Millennium 5: The Battle of the Millennium (PC) Review

From a more objective standpoint, Millennium 5 is fairly decent. Following from the prior releases, this fifth entry continues the story on without missing a beat, with the main characters attempting to get into a martial arts tournament only to find out that they have only a week to train and get ready, despite such things normally taking months. As well as that, their trainer is quickly incapacitated to boot. While decently written, with some solid dialogue, other parts simply feel rushed or rather underwhelming.

However, it does manage to hold its own when it comes to the actual mechanics. While at first it appears to be little more than a stock RPG, it provides a sizeable chunk of options, some of which are pretty well thought-out. For example, a 'story' mode exists that makes it pretty easy to plough through for those interested in just wrapping up the series and, likewise, there are options to have guide-arrows to lead the way, the ability to see where enemies are or leave them invisible, and there is a large cast of characters that the game tries to encourage the player to rotate through, compensating somewhat for the stock mechanics.

While the combat is fairly standard fare and follows the basic outline of many other RPGs, it does attempt to mix things up a bit by doing such things as providing only a limited number of usages for skills and even a helpful fairy to provide buffs for certain fights. In the story mode these abilities and buffs may not be needed at all, but they become more important as the difficulty increases. Thankfully, proceedings don't usually become too overwhelming, yet considering how it all ends up with a massive series of over 100 battles, it can be both daunting and stale before too long.

Thankfully, Millennium 5 does at least attempt to make up for this with a series of long dungeons with a large amount of hidden rooms, amongst other things. However, once again, there is one critical flaw in that some of these dungeons not only end up feeling tiresome after fighting through a slew of battles, but it can be difficult to progress, or easy to miss things simply because a character, say, was not wearing the proper piece of equipment to make a jump, which can cause a large amount of irritation, especially when hunting for secret rooms that are, by their nature, secret and easy to overlook.

To add to that, the overworld is fairly lacking, on the whole. Confined by its RPG maker tools, it doesn't stand out too much visually, but neither does it falter, merely reaching a 'standard' level, with only a few places to go and little reason to seriously explore when compared to other RPGs with an overworld. While this isn't a reason to shun the adventure, it does highlight some of its recurring flaws and makes it feel less like its own game and more like an extension of a series… which it actually is. On its own, however, this ends up feeling lacking.

On the positive side, when within the dungeons there is plenty to see and what is around is interesting even if it is only terrain as it is well-placed terrain. There are some flaws, such as being able to walk off ladders onto what should be cliff-faces at certain points, some clunky menu options, and so on, but nothing too overwhelming at least. They are still fairly interesting and decent to look at, even if it's a simple forest.

This is very difficult to approach for someone who has not played the prior entries in the series, and it is obvious right from the beginning. The adventure starts off with a multitude of characters having gained entry into a tournament in a place called 'Mystrock' to battle the big bad. The problem is that this is not a single person or even a small group, but a massive amount of characters that may or may not have their histories explained in the prior releases, may or may not be good, and might be familiar to those who worked through past entries but just won't be to those who haven't. With no catch-up featured, the result is that newcomers will be totally lost.

This even holds true with the combat, since terms like 'healthy' and 'tired' and how they affect combat are not properly explained. While it can be guessed at without the proper knowledge, it's just that, a guess. It is so reliant on prior experience that it doesn't even start players off at Level 1, rather just straight up to Level 40 or so. It appears to be there largely to encourage rotating the cast about and trying to keep the people from dilly-dallying about in an area to grind EXP, but it's just a guess in the end as to what it actually affects and in what ways. This sort of problem is the game's downfall as it means that it wears the badge of 'sequel' so prominently that getting involved at this late stage can be quite difficult, if not impossible.