Rainbow Moon

Does that logo remind you of anything? Because it did for me! What a blatant Final Fantasy-looking knock-off. That and the fact that this game, Rainbow Moon, is a tactical RPG are the only similarities between it and that series, however, and Rainbow Moon would rank on the lower end of the FF spectrum to me, at least better than the first three of that series. Rainbow Moon was a free game, and while there is a decent level of polish here, the only reason I was able to bang out its sixty hours in the past three weeks was because it was also a pretty easy game. Long, but easy- I died maybe twice in battle, and death itself is really no big deal here. You play as Baldren, a knight who doesn't really talk who has somehow opened up a portal to the moon, and in the ensuing chaos Baldren, as well as his long-time rival and a bunch of monsters end up on the moon, which looks a whole lot like Earth, but who cares. The only way to properly fix the portal to return home is to go on a lot of fetch quests and crawl through tons of dungeons, as RPGs so often do. However while most RPGs, especially the Final Fantasy series, have deep and engrossing stories, Rainbow Moon has barely any at all. Just go on fetch quest after fetch quest, and once you're done with one NPC, it's off to another NPC for his fetch quests. Rainbow Moon's gameplay itself is actually pretty good though- basically for every enemy a character kills, you gain a "rainbow pearl", and the more battles you win, you gain experience. Once you level up though, your stats don't actually increase- you merely have more attributes to purchase with those rainbow pearls. As such the characters you really want to level up will determine the way you battle (that guy needs the killing blows) and allowed me to balance my roster as I saw fit. This was fine for the first ten hours or so, but then I did something controversial by backlog standards- I paid real money to make the game easier. Sure, it was only a few bucks, but it basically gave me all of the pearls I could need in the game and saved me another twenty or more hours, I'm sure, while allowing me the full experience of the game anyway- I still had to grind now and then, there was just much less of it. Still though this feels like a PS2 game at best; there's repetitive music, only a few lines of spoken dialog, and while the graphics are mostly decent, the characters themselves often looked like a mess. Maybe I would have enjoyed this game better if I played in on a Vita (PlayStation Network is throwing so many free games on all systems at me that I'm leaning towards that as a potential console-buy) but having my PS3 on for sixty hours for this just feels like a waste. At the very least, none of my other free games are supposed to be anywhere close to as long, so no more long stretches without posting for me!