Just finished Zwei: The Arges Adventure, in my quest to play every Falcom game from the past 20 years. This one in particular is the oldest one in my Falcom backlog.
The age shows pretty hard on this one. Allot of little annoyances: You randomly lose bits of your inventory (not excluding key items) when you die, which you then need to buy from a merchant to recover). You can only level by eating food, but only the higher grade food is worth a damn and it's much more efficient to trade up for high level food but then you're at mercy to the RNG where you could end up short on food or have useless extra food that doesn't contribute enough XP on its own. Leveling gets expensive too but thankfully while levels are important they're not quite as stingy as Ys games from this era - You can go in a couple levels below and come out ok.
I never could figure out how to consistently trigger high level combos but the battle system is... alright. It's a pretty simple game on the whole, with simple and straightforward dungeons. I was expecting a little more from the soundtrack since Hattori was at Falcom during this period and I loved her stuff in Ark of Napishtim. The soundtrack was a little underwhelming on the whole (not Ishibashi's greatest outing either), but there were a few standouts. Pavel Garden by Hattori is probably my favorite. I'm glad I stuck with the 2008 remixed OST - Jindo's choice of a violin there is perfect but (as usual) most of his arrangements are improvements.
Best part of the game is the script. This is the last game of Falcom that XSeed localized (early 2018 - so well after the original release, again!), and Sara and the team had allot of fun with this one. I imagine most of the characterization was pretty bland and they went the extra mile in sprucing it up. Pokkle, for instance, is a dutiful, earnest, hardworking kid who's good at cooking and enthralled with ancient fantasy and adventure but he also almost compulsively makes puns about nearly everything (something everyone around him openly groans about, much to his confused frustration, because he thinks they're all great!) and he loves older women. Pipiro is a spoiled, narcissistic brat who paradoxically is skilled at magic but hates learning or doing just about anything for that matter if it doesn't provide any immediate benefit to her. She's cynical to the nth degree and will say whatever's on her mind to your face at any particular moment, often undercutting Pokkle's more friendly and polite demeanor during their adventures. The two of them have some big Banjo and Kazooie energy, although I'd say Pokkle's a fair bit smarter than Banjo as, however rude Pipiro's being in any given situation, if she's right he'll usually agree with her or go along with her (just... more politely or under earshot of anyone but Pipiro).
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