Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

At the start of the game,you'll be shown beautiful FMV style anime scenes with villages on top of some extremely tall tress surrounded by beautiful forest scenery.The first few quests built me up to thinking I was going to play a traditional JRPG because I was doing a good variety of quests such as delivering messages,finding herbs in the forest for dinner,and defending the village from attackers.But afterwards,the game turns into a dungeon crawler,and you'll enter dungeon after dungeon and hack n slash for the next 40 or so hours.

The hack n slash style gameplay is fun,but very tough,you can get killed in 2 hits unless you do a lot of level grinding.I guess the gameplay becomes another one of those mindless hack n slash RPGs and it's a simple,kind of mindless fun and the game uses some nice presentation and colorful graphics to make this game stand out amongst the other hack n slash RPGs.

Your health slowly regenerates by itself and at most times you'll be able to teleport back to Greensleeves(your home town)and refill your healing potions and health and then you can teleport back to where you teleported from.But you can't do this during certain boss battles and segments.The game tries to make things convienient for you in certain ways,because Greensleeves allows you to heal your character and heal potions for free(and like I've said,you can teleport there whenever you want,except for certain segments),and there's a weapon and armor store that upgrades it's weapons and armor as you progress through the story,so you won't need to search for new stores with stronger weapons and armor and it saves you from having to walk to a store that's far away.

The enemies keep respawning when you reenter areas(unlike many hack n slash WRPGs)which gives you a good opportunity to level up,and you'll need to.

When you're travelling through Greensleeves,you'll notice how tall the trees are and how high the village is in the air and the homes and buildings have the colorful JRPG/anime style appearances and so do the characters.

The story isn't memorable and the characters aren't interesting(but this is an RPG that focuses more gameplay than story,so it's not a big deal).The story in SF Neo is still better than any hack n slash WRPG I've played,but for JRPG standards,the story is weak.

However,the game can feel brutal at times,and if you don't want to get killed in 2 hits,you'll need to level up a lot,and even then,you'll only be able to withstand maybe 3 or 4 hits,after doing tens of hours of levelling up.You only can carry a maxinum of 6 healthpoints too.

Even though Greensleevs is beautiful,you'll often be travelling through environments that are just typical caves or dungeons with extremely long rooms.

For more of an RPG feel,you'll need to use magic to kill certain enemies and certain types of magic are effective against certain enemies.

I guess you can describe this game as a Japanese version of Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath and much longer and harder too.

Overall it's a fun game,if you can handle doing hack n slash for 40 hours with a weak story,and the pretty Japanese style visuals make the game a bit more appealing too.