CIMA: The Enemy was a good idea in theory, but bad game overall.
----------Battle System----------
CIMA: The Enemy is an Action / RPG / RTS hybrid. The game plays similar to a Zelda game, except alot more mindless. You control the character Ark in most of the game, he uses a sword and has 2 moves, hack and slash. He can build for a bigger attack by holding down the attack button, but it's just a quicker hack and slash. Arc is followed by fellow teammate Ivy, she mindlessly follows Ark and usually gets stuck on walls, gets hurt and rarely ever attacks neverending regenerating enemies. The AI in this game is very stupid. There are times in the game where Ark from the team, and that means you have to take over another character. Ivy has a gun and can shoot at a distance, and really that's about it with weapons. You either have a melee attack weapon or a weapon with some distance, you can't change equipment for your characters other than accessories. You find accessories in chests through out the dungeon, each character can equip 4 of them. Most accessories can only be used once, like to prevent a poison attack, then it will break. It wasn't until about half of the game when I found an accessory that was useful and won't break, it would heal the character holding it after a period of time. There's no money in the game, but when you kill monsters they drop gem called Majesties. There are four kinds in total, and you can use these gems to make new items or even accessories. You can only make items if your character trusts you though, if you let a character get attacked then they'll lose a trust heart, if you go below zero, then they won't help you. You don' t gain experience in the game, but you can find crystals that can upgrade your armor or weapons. I wasn't able to upgrade anything until half way through the game, what kind of crap is that? The dungeons are pretty generic, there's really no difference between them other than the backgrounds. They might add a new trap here and there, but the dungeons are still repetitive and boring. There's always a point in the dungeon where you meet a new person, your team is separated, you need to find a boss key, and then go to the boss area to talk to a bad guy where he runs away and sends a big boss at you. Every dungeon is like that, it's hard to stomach. The only goals in the dungeon sections is to get from point A with your team to point B.
The RTS elements in the game is controlling a team of up to 14 characters through the dungeon. This is where the game can get pretty ugly. At first the controlling the team is very simple, since all you have to do is press the R button, and a pop up will come up showing the 4 characters in your team. You then hit the R button again, then mark on the map where you want the characters to run to. You can place 3 markers on the ground to show them where to run, and then zig zag through the dungeon how you make them. They'll fight if they have to, but other than that they will just move where you tell them, that means if they clip the side of a wall, then they'll get stuck. They won't try to go around it. So you have to reset the markers if you mess up, while trying to protect the team from regenerating monsters. After you get more than a team of 4 is when I had trouble in the game, no it wasn't hard controlling the team. It was just hard getting to change which team of 4 I could move. Normally you tap the L button to change the teams, but sometimes the pop up on the L button would show the characters on your current team, and not the book or tent icon of the other teams and I just couldn't do anything until I had to move all my characters at once into a small point and start over. This probably doesn't make sense unless you had to play this yourself. Moving the teams to your points of destination is pretty simple, but it was completely frustrating for me trying to switch the teams I wanted. ----------Characters / Story----------
The game starts off with Arc and Ivy, the Gate Guardians protecting a train on route to the Frontier. The train is eventually hijacked and sent into a different dimension. Everyone but Arc and Ivy is separated from the coach, so they much retrieve all the passengers and head back home. The CIMA captured the passages to feed off their hope and despair. I enjoyed the initial plot, but it ran thin after a couple dungeons. Before the game really starts you get to meet and greet with all the passengers, which are all full of personality. The ending is pretty strong with a couple twists. Everything in the middle is just extremely predictable and tedious.
----------Graphics----------
The character models look great, including the main villains of the game. Since there's no towns to visit and NPC to talk to, there's really no repeating character models. The models look more detailed than most SNES RPGs. In the dialog box they'll show a character avatar on the side showing who is talking, they don't change expressions or anything, but it's still drawn out pretty well. The enemies are boring looking for the most part. The dungeons look good, but there's not enough variation between them. The bosses are big and impressive looking, but nothing screams "classic rpg boss" out of any of them. ----------Sound----------
The music isn't terrible or anything rememberable either. The characters will scream if they get attacked of if their health is low you'll hear a constant beeping sound telling you to help them. There will be a beep sound that will tell you when your group as made it to their destination too. You pretty much need sound to work this game.
----------World Map----------
CIMA uses warp portals to go to each dungeon. During the entire game your character's are stuck on train cart in an unknown destination. The game starts off with one portal that warps them to a dungeon. Each dungeon has a new character that was separated from the train cart, each time you defeat a dungeon a new track will be laid and a new dungeon portal will pop up and repeat. ----------Time to Complete Game----------
12:14:59
The game doesn't save after you beat it, so that time is before I fought the final boss. The final boss was extremely easy, I didn't have to use a potion during his battle. The mini-bosses before him was harder.