When I saw ads for this game in the magazines, I immediately though "This could be really cool." An RPG that takes place in a totally underwater setting, with Mermen and Mermaids as the maid characters. The artwork that was shown in the ad, and later became the cover art, was very well done and was stylised nicely, and definately got me interested in the game. But when I actually found the game at a good price and bought it, I was fairly disappointed. Mermanoid is a game that could have been great, but instead is very, very average.

First off, the graphics. The game opens with a very nicely done FMV of one of the main mermaid characters swimming around. Nothing real fancy, but it is very well done (although nowhere near a Square or Namco FMV...). The water looks like water, and the fish look like fish. If you let it run some more, you're treated to another FMV of a merman and killer whale. Again, very nicely done. At this point I was still pretty impressed with the game. But once I got into the actual game, disappointment set in. The in game graphics are very dated looking. Pixelation abounds in the backgrounds and landscape, and the characters themselves are fairly blocky and lack detail. Of course this would be alright if they were animated well. Such is not the case. Jerky movements and unrealistic swimming, combined with the sub-par graphics make the main gameplay very hard to swallow. There is, however, some salvation when it comes to graphics - the menus. The menus are designed in a similar style to the cover art, full of twisting metal and spheres and whatnot. Add to this a unique bubbling interface when the character dialogue boxes come up, and throw in some decent portraits for good measure, and you have a nice looking interface.

Now let's tackle the sound briefly. The sound is decent - it doesn't get in the way, but it's by no means memorable. The battle music is good, and the in game music is decent as well. Not a whole lot to say here except that you're not going to want to track down the soundtrack for this one...

Gameplay. Well, it's alright. Again, nothing great. The combat interface is alright - I haven't gotten a chance to explore it much, but it does have a decent autobattle mode that actually works well. Again, you're going to have choppy (and much to fast) animations, but on the other hand the battles move quickly enough that you don't really notice... that much, at least... The in battle camera is decent - it slowly moves around the fight, occasionally zooming in for a hit - it works very nicely given the water theme of the game. The overworld section is, again, decent - it's very wide open and fairly easy to manuever. You're given enough controls that you can actually have some fun going from point A to point B, doing flips and whatnot, but after a while the lack of speed gets to you - you move very, very slowly. The enemies are kind of annoying here as well - when you want to get in a fight, to build experience or whatnot, it's actually somewhat difficult. The enemies that I've seen just swim in circles endlessly, and distance is VERY hard to judge in this game, meaning that you'll end up having the enemies swim around you and not attack. It's... odd.

Now for the control. Again, alright, but at times a bit annoying. Since you're in a 360 degree area, the controls are more like a jet game - you have an button that makes you swim, and the d-pad will change the direction that you're swimming. However, unlike most games with this kind of control, up is up, and down is down. Not good when you're used to the opposite (if you've even played any flying games you'll know what I mean). I suppose that it makes sense, seeing as you're controlling merpeople and not jets, but still… The game is full of little annoyances like that - like the accept button. It's the circle button. Not the square or x, like most RPGs, but the circle. Annoying. On the plus side, there is quite a bit of control when you're swimming - little corrections in direction are fairly easy to make. And it would have been even easier to make these little corrections if the game would use the analog sticks, but again, it fails in this category as well…

As for the story, my Japanese is very poor, so I can't be a true judge here. From what I've seen, though, it's nothing spectacular. It seemed to plod quite a bit and have very little direction. Of course, I haven't completed the game, so maybe it will pick up later.

Something that is important to me that often gets overlooked is packaging. Mermanoid has very nice cover art, again, in the same style as the in game illustrations and menus. The back is very average, with two FMV shots and two smaller in-game shots. Kind of deceptive, but many games do it. As for the instruction book, it's alright - it features art in the style of a stone carving that works decently for the cover of an instruction book. The CD is very, very average, being a blue and black recreation of the cover artwork. And strangely enough, the game is put in the thicker style jewel case that is usually reserved for games with very long books. Mermanoid's book only clocks in at about 20 pages. Odd.

Overall, the game had potential, but falls fairly flat. A little more tweaking the graphics and animation, as well as the play control (and probably the story while we're at it), and things could have been quite different. I'm sure that I'll trudge though it some more, but in the end, there are much better games out there. Only pick this one up if you're a hardcore RPGer, really into mermaids, or find it really cheap.