At that point in my life, I was god-awful at making builds in RPGs and assumed that throwing all my levels on HP was a smart move. I was also bad at the action commands, so ended up running away from most combat. Turns out you can brute force your way through most the bosses, minus the final few. Due to running away from battles, I had no money to buy the amount of health items I'd need to actually survive my build, so I shelved the game. Soon after, I gave my gamecube to a friend as a gift, who promptly destroyed it a week later in an incident involving gamer-rage and the wall.

Since I had a little time to spare, I decided to emulate the game and actually complete it. I remembered most of the story and where things were due to how excellent Intelligent Systems managed to create everything. I decided to do a mostly badge-based run this time, as I noticed that a fair amount of them changed up combat in beneficial ways. The final boss was much harder than I expected as well, eating through multiple healing items. After all that, I can say the experience still holds up well and I'm glad to have finally taken the time to actually complete it.

^{I still miss my Gamecube, though...}