Rogue Galaxy: A non-dungeon crawler with the most annoying dungeons ever.

Rogue Galaxy was a fun one for me and my friend back in our younger years. Just hearing "here they come...the bastards" was always a kick and generally, it seemed to have an interesting story. But I never finished it.

I said I didn't finish it years back. Playing it again, I realized that I had only played maybe 10 hours of this game. This time I played a lot more - and when I got to the two tower dungeon...I simply had to cut it off. It will not be finished unless I can find a walk thru walls code.

What I Liked

The beginning segment was a bit interesting.

Music, as I mentioned, had its moments. Slightly memorable but not overly so.

Battle is mostly smooth and intuitive (mostly).

Appreciated the pausing to heal.

The player AI seems to be smarter than in other games. They'll block when they can, offer to heal when it's actually needed and suggest skills that are designed to take the enemy out.

What I Didn't Like

DUNGEONS. They just get worse and worse and worse. Even towns have dungeons in them. Every dungeon is the same thing - twisty, limited, linear walk paths with excessively high encounters. I didn't think I would ever find a game with worse dungeons than Equinox or Ys Origin but...here we are. One dungeon was so long I counted EIGHT SAVE POINTS inside and still couldn't finish it.

Character development is severely lacking the more you play the game - which is entirely backwards. For certain characters they do a brief exposition, then never again. Early on, it forces you to use certain character pairings which helps, but later when you can pick and choose, most of the characters go unused as you find your favs.

Slow, clunky UI when you need to switch out subweapons or when you need to switch weapons. Just too many clicks to do basic things.

It's really frustrating to see a game that's otherwise enjoyable suffer from horrific dungeon design. I could absolutely forgive everything else, but that...no.