, I thought Rei was a woman.


Back in the day, there were plans for Cosmic Fantasy 3 to be localized in the West by Working Designs. It was teased in gaming magazines, by developers, and even within the text in Cosmic Fantasy 2. However, TTI, the company in charge of the Turbo-Duo in North America died and closed down and their assets were given to TZD, Turbo Zone Direct. As development time was increasingly taking too long, and without a proper distribution channel, Working Designs opted to move on, and Cosmic Fantasy 3 remains Japan exclusive. 


Sad Violin - Sound Effect (HD)


Some magazines stated that at one point, the localization was 100% complete but unreleased, not too dissimilar to Working Design’s PS2 localization of Mythical Ninja Goemon which was dumped online by Hidden Palace, or Nintendo’s EarthBound Beginnings before it was released officially on Virtual Console. There are also rumors that this game is somewhere, likely on an employee’s hard drive or attic or something. But from what I’ve gathered, it seems a lot more likely they only got as far as translating the script, but didn’t get the chance to fully insert it into the game.


We—or rather, Japan—then got Cosmic Fantasy 4: Cosmic Boy Takes Off! A Prelude to a Legend (lit. Ginga Shōnen Densetsu - Totsunyū-hen) and Cosmic Fantasy 4: The Fierce Battle, into the Sea of Light (Ginga Shōnen Densetsu - Gekitō-hen) which came out as two separate entries for the Super CD ROM. 



The Prelude Chapter follows Cobra and Sayo, who are on a mission to planet Kazarin, where the Princess, Princess Saria, was kidnapped. As Sayo looks identical to the Princess, she offers to stand in for her, while Cobra is in search of the real princess. 



The Fierce Battle Chapter follows Van and Babette and takes place on Van’s home planet, planet Idea, more than 20 years after the second game. Idea has joined the galactic federation and has become a lot more advanced in the time since the last adventure. Annie, a sorceress who briefly accompanied Van in CF2, sends a distress signal to Van, notifying them about a wizard named Jiribel who’s terrorizing Idea in search for Laura’s pendant, that Van has been holding onto since the end of the second game.



This game also serves as a conclusion to the series, tying up a lot of loose ends and giving closure to a lot of the main characters.


In addition, LaserSoft also released Cosmic Fantasy Visual Collection, which is just a collection of all the animated cutscenes from the first two games. There isn’t too much else to say in that regard.



Later on, Cosmic Fantasy characters would appear alongside characters from the Valis series in the crossover board game called The Suguroku '92: Nariagari Trendy.


Fun fact, this box art was strangely reused for the Sega Genesis game called “Syd of Valis.”  


The story of the first game, CF1, was also adapted into a novelization. However, I don’t know where to find this. I can’t even find any info about the author of this novel, nor can I find a picture of it online. 


PC Engine Fan Magazine also created two manga following the characters from Cosmic Fantasy written by Kazuhiro Ochi. It’s a collection of a bunch of short stories that take place between CF2 and 3. While there is no translation, YouTuber GTV Japan has provided a cool reading of the events that happen in the manga.



The scans of the Japanese manga also exist online and can be viewed here.  


  


Cosmic Fantasy also received an OVA which spanned all of one episode, Cosmic Fantasy: Cosmic Cougar's Trap (コズミック・ファンタジー lit. 銀河女豹の罠, Kozumikku Fantajī Ginga Mehyō no Wana). It takes place after Cosmic Fantasy 4 and centers around a Cosmic Pirate named Belga who wants Cobra all to herself. 


 


There was also a CD Drama that followed the OVA called Cosmic Fantasy: Cosmic Merchant’s Trap (コズミック・ファンタジー lit. 銀河女豹の罠, Kozumikku Fantajī Ginga Shōnin no Wana), which followed Nayan and his antics.


The strangest piece of additional media is the fact that Telenet operated an arcade back in the 90s in Hawaii, simply called “Cosmic Fantasy.” It was a very standard arcade, with not much to do with the Cosmic Fantasy series outside of the name.


Lastly, as I alluded to multiple times, in 2022. Cosmic Fantasy Collection was released for the Nintendo Switch which contained both Cosmic Fantasy 1 and 2, alongside scans of the original manuals, a sound room, and a collection of all the animations. The games are very much ported over 1:1, meaning there are no quality-of-life features like speed-up, saving whenever you want, or anything like that. 



After this collection was released, the game was later localized into English with a brand new translation in January 2024. This was the first time the first game was ever released in English, and the second game received a brand new translation different from the Working Designs version which, while it was more faithful to the Japanese dialogue, was littered with horrible syntax errors and awkward dialogue.


For example, in battles, there’s this weird oversight or bug where the attacking text is reversed. For example, if you have Cob—Yu attack a Monster Egg, in any other game, the text would read: 


“Yu did 24 damage to the Monster Egg!” 


And when the egg strikes back, the text should read:


“The Monster Egg did 3 damage to Yu!”


However, in this scenario using this translation, when Yu attacks, the text would read that the Monster Egg is attacking him, and vice-versa. This only applies to physical attacks in CF1, but it’s a very notable thing to not notice when testing. 


Screenshot of Yu attacking a Monster Egg


That’s certainly not the biggest criticism, though. The asking price of 50 dollars for two JRPGs from the early 90s with no real improvements is extremely hard to justify in any sense of the word.   



In 2023, Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2 was released which included Cosmic Fantasy 3, and both Cosmic Fantasy 4 entries. There has been a crowdfunding campaign to get Edia to localize this game as well, and at the moment, only time will tell whether or not we get this entry too. It would be nice to see all five games localized into English.


Conclusion

Overall, CF2 is the type of game I'd only recommend to someone who’s a hardcore fan of retro RPG games. I can understand why a lot of people liked it back in ‘92, and it was oddly addicting to me at certain points. Despite my frustrations, there wasn’t a moment where I legitimately considered outright dropping it. Though, once I beat the game, it felt less like I completed a fulfilling quest or an epic story, and moreso I got through a tough semester or stressful day at work. 


A lot of the high points of the game are pretty notable, and I believe it makes for a good framework for what could be considered a genuinely amazing game. If this game had some more time in the oven to fix a lot of the errors, or maybe if any of the remakes or ports ironed out a lot of the quirks I could better recommend this game to other people. I haven’t played any of the sequels though, so if Cosmic Fantasy Collections 2 ever gets localized, I’d be interested in seeing what’s improved compared to this entry.


With that said, I believe I’ve made all my thoughts and opinions on this game very clear. Whether or not you opt to play the game, I can’t stop you, but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on the game since it’s not a very popular game in online discussions. Anyways, to avoid dragging out this conclusion anymore, I want to conclude this review with one last statement: After playing this game, I never want to hear anyone bitch about how games like EarthBound Beginnings, Pokémon Gen 1, or Fire Emblem 1 are “slow” and “tedious” ever again. And with that, I wish you a good night.


No comments:

Post a Comment