Siralim

I've installed and played Siralim several times, always coming to the same conclusion: the game appears to have many mechanics, complexity, depth of customization, and lots of monsters to collect and power up... but in reality it's just a lot of the same thing with different descriptions. For example, there are multiple damage over time status effects with a variety of interesting names - Poison, Blight, Burn. In reality, they might as well just be folded into one status called 'DoT', as they all just inflict a certain amount of damage each turn. You have myriad character stats in which to invest your Royalty Points (skill points for your caster leveling up), but they all boil down to unimaginative "increase chance to do X by Y% for each rank". Many creature unique abilities are heavily reliant on RNG, and some are just utterly useless. Delving further into a particular realm increases rewards, but also increases the tedium of fighting monsters - fights last longer due to most enemy packs tossing out spells that decrease your attack or defense power, can stun or hit the entire group, on top of just having higher health pools and stats. Might as well just grind yourself up on the first level of a given realm until you accumulate BIG NUMBER. And that's what this game is - a giant grind. That's not bad if you're just looking for pure gameplay with a sprinkle of thought required, but unless you're into that hamster wheel, you'll probably brain yourself after completing a few castle quests. If you want to get information on any particular game subject you'll need to traipse over to your library and search all the bookshelves for the one containing the appropriate info. There's no in-menu database or info collection - if you're not at your castle, too bad. On top of that, the castle has no options for teleporting to your various structures, so you're stuck walking at a snail's pace from place to place. There's no run or speed up button, either - tedium, tedium, tedium. Maybe these problems were fixed in the later games, but it's moot for me.