JRPGs have become a dying breed in the video game world. The only notable JRPGs anymore are Dragon Quest, which barely ever sees a release outside of the occasional remake, and Final Fantasy, which has become more ridiculous, boring, and westernized with each iteration.
Today’s game claims to be a callback to classic JRPGs from the 90s, the golden age. Back when RPGs had compelling stories, relatable characters, epic boss fights, massive landscapes, and wonderfully made dungeons. Did Alphadia Genesis succeed in all or any of that? Not exactly.
This game suffers from a huge problem that isn’t exactly subjective, or excusable, especially in a JRPG – It’s bland as stale bread garnished with tofu. I went in hoping for at least a semi-unique, nostalgic experience, and what I got was more along the lines of a cheap nod to old JRPGs made so that people with a longing to play such games again would buy it.
The game takes place in a land split between two kingdoms, Archleign, and Galzabine. The setting of the game is a bit weird: It looks like a pure fantasy setting, but very quickly you find out that it’s more of a watered down steam punk setting. The game doesn’t really seem to have magic, per se, as spells are used with some kind of element known as Energi. There are also basic firearms in the game that use Energi as their main power source or something.
The story of the game revolves around Clones. Androids that were built years ago, and basically used as slaves. At one point, there was a war between the two kingdoms, and clones were used as soldiers. The war ends, and clones have gone back to normal, bringing up the question of “freedom of clones”, which is just about the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while. I couldn’t take the game seriously whenever anyone brought up this political nonsense about clone freedom, it just sounds too ridiculous.
15 years later, a few clones in a city of Archleign suddenly revolt against their master and murder him, sparking a joint investigation between our two kingdoms to find out what caused it. The investigation is led by Fray, our main hero, who is about as interesting as a brick wall. Unfortunately, pretty much every single character in the game follows that trend. Every single one falls into some category of generic anime character, which leads to pretty lackluster first impressions. We have the “humble, but confident hero” character, the “clumsy, overconfident little sister” character, the “polite, level headed, understanding” character, and the “overly angry guy who hates the hero but begrudgingly works with him, and will probably end up having a change of heart by the end of the game” character. There are probably more that join you, but I wasn’t able to get far enough into this bore-fest of a game to find out.
Now there’s something I really want to touch on before I get into the meat of the game (or rather, the lack of meat), and that’s the graphics and overall design of the game. It looks like it was made on a budget of $69.99. Why do I say that, specifically? Because I could SWEAR that this game was made with RPGMaker. The tilesets, the sprites, the MAIN MENU all look like they were made using RPGMaker assets. I’m not saying they were, because I have no real proof, but holy cow is it suspiciously similar, and it just makes the game look cheap.
For whatever reason, this game actually has the option for voice acting, but in Japanese only. Now at first I thought this was kinda cool, but I very quickly realized it gets SUPER grating. Fast. Not only that, but there’s very little voice acting, anyway. Most of the game is just text, with the characters sometimes randomly speaking Japanese for about 30 seconds before reverting back to just text. It’s interesting at first, but about an hour in, I had to turn it back off.
Now, as for actual gameplay, Alphadia Genesis isn’t much to write home about. It involves the standard JRPG stuff: Walking around an overworld, random encounters, menu based combat, items and items galore. Something interesting to note is that the overworlds are from a top-down, 2d perspective, but the battles are fully 3d, which is a pretty nice touch in my opinion.
The battles are so incredibly boring, though. Enemies were always so easy that I barely ever bothered using my spells or skills. You level up so quickly from just a few random encounters, that you quickly eclipse the enemies in your current dungeon\area of the world, which ends up just making the battles more of an annoyance than anything.
What makes it worse is that 3 hours in, I think I encountered maybe 3 unique enemies, with all of the rest being reskins that were either scaled up or scaled down. I read some other reviews on this game from people who actually managed to sit through the entire thing, and it pretty much sounds like half of the enemies in the game are like this. That is just unacceptable.
You can only have 4 people in combat at once, and this game has a very strange mechanic that allows you to still use powers with the extra party members, but they have to take a few turns to charge, and they have extra buffs depending on which character’s turn you use the power on…Or..something. I don’t even know, I was completely confused by this mechanic.
Another mechanic this game employs is Side quests. I can’t think of many JRPGs that actually have side quests, so it was an interesting addition. I only managed to find 2 in my time with this game, where one was incredibly stupid and easy, and the other was incredibly stupid and hard.
Quest number 1 involved me finding a boy’s lost clone (yeah I didn’t ever think I’d say that in my life, either), which can be completed by walking out of the house the boy is in, and then walking straight to the left for about 5 seconds.
The second quest involved me going back into the game’s first dungeon, (which I had literally just left 5 minutes earlier) to fight a monster. After going back through the entire dungeon, forcing myself through random encounters, and also forcing myself to stay awake, I found the boss. Of course, it was a reskin of the dungeon’s actual boss that I had fought a little earlier, except this one was impossibly hard for this point in the game. And no, I don’t mean the boss attacked once and killed everyone in my party, he actually barely did anything to my party. I mean he had an absolute TON OF HEALTH. I sat there pecking away at this guy for about 10 minutes, using my best spells and skills, and his health bar had decreased by about 1/20th. I’m not even joking. It was at this point I quit the game, I just couldn’t handle it anymore.
Graphically, the game looks..well it looks like RPGMaker. I already told you that. The graphics in the battles are pretty terrible for a game released in 2015, and don’t even get my started on the character animations. They’re horrendous. The enemy death animations are even worse. When you kill enemies, they literally just rotate 90 degrees and disappear. I’ve seen better animation from games released 20 years ago.
As far as sound goes, I already talked about the annoying voice acting. The sound effects aren’t anything special, but the music in this game is probably the one saving grace. The music, although pretty generic, is very nice. I found myself humming along to a few of the tunes after a while, even though I was annoyed that the game used the same track for basically every town I went to.
Overall, Alphadia Genesis is a pretty sad attempt at reviving the classic JRPG. There’s just nothing interesting about it whatsoever. The graphics are bad, the story is boring, the characters are bland, the combat is grating. It’s just a mess, and I would not say it’s worth $15. If you’re a diehard RPG fan, maybe pick it up if it goes on sale, but don’t expect much, because you won’t get much. I couldn’t even manage to get halfway through the game before calling it quits, I just couldn’t make myself, as much as I wanted to. And believe me, I tried several times.
Alphadia Geneis
$14.99
Pros
- Decent soundtrack
Cons
- Uninteresting story/characters
- Boring combat
- Terrible graphics
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