LogFAQs > #973177909

Time Stalkers (Dreamcast)
A fascinating relic of my childhood, this bizarre roguelike-esque... thing is quite possibly the first RPG I ever played. Almost definitely the first non-Pokemon RPG, anyway, and it definitely may have even predated my initial foray into that series.

This isn't a great game or maybe even a good one, but I think I'd probably stop short of calling it actively bad. There's some cool ideas present, but it all just kind of feels unfinished. The story and world, for example, have some isekai elements and almost seem at times to be something of a meta commentary on fantasy adventure tales about 15-20 years before that sort of thing became popular, but it really doesn't get a whole lot of time to develop fully and so a lot of the bigger beats end up falling flat. The characters hardly interact with each other, considering most of them aren't even around for the majority of the game, but they have some fun banter on the rare occasions that they do. And then there's the gameplay, which includes such things as randomly-generated dungeon floors and a monster capturing-and-training system, but is ultimately pretty badly balanced and repetitive. Even the entire concept of the game - a big crossover between the characters and worlds from Climax Entertainment's (the developers of Shining Force, most significantly) prior games - was a fairly novel idea for the time, but the aforementioned narrative problems kind of put a ceiling on how cool it ends up being.

If nothing else, though, this was an RPG on a system that was pretty famously starved of the genre aside from the few pretty obvious exceptions. And with it being such a formative game for me in some ways (RPGs are by far my favorite genre now), I'm glad I finally went back and finished it. Doubt I'll ever put the disc into my Dreamcast again, but that's okay.