Okay: the first disc was still kind of cool. At one point, I managed to got stuck somewhere because I mistook a forest I needed to go in with mere rocks. As a result, I wandered back and forth through the map and did about a gazillion battles. Not that bad, I thought: this would allow me to level up a bit more so the rest of the game would be easier. This later turned out to be a thought fallacy because monsters level up with you (meaning: the whole system is useless to begin with). I also couldn't be bothered with the cards, as I assumed it was a useless gimmick.
So anyway...the first disc ended with a nice cliffhanger. So far, so good.
The second and third disc was where the story became convoluted. It's been years now, but even then I could never understand what that past and present deal was supposed to be. I slowly got tired of all the repetitive fights and just wanted to skip to progress the story. At least I could skip that stupid card game.
And at one point, there is this ENORMOUS storyline "cutscene" where the cowboy reveals that he is the only one not suffering from memory loss and all the characters know each other. That wasn't so much a revelation, as it was DUMB. Perhaps in a movie you could throw this under the "suspension of disbelief" bus, but c'mon...cowboy character was with me for god knows how long. You'd think he (or she? I can't remember) would have mentioned something sooner. Like...when they were planning to kill their former nanny at the end of the first disc?
On top of that: just after my hopes of a decent story progression were torpedoed, my computer and/or the game crashed (this was windows 98 for you). Meaning: I had to go through the whole retarded part again. No 'auto skip cutscene', no way to fast forward. Christ.
After some more faffing about, suddenly all my weapons were stolen. This meant that basically any random encounter could kill half or even my entire party in one or two hits. I think I got halfway through that through the magic art of "saving every time a monster fumbles his attack and loading whenever he didn't", and then fled to the internet. This sounds perhaps a bit late to you youngsters, but try setting your connection to "56k settings" and then browsing through nineties web pages through altavista. Then you'll understand why I wanted 'text only' walkthroughs...the page would probably still be loading if I went with an 'all pictures' guide.
The guide said that in order to get through that part, it's pretty much mandatory to have played that card game all the time.
I don't think I've ever bothered to get those discs out of their packaging after that.
