I played along with the Retrograde Amnesia podcast, this is the game for series 5. This game was never released in the UK, though I was aware of it at the time. I’d played Xenogears through an emulator and absolutely loved it. I didn’t have a way to play import PS2 games though. Strangely they released Episode 2 here, but it can’t have sold well since they then didn’t release 3.
For long stretches this doesn’t even feel like a video game. There are cutscenes so long that they have save points in the middle of them. It’s mostly a traditional RPG, with towns, dungeons and story scenes. It feels like the game is squeezed out though, and there’s not really enough time to explore the mechanics. The main one I used is called boost, where you can build a meter that lets you jump the move order which is useful for healing. There are mech suits that some of your characters can use, but it felt a bit pointless and I ended up not really using them.
The characters in the game were pretty interesting, and I was engaged with the story. It shows that the funding was pulled and they had to scrabble together the game though, and there are cut corners everywhere. The same thing happened with Xenogears, but that game came out a lot better than this.