Time Stalkers (known as Climax Landers in Japan) is another dungeon crawler/RPG developed by Climax and translated by Sega for a domestic release.  Unfortunately, this game comes up short in every department imaginable and will leave RPG starved Dreamcast fans disappointed.  

The basic premise follows the misadventures of the annoying Sword, who comes upon a book in a castle that draws him into a quirky world filled with settings from different times and worlds.  It’s his job to uncover who is kidnapping the residents of these time periods and why.  During the course of the game, more characters join Sword and any can be controlled by the player.  The plot goes immediately into a nosedive as you realize the story is just an excuse to create the dungeons.  There is virtually zero plot development and even less character development.   All the characters are one-note personalities that don’t change at all during the game.  The events are predictable and ultimately boring.  With every dungeon conquered a new section of the world appears, filled with the same useless NPCs as before.  The dialogue is dry and does nothing to flesh out the characters or the plot.  I don’t know why Sega bothered to translate the story at all seeing as there is none to speak of.  

The graphics of Time Stalkers feature sharp, colorful environments that vary widely between futuristic platforms to volcanic islands.  Here the game breaks down again because only the environments are pretty to look at.  The characters have an awkward polygon look that could have been much better considering the power of the Dreamcast.  

The worst graphical features are the dungeons where the player will spend the majority of their time.  All the dungeons are basically the same, with long narrow corridors branching into wide rooms.  All are randomly generated.  This would be good for replay value if there were anything different to see in the dungeons.   As it is, after the second dungeon the novelty wears off and the player will find himself or herself wondering why they are playing this game at all.  

Another big problem is the uncontrollable camera in the overworld.  It zooms in and out seemingly at random so that you can never control what and where you are looking at.  This makes navigating outside the dungeons a big chore.  

Fortunately, the sound and music is pretty good - changing for each character. The game also features lots of sound effects during walking and enemy encounters.  Here again, there is not much variety as the music repeats endlessly complementing the boring dungeons.

With plot and graphics in the doldrums, Time Stalkers may have been, at least, a decent dungeon-crawler game.  However, this is where the game really falls apart.  Someone had the bright idea of allowing leveling up to happen only in the dungeons.  Once you step out, the character level goes back to 1.  This makes building-up your characters pointless.  Sure you can gain new spells and titles with dungeon experience but you can’t use them until the character is at a certain level again.   

The battles themselves are standard attack/magic/item/skill mix with little to no strategy involved.  Monsters are laughably easy doing 1 point of damage to your character even near the end floor.  In addition to HP/MP, there is also a vitality statistic that allows you to perform special attack moves which really are no different from standard hacking.  Finally, the character has a hunger meter which when full allows you to search the dungeon area for items or traps.   

The item management system is also a huge pain since you can only take a very limited amount of items into dungeons.   Item storage capacity increases with experience but that means you must find all the items in the dungeon as you go.   Once outside, you have to sell or store any items you find in order to go back into another dungeon.  However, even the storage space for items is limited so you end up selling everything.  This is a big problem because it makes gathering items in the dungeons useless.  

So, the dungeons all look the same so there is no fun in exploring. You can’t keep or do much with the items you find which means its pointless looking for items.  Battles and enemies are boring and offer little challenge.  All together this makes for a very dull game with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  

Sure, there’s also a monster rancher mini-game where you can capture dungeon monsters and have them fight for you.  However, these end up being good only for support since monsters can’t use magic or abilities.   The game designers might as well made it a multi-character party.  It’s unclear to me why they chose to replace the potential ally characters with faceless monsters.  At least there could have been a feature to combine unique abilities between the characters during battles.  

Time Stalkers is a perfect example of what happens when a game is designed without any forethought or planning.   It seems more of a demo for the Dreamcast rather then an actual RPG game in the true sense of the term.  Sega is in big trouble if it keeps bringing out cheap excuses for RPGs like Time Stalkers.   This game will sink into obscurity and deserve it.