Alphadia Genesis

Alphadia Genesis likes to take the long way round. It meanders through dull exposition and pointless character development, drivelling on with endless chattering dialogue scenes that make you wish its spiky haired protagonists would get their glib faces trapped in blenders.

It's a game that's so desperate to make you care about its bland characters that it doesn't so much unfurl their backstories as ram them down your throat, forcing you to choke down each and every banal detail in a depressing attempt to pad out yet another JRPG clone.

And this time it's all about clones. "Clones are bad. Or are clones bad? I was a clone once. Were you? Yes, I was, it was that Tuesday when we had that cup of tea with that nice lady down the road. Oh yes, I remember."

And then you're screaming at the game to shut up so you can go and fight some identikit jello monsters rather than read this insufferable waffle.

Stop talking

The main character of the piece is a dullard named Fray. He has two swords, a red jerkin, and is nice to everyone. He's joined in a quest to solve a clone-based murder mystery by a band of generic RPG archetypes stripped directly from the cartridges of your most beloved SNES games.

There's the little girl who's smart but not that strong! The surly one who doesn't like the others but eventually changes his mind! The girl one with impractical metallic clothing who always stands like she's holding in a fart!

Once your band of characters is formed you wander around a flat and meaningless world having explanations for things tossed at you by skittish sprites, opening chests, and battling all manner of unimpressive creatures.

At least those battles prove a salve for the annoying talky bits. The big draw this time is that they're in 3D. But they could quite easily be in 2D, for all the difference that extra D makes. Instead of watching sprites sort of bob around, you're watching multi-polygonal models sort of bob around.

There are some interesting additions to the battle system, though. Including an intriguing aid system that lets you utilise the skills of members of your party who are off-screen. You can combo together attacks, and use spells that are otherwise impossible.

That the battle system has so much depth makes the rest of the game that much harder to bear. Your wanderings are either controlled by an inadequate tap-to-move system or a slightly less inadequate joypad.

Neither of these methods will make you oblivious to the fact that you're stumbling through the same retro-looking world you've stumbled through in about a thousand other Kemco titles.

And then the characters will start talking again and you'll have to tap through a swathe of utter nonsense, slowly losing any of the remaining thrill left over from the slick and polished battle system.

Kemco has been flogging this horse carcass for a good long while now, churning out lump after lump of stodgy JRPG filler. With Alphadia Genesis the studio finally appears to have reached the limit of its storytelling ability.

It's a shame, because there are enough interesting bits of gameplay here that sometimes you forget about the sub-par soap opera that's going to kick back in when you've finished slaughtering these globs of slime.

But then it does kick back in, and all you can think about is stomping over and over on the big-eyed mugs of the morons doing all the chattering.