A fantasy RPG with lots of Japanese ideas blended in
Neophyte: The Spirit Master is a straightforward RPG game, one that presents you a large top down world, with a single threaded story for a main quest and lots of mini quests and random encounters to fill your journey. In terms of the way you level up your character and the classes and ways you can play, this is a fairly classic game. You can choose to be a wielder of swords, or a mage or a ranged player, but whatever path you take, you can do a good job within the game just by taking the right people in your party. You will have the occasion to add to your party as you progress, and, depending on the way you balance your party, there will be great opportunities for you to experience the game in different ways. At any rate, it's a fairly well produced game, but, for some reason it doesn't pack a lot of surprise, a lot of interesting moments. It's pretty much the same throughout, on a lot of levels, from the world to the characters and the dialogues. But it plays well, and the animations and controls are both well rounded, which is why the game is fun enough. Sure worth a go if you loved the later Ultima games and you are not extremely pretentious in regards to the story.