It's not an RPG. It's an Adventure game. And it's the best adventure game I've ever played.

You play a 10 year old castaway who is attempting to find food, water, shelter, and a way back to civilization.

The game starts out showing you and your father, and then shows the shipwreck that strands you alone on the island. Pretty nifty.

The graphics in the game itself are quite good. The sand is sand colored, the grass is green, the water is blue, the berries are red, the nuts are brown, etc. It's easy to see what everything is meant to be. Clams look like clams, fire looks like fire, monkeys look like monkeys. Sticks look like sticks, the soul leaving your dead body looks like a soul leaving your dead body, etc. The view is top/down. It gradually transitions between day and night. At night it's hard to see unless you have some source of light, but this is as it should be.

There's one background tune, but it's good enough, and goes well enough with the game that I haven't wanted to turn it off. The sound effects are great. There are animal sounds when there are animals nearby, when you're on the beach you can hear the waves crashing, it's all pretty cool.

Some parts of the game are random, and are different every time you start a new game, for instance, the kind of berry that heals you in one game may poison you in the next. There are animals on the island. Some of them are wimpy, and will flee if they see you. Others will happily bite you to death if you let them.

You can choose to play a male or female castaway, and you can name them what you wish, so long as the name is 4 letters or less. You find various items washed up on shore, and scattered about the island (sticks, leaves, pointy rocks, vines, etc.), and can use the Merge command to attempt to assemble items you've collected into useful tools. There are 8 different endings to this game. There are 4 numbers in the game you must keep an eye on. Life, Hunger, Water, and Fatigue. If you eat poison or get bitten by animals or get too tired, hungry, or thirsty, your Life goes down. When Life hits zero, you're dead.

The controls are good. The action is much like that in Zelda. The control pad moves your character. A examines and interacts with the environment (pick stuff up, examine things) or selects commands on menus, etc.). B attacks with your equipped weapon or cancels a selected command. Start brings up the menu screen. Through menus, you can use items, drop items, equip items, etc. Standard RPG type interface. While you are in the menu, the game action is paused, so if you're holding a fishing rod, and a hungry bear takes notice of you, you can quickly hit Start and equip a weapon, without being mauled to death in the meantime.

This game is awesome.

You can choose gender and name! You can explore! You can invent stuff! You can hunt and fish and forage! You can even eat funky mushrooms and hallucinate! Actually, I liked pretty much everything. Especially the fact that there is actual Replay value :)

It might have been nicer to have a longer name, but that's pretty minor.

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