The gameplay is nothing to call home about either, to be honest. When the game starts, it actually seems to purposefully shed itself of anything so stifling as a plotline. You are Sword, taken to this strange world by reading a magic book. The world itself is made of parts of other worlds and times, and people from those worlds and times end up coming along for the ride. Someone or something has created this world, and it’s up to you to figure out who, stop it, and get everyone back home safely. Sound original? Well, the setting is, but the plot itself is pretty weak, and it doesn’t get any better. The scenes where new pieces of terrain are plopped down are suitably cool, but not amazingly so.
The game is basically a watered-down rogue-like, like Chocobo’s Magical Dungeon 2 and Azure Dreams for the PSX (or Diablo, even). It holds a lot of similarities to Azure Dreams, actually; sometimes painfully so. Basically, you’re thrown into one of ten or so dungeons and you have to fight to the end, picking up items as you go. The dungeons are randomly generated each time, but they only take 20 to 30 minutes to get through, so you don’t get too frustrated.
Unfortunately, the game mechanics themselves are hellishly frustrating. Like in Azure Dreams, every time you go into a dungeon, you start back at Level 1 with respect to experience. Unlike Azure Dreams, so do the monsters that you capture and decide to use. This is really, really annoying, and you’ll find yourself running through a dungeon just because it won’t effect the world at large. Another big problem is that you can only take four items into the dungeon, and you’ll generally want to take a weapon, armor, shield, and boots, so you can’t take any real ‘items’ in. What this means is that everything you find in the dungeon and don’t use might as well get sold -- you can’t afford to bring it in with you.
Luckily, you sometimes gain ‘ranks’ when you complete a dungeon, giving you new skills that will be with you when you re-enter any dungeon. Unfortunately, many of these skills are unusable until you reach a certain experience level, so they might as well not be there. Argh. The bosses at the end of each dungeon are considerably more difficult than the monsters, so you’ll end up fighting the creatures so you can beat the boss. Too bad you lose all of that once you exit the dungeon.
Battles themselves are relatively novel -- your party is in a 2x2 square, and there can be up to four more 2x2 squares of enemies, one on each side. This means that you may get attacked from the sides and behind while you’re assaulting one group of enemies. Spells that affect groups only affect those in one of those 2x2 squares, so you’ve got to choose judiciously. And every physical attack costs Vitality, which recovers a bit each combat round (more as your levels go up). With large weapons, this is a serious pain in the ass, as they cost so much vitality. Of course, you can only afford to bring one weapon into each dungeon, so you may find yourself keeping one of the weak ones with low Vitality draining and hoping that a better one is in the dungeon... somewhere.
A bit into the game, you can start going on non-plot ‘quests’ offered by a psychotic bunny. If you complete them (which often means killing N enemies or finding the Y on level Z of dungeon Q), you get some money and perhaps a skill. This is relatively interesting, but not enough to hold your interest. And don’t even ask about the equations used to figure out how much experience you get from a battle -- I don’t understand them either.
Time Stalkers isn’t a terrible game, but it’s not stellar either. Climax’s older offerings like Landstalkers and the Japan-only Lady Stalkers were much better than this one.
