[quote name='pete5883']It wasn't the length.[/QUOTE]
So you still remember me being the only person on the boards who didn't like it. :lol: I personally found it inferior to 3 in many ways, including the characters, the new types of dungeon styles, the story, the presentation, and the pacing. It really felt like, to me, that it was less than the sum of its parts. I quit at like the second to last dungeon because I wasn't having any fun any more and hadn't been for hours. I really don't mind long RPGs at all as long as the content is good. Same for short RPGs; Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden is like 4 hours long and it was still a blast. And an RPG Maker game. That still manages to be far superior and with less bugs than this game.
This game (Black Sigil) is also just not fun. Because I really hate giving up on games even if I'm not having fun, I'm still playing it, but I also have it up on Amazon so that if someone buys it, I can give myself some mercy and be forced to give up on it. :lol: I tend to give up on games hours and hours after I realize I'm just not enjoying it anymore (see: Persona 4, FF12). My previous complaints still stand, and I'll add a few more. The pacing is horrible. It always feels like you are rushed and on the run and can never really enjoy any of the towns without being forced to leave (often with little warning). Supposedly the game opens up later on, but it's been over 12 hours. The story and characters are uninteresting and not endearing at all. Like I said, Aurora is a
ing dumbass and the plot is often moved along simply due to her stupidity, like a crutch because they couldn't come up with any decent ideas for the plot. The other main female seriously looks like a dude in her portraits.
The dungeons are too damn long considering the encounter rate and the length of the battles. The battle system is also poorly implemented; though the general idea is a good one, the execution is severely flawed. In most of the battles only one of your guys can attack normally because he's the only one who can reach the enemy thanks to the horrible encounter maps. This "review" here explains it a lot better than I am willing to:
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?publicUserId=5379721&bId=8995028
Your party's actions in Trigger were somewhat determined by their proximity to the enemy, but that was something the computer handled automatically. It never got in the way of your actions; if your heroes were too far away, they'd simply leap across the screen, take a swipe at their target, and jump back to their starting location. Sigil, on the other hand, forces you to stand right next to your foe in order to attack. But wait: you also have to give other combatants a wide enough berth in order to move past you -- and most of Sigil's battlefields consist of narrow passageways that cause complete bottlenecks. In the vast majority of battles, at least one party member ends up stuck behind his comrades, unable to approach any enemies and basically being dead weight.
Of course, enemies have little problem launching the ranged and magical attacks that are so rare and precious for your own team. Your party spends an awful lot of battle time impotently soaking up damage while waiting for the sole character who can actually reach the enemy to take his next turn.
And yes, despite what people on Gamefaqs say, this game was HEAVILY influenced by Chrono Trigger in its design (not so much its story, but the story is still very cliched). I'd recommend reading the rest of the "review" I linked to if you're still at all interested in this game after my post.
EDIT: I just want to add that I am currently past the part that the reviewer stopped playing at. He is correct in that they dump you at a place with no return where you can't buy any healing items... and your healer cannot use any magic. I didn't have as hard of a time as him (he notes he had to revert to an older save because he ran out of healing items, I didn't have to do that), but it is still a pain in the ass dungeon that is by far the largest and most annoying of any of the ones thus far in the game. The dungeon would have been bad enough even if you could use healing magic. At any rate, the reviewer wasn't missing much (from what I can tell) by stopping play.
