I did use online maps, which probably cut at least a couple hours off due to not having to explore dungeons unaided.
This has a pretty unique battle system for the standard battles, where encounters are random, but the actual battles are like a top-down action-adventure or ARPG, but within a battle arena. So, if you don't like the combat of games like The Legend of Zelda or Ys, I don't believe you'll enjoy this. It is nice that you can escape any non-boss battle by simply walking off the left or right side of the screen, especially as it has a pretty low level cap of 31. Since the level cap will be reached near the end of the game, unless you were grinding early in the game, when you have no real need to keep earning more money, you can just run away from every battle while taking very little damage, if any. Upon a level up, you regain all HP and MP, cutting down on trips back to an inn to heal. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, there is never a mix of enemies, as the enemy that appears on-screen before the battle is the only enemy type you will fight during the battle.
Another nice thing is that in order to see more than a small circle around your character outdoors, you need to acquire a map from someone in town, except for a few very late game cases, that leads to the next destination. This means that when you try to make your way to the next destination, you'll instantly know if you've taken the correct path. This also pretty much drives home that the game is extremely linear. Dungeons are the same in that you'll have to find the map inside to view more than the small circle around your character, with a small difference that you either need to have a candle, lantern, or cast the light spell to even get the circle.
That's the extent of the positives I have to say about this game.
Even given when it was released, there are several decisions that make me scratch my head. There's no run button to make your character move faster in towns. While there are text speed options, the Fast speed is still rather slow. It does not show whether equipment for sale is better or worse that what you have equipped. You have to open the menu to talk to people, search, or open a treasure chest. Speaking of treasure chests, not only do you have to go into the menu to open the chest, you then have to reopen the menu to take what's in the chest -- something I didn't realize you had to do (the compilation does not include game manuals) until a monster dropped a chest with armor inside and I wondered why it wasn't available to equip. The inventory limits are 8 items (8 pieces of equipment; and 8 other items, such as curative items, keys, etc.), which really comes into play at the end of the game when the final dungeon requires 4 keys to make it to the end boss. The Seek command is one step short of pointless, as there are zero items in any dressers or bookcases (I searched every one of them in the game), and there are only 2 hidden items found with the function -- for both of which, you're told where to look. Other than to tell you that that treasure chest on the screen is a treasure chest or that the person in your path outdoors is indeed a person standing in front of you, the only "unusual" instance is at the very beginning of the game when you search your surrogate father's tombstone.
You only ever have various types of swords, so, other than magic, there are no projectile attacks. Likely due to the battles being real-time, you can only use one type of magic during them. This means that you have to decide on a sort of favorite attack spell and ready that for use during battles. As with the item inventories, you're stuck with 8 different magic spells at your disposal. Luckily, you can sell off spell books (each book has one spell) that you don't use. There is an extreme amount of palette swapping, as there are only about a half dozen monster designs, with more powerful monsters of each variety being a palette swap along with either being faster and/or cycling through a few different attacks for each color of that variety, with each color having the same cycle of attack types.
I was debating between giving this game a 7 or a 6, but the boss battles are what kept it at a 6. They're horrible. Rather than being like the normal battles, they're from a side profile where you shuffle back and forth and attack the boss that's usually on the right side of the screen. You can't turn around, so for those bosses that jump over you, while it's on your left, the only thing you can do is wait until it jumps back over you -- luckily, the bosses also can't turn around to attack from your rear. At least you can crouch and attack from the crouched positions. The bosses are also all extremely easy.
This compilation does have save states, so you aren't stuck with only being able to save at churches.
