Developer: H2O Entertainment Publisher: THQ

Released: March 20, 2001 2/10 Rated: T

Maybe we all owe Quest 64 a little apology. I, personally, grew up never understanding what anybody saw in that game and to this day, I still dislike it. But at least that game tried. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage sneaks in just before the great release drop-off of Spring 2001, reeking of obligation and opportunism like many a launch title in the coming generations just to have something for players to buy on their new system. The only difference here is that THQ was looking back, not forward, and realized that the RPG category was still wide open, so H2O, a talented developer of games with “Tetris” in the title, set to work on a title far beyond their scope, and, I’m guessing, with far less time than would have been necessary to make something worthwhile.

I admit, I’m going to use Quest 64 as a reference point repeatedly, both as the only true comparison point within the N64’s North American library, and for quite a few other similarities I’ll get into. This is especially strange as even though THQ was the publisher for both games in North America, Eltale Monsters, as it was known in Japan, lacks any direct affiliation with the companies behind Aidyn Chronicles. So when we see the same imprecise, glacially-paced, arena-style combat system being utilized in Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage, the first question is “why?” Why nick a combat system that pretty obviously doesn’t work, and decide it’s going to be better just because your game has a party system instead of just one character? If anything, Aidyn Chronicles somehow makes this system even worse by having more characters, as not only does every battle take even longer with so many player characters and enemies to cycle through, each having their own dexterity stat to determine when they can take their next turn. And not that this was commonplace at the time, but with such a wildly variable sense of determining initiative as Aidyn Chronicles has, an on-screen indicator of upcoming turns would have made this already frustrating system a little bit less so, instead of just wondering why your spellcaster hasn’t moved in about six minutes.

Maybe this combat system was purposefully designed this way. It does, after all, stretch Aidyn Chronicles’ playtime out to something like 60 hours, and as we all know, RPG quality at the time was often measured in play hours – at least by idiots. The thought of actually wasting nearly six Lord of the Rings Extended Edition viewings worth of your life watching the continental drift of Aidyn Chronicles wander through to its end sounds like actual torture to me. I know plenty of folks that are already surprised when they hear about 70, 80, 100 hour main stories being considered masterpieces, but it’s plain to see that Aidyn Chronicles gets its runtime out of its similarities to the worst Dungeons and Dragons campaigns you’ve ever played. Combat encounters that feature merciless exchanges of missed attacks. Squishy characters that can’t survive long enough to actually gain levels and attain their usefulness. Wide swaths of nothing between encounters and space-filling NPCs that all say the same pointless thing as their neighbors. Even menus and logistics seem to fail as assigning experience points and equipment is tedious, while a day/night cycle and calendar seemingly only exists to make you waste time stopping to camp when the sun sets, lest you cede the upper hand to enemies who hit harder in the dark.

I admit, I could see myself caring about the story, were it able to be told with any effectiveness. Dialogue boxes are not in and of themselves exclusive from telling great stories on hardware that’s incapable of FMV or voice acting, as plenty of N64 and SNES titles have proven before, but Aidyn Chronicles essentially fails through every other aspect of its presentation to kill even the seedlings of acceptable writing. Your opening scenes with your character lost in the woods, searching for his kidnapped friend, attacked by orcs, rescued by a healer assumed to be an evil witch – it’s all pretty decent as far as setups go. Only to be followed up immediately by an excruciating search through a horribly laid-out castle to gather a party, plagued by music that flips between non-existent and completely unfitting, and surrounded by perhaps the ugliest characters I’ve ever seen.

Seriously, this game is absolutely hideous, the style of the characters is some of the most off putting I’ve ever encountered in a game, and their animations only make things worse. If it’s a style H2O were going for, I don’t know how somebody didn’t raise their hand and ask why this was the direction – look at the Dreamcast, almost two years old by the time Aidyn Chronicles was released. Time Stalkers, for example, and its 3D models complemented by 2D drawings in its text boxes looks immensely more polished than anything here. Or Final Fantasy VII and its deformed/simplified take on the 3D models. Aidyn Chronicles almost seems to operate with a design philosophy that the more polygons the player can see, the better. They’re all over-designed, over-complicated, with unnaturally sharp corners and sharp everything else, and terrible animations that I’m sure were not helped by these needlessly overdone models. The player character alone has a completely baffling walk cycle that looks as though he’s stopping to stand still for a split second before starting to move again. It’s this bottom of the barrel presentation that takes Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage from a regular swing-and-a-miss to fill out the RPG genre on the N64 to an easy candidate for the absolute worst games on the system – and it may be the worst one that actually functions. Just don’t come to the N64 for your RPG fix, at least not the North American library.

Continuing Legacy

It makes me sad to say that H2O Entertainment, the makers of Tetrisphere and The New Tetris, would only make one more game before folding later in 2001 – a shovelware Flintstones game for the GameBoy Color. Perhaps if they were able to stay more in their lane, they would have seen more continued success. I would imagine that Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage has stayed mostly under the radar due to its late release, middling reception, and poor sales, otherwise it would more commonly be acknowledged alongside Quest 64 as the system’s representative RPGs, rather than Quest often being remembered as “the only one” here in the West.

Additional Information

Saves: Controller Pak

Compatible With: Rumble Pak

Players: 1

Print Guides: Prima

Aggregate Critical Reception (GameRankings): 46.30%, based on 11 reviews

Other Releases: EU, August 3, 2001

My Streams

Commercials and Print Ads