Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
Nostalgia is an RPG that takes common elements from traditional RPGs and packages them in a new story. The story follows the tale of Edward Brown and his band of friends and they try to find out what happened to his famous explorer father and what role a mysterious girl named Fiona plays in the evil plans of the Ancient Cabal. Unlike other RPGs, Nostalgia is set on planet Earth and you'll visit famous cities all from your airship. Nostalgia is best described as part steam punk, part new ideas and part traditional.

What's Hot
RPGs have a knack for story telling. Part of the reason they have stayed so popular is because the hero's journey is a tale that people never get tired of hearing. To help sell the story, a unique visual element helps set games apart from each other. In Nostalgia's case, there is a strong visual element that enhances the story. The reason for that is because you'll see the world as you know it in a new light. The characters you come across are immediately recognizable and you won't have to worry about anything looking generic. The only fault is that Nostalgia perhaps plays too much to RPG clichés in terms of personality and the style that goes hand in hand with that. For example, the amnesiac princess in white robes is the healer while the street urchin Pad is just like you'd imagine a cross between Han Solo and Oliver Twist. The monsters in the game look awesome and bring new twists to classic monsters like blobs of goo and skeletons.

RPGs are not the genre that you'd typically think of as innovative all the time. Nostalgia hit upon something that is the next step in evolution for RPG combat. Yes, you read that right, there is a game that has improved on traditional, turned-based combat. The key to it is the airship. It plays a huge role in the course of the game and is your main mode of transportation in the world. When you aren't exploring dungeons, you'll take to the sky and encounter all types of flying enemies. When those random battles occur, you don't take the traditional role of your characters. Instead, your party of characters man different parts of the ship and battle together as the ship. It might not sound revolutionary but it provides a wonderful distinction between dungeon crawling and traveling.



What's Not
Nostalgia falls into becoming a game about grinding early on. There are more than enough random battles to fight but as you work your way up the leveling ladder, you'll notice that you'll need to stick in dungeons longer to keep gaining levels otherwise you'll hit a brick wall of monsters. If you remember to use the save anywhere function in non-dungeon areas, you'll do fine, otherwise you could end up losing a lot of progress due to your weak characters.

There are some annoyances with the combat system in place. The upgrading of spells and skills is needless. It was a nice thought to have a World of Warcraft talent tree system, but it doesn't integrate itself well into the game and you'll accumulate a ton of "SP" points before you remember you can do anything with your additional attacks. The menu system takes way too many presses of a button to get what you want to do. It doesn't matter if you are buying something from a store or trying to attack a creature, it feels like there are too many presses to do what you want to do. On the same token you don't plan an entire combat turn in one setting. For each character turn, you select what you want to do. It makes the combat feel slightly disjointed since you select your command and watch the attack unfold rather than watching an entire turn unfold.

Final Word
Nostalgia is a fantastic RPG by successfully blending traditional RPG gameplay and some new ideas with creative visuals. It is too bad that grinding rears its ugly head early on in the game. For an RPG, it shouldn't be too unexpected, however. RPG buffs are going to really get into Nostalgia and even some tepid RPG fans are going to renew their interest in the genre.