This is a complete playlist of every time kuoushi played Franzen, but available in a playlist format. Enjoy just letting the whole series run without having to click anything! Hours of kuoushi, direct to your brain.
Let’s start this off by saying Franzen is free. That alone generally means if you’ve got nothing else to do and no other games to play, it’s worth your time.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about how Franzen is actually a great little game. You may or may not be familiar with the developer, Scumhead, but one thing that they have is a fantastic eye for world-building, and a unique sense of style (that may be divisive). Primarily, they make FPS games like Vomitoreum, but this is their one venture at the time of this review into making a game inspired by old JRPGs of the SNES era. Think Final Fantasy 6. With all that in mind, Franzen looks great. It has a nice, cohesive style with some cool designs, all fitting in the SNES JRPG visuals. There’s not a lot that could be improved there to my eye.
Battles in the game are done with an active time battle system, where your turn points charge up over time and once the bar is full your character gets a turn. Fairly standard and familiar if you’ve played other similar JRPGs. Status effects seem relatively important, but if you get to a certain point you’ll generally just be throwing out damage. There is an element system in place, so when getting your characters ready for a specific thing, make sure you also have the appropriate weapons and armor, otherwise you could find yourself in a difficult situation. I will say, there is a reason the game sells weapons and armor for relatively cheap.
Another point on the systems, which is mentioned on the store page as well, is that the game doesn’t have a leveling system. Instead, you will occasionally receive items that boost your character’s stats. If you don’t use these, the game will get extremely difficult (to impossible), so make sure you’re using them and boosting your characters’ stats if/when things start getting tough. There are some difficulty ceilings at certain points, but the overall difficulty isn’t too bad throughout.
The one thing I do kind of want to point out as not as high quality as the rest of the game is the writing itself. It’s not bad. There are just certain word choices that feel like they’re trying to punch above and beyond where they need to go and end up sounding silly instead of having the intended weight. Also, when I say writing, I don’t mean the story. The story itself is perfectly fine and entertaining, with a lot of world-building added in that lets you know just enough about the world without overdoing it. Though, I did go through a whole hour or so of just cutscenes and walking without doing any battles at one point.
All in all, though, the overall presentation of the game is great and it would’ve been cool for it to last more than around 7 hours (for me, but I’m slow so probably 4-6 for others). But hey, it was free, so I can’t really complain that I only got 7 hours of entertainment for free.
Play it if you’re into JRPGs. You’ll probably have fun.
