izigame.me

This is a very specific jRPG. It was very strange on SNES where it originally released, and honestly it is till very strange even in 2023. Instead of getting singular game we're getting an anthology of 7 small jRPGs that only have basics of the UI in common. The games are very short - on average about 2 hours to beat each of them. Although some are much shorter than that, while others are a bit longer.
This feels more like a set of very polished RPG maker games, where developers could explore themes that were (and still are) rather original for jRPG genre. I mention RPG maker, because that's the only place I've seen similar games released.
We have a jRPG that is a survival horror in space with (nearly) no combat, no levelling, and mostly based on the dialogue and story.
We have a clean western, I can't think of any western jRPGs except for Wild Arms. But Wild Arms is full of typical jRPG concepts, like giant guns attached to hands, or girls fighting with umbrellas. The one here is straight western.
There is sneaking mission, which you can complete without killing anyone, or by killing everyone. Pretty much your choice. MGS: The RPG. But in feudal Japan.
Oh, and then there's prehistory jRPG where none of the characters can speak, and everything is communicated to the player by animations and emoticons.
And you have a game happening in near future of... around 2012 (it's a SNES game, remember), where you can read minds and ride giant mechs.
There is also Street Fighter the jRPG, where you just have a few fights like in fighting game arcade mode.
And finally there's a rather basic jRPG where you are tasked to train 3 martial artists in ancient China.
It's like each team making those games took their favourite movie and made it in jRPG form. They vary very much not only in theme, but also in tone. Prehistoric one is rather funny, while the "near future" one can be pretty dark. And survival horror is pretty dark too. There is a lot of murder and sad, unfair deaths in many of those stories.
Note how they went out of their way not to include most common trope of medieval fantasy with a knight saving world. This made the game pretty original now, and it keeps being original today.
The battle system is pretty strange and takes a bit to get used to. You basically have battle order, but during your turn you can move freely on chessboard stage. Each step you take makes all other combatants get a bit closer to their turn, and if you take too much steps positioning their interrupt your turn with their own. This can also be used to your advantage by moving into their blind spot and forcing them to lose a turn repositioning. You also can block your other characters from acing (when you have multiple in the team) if you're too busy moving around. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but it really fits this game, as it allows to make the battles in different jRPGs feel different. Western is more shooting oriented, and thus you have very specific angles at which you can shoot, and the battles feel like wild west shootouts. Meanwhile prehistoric battles are pretty primitive, with sticks and stones, and a focus on melee.
The jRPGs are not connected to each other, except for some random names being similar.
Once you complete the 7 games you can partake in some additional dungeons which brings total game time up by another few hours. Completing everything in this compilation took me 26 hours, so about twice as long as just beating each mini-jRPG.
This remake looks great, I really like HD2D aesthetics. But the remake brings some more ease of life improvements over the original. It improves save system and the way you can replay chapters. It adds minimap, that shows which rooms you've already visited, and also shows you where to go to progress the story. It is especially useful in the sci-fi far future chapter, as it was often very unclear where to go in the original. You would waste a lot of time wandering the space ship without much of a clue where to go. It might have added to the survival horror theme, but making it more dangerous, but in my opinion it only made the game irritating. You also can skip cutscenes, which I think was not in the original. There are some battles that will probably take you off-guard first time you fight, and you'll be glad you can get back there rather quickly.
The one mini-jRPG I didn't like was the sneaking one. I am not a fan of sneaking missions, and this one is full of "you'll miss it unless you played the game multiple times or read it in the walktrough". My suggestion is not to worry too much, go in blind, accept that you probably won't kill everyone / save everyone on the first run, and deal with it. It's full of very ancient game design decisions... But since the whole thing is about 3 hours long it's not that bad.
You can also stop playing any mini-game at any point and just switch to another. So if you don't like one you can just complete something else at that time. Even if you just like half of them it's still worth getting. I remembered the original left a very good impression on me, and the remake left as good impression, reminding me why I liked the original. Just don't think this is some "missing SNES gem that was unearthed", it's not FF6. It's high quality, fun product, but it's also just few experiments polished enough to show them to a wider audience.