Took me about 103 hrs, but that included machine translating it as I went and mapping out a couple locations in Excel.
The backstory is that humanity got wiped out by something, aliens have begun colonizing Earth, and 12 monster clans from the demon world are given an ultimatum by the aliens to either submit or be wiped out.
For this version, all the cutscenes are voice only, which adds to the language barrier. Luckily, the script is almost entirely the same as the PC88 version, and there is currently a website available that has most, if not all, of the PC88's text. So, I was able to translate almost all the cutscenes.
I have a feeling I would be in the minority of people who enjoy the game. There are no towns, and therefore no interactions with townspeople, no shops, very few dungeons, no item drops, no items to be found in chests and the like, and no real character interaction. Because there are no shops or item drops, all items and equipment are created by the party using Jin that you acquire from defeating the enemies. The nice thing about this is that your parties are traveling shops, making it possible to never have to take a break from exploring to go back to a town to buy stuff. I said parties because you use three different parties: a daytime party, a night party, and a party that's active only on the first day of the month (there's an in-game clock and calendar).
The game has some interesting ideas. In addition to the aforementioned multi-party system, each stat levels up based on what the character does in battle, rather than based on the enemies. This game originally released on PC88 in mid-1988 several months before Final Fantasy II, which uses a similar system. The monsters that make up your parties evolve three times and then merge with another monster twice.
By the end of the first half of the game, the enemies, including bosses, should be doing 0 damage to your party, so battles relatively quickly become nothing but time sinks. By this point, the game becomes pretty much entirely about learning the cause of humanity's demise, how the monsters' came to be, and just what the heck is really going on.
