Except it really isn't. Having played it for quite a while now, the game may seem to be just a fan service clone, but there really is an old-school charm to it.K wrote:This game really should have perished in obscurity as wanky fan-service clones of shitty games are supposed to die.
The art and presentation really has a lot of references and throwbacks to old school D&D. For instance, you don't have scripted FMV sequences in between battles. You get a DM-like narrator. Cynics may say it's just the company not having a FMV budget, but it actually really meshes with everything else in the game.
The cynic in me wants to scoff at it for being so old school, right down to how you need to actually have a physical paper print out of the rune combinations instead of just having an in-game tool tip. But that's the exact sort of thing that the old school RPGs used to have (e.g. you typed in the name of the spell), and the way it's implemented here (even without the paper guide) is actually not so annoying or frustrating. It's like the designer winking at us old fogeys and reminding us of tricks from bygone days.
It's a lot like Pacific Rim honestly. Its premise is ridiculous, and the artwork is over-the-top. But it gets to the heart of the genre better than anything that has been released in recent memory.