The Longest Five Minutes Reviews

Ok lets make something clear: If you are looking at this review and then considering the game at full price - change my thumbs up to a thumbs down. The Longest Five Minutes is a unique rpg. There are two parts to it: the final battle, which is how the game starts (figure that one out), and the flashbacks that tell the story of getting there. But this game isn't your standard RPG. it is more like a Rogue-like RPG in a way. Each new flashback resets your money and gear. In addition the game is pretty easy....as you always feel overpoweredy. So even being Rogue-like (sorta), you can still just steamroll through the opposition. So if you demand a challenge..start hunting elsewhere. But even as easy and weird as it is...it is still pretty fun. The style is top quality. It reminds me of good old rpgs like Dragon Warrior in its style..but still with an anime/cartoon style turned up that adds to its flavor. So if you can handle losing gear you buy, and ok with no challenge....add it to your wishlist. I wouldn't pay $20 for it, but if it gets to like $2....it is worth it to slam through the game....just to see how the two style work together.

I really like this JRPG, despite it having good parts and bad parts. The title concept of the protagonist Flash struggling to recover his memories of who he is, who his friends are, what his quest is and most importantly, how to use his ultimate attack... it's an interesting concept, even if it's just a vehicle for playing through a set of standard JRPG overworld sections/dungeons chopped up into 15 to 20 minute sessions regarding Flash's (roughly) chronological story of becoming a hero. The story is a fairly generic 'save the world from darkness' JRPG plot, but the characters are sympathetic enough for me to want to root for them to succeed when you already know that they're probably going to succeed either way because they're JRPG heroes. There are some funny, lighthearted moments related to the dialouge depending on some of the prompts you can prompt Flash to choose in the RPG sections, but there are some shocking (non-canonical?) moments where really bad things can happen depending on what choices you have Flash pick during the fight with the Overlord. Gameplay is split between Flash, Yuzu, Regent and Clover doing their best in present time to deal with the Overlord's overwhelming firepower and generic evil monologues, and then Flash cutting to a flashback to reveal a retroactive plot detail that is immediately used to save a party member's bacon. This continues for a bit while playing through flashbacks that flesh out the strong childhood bonds between the four party members (Flash the standard noble young man JRPG protagonist, Yuzu the martial arts tomboy, Regent the reluctant mage son who wants to be a rock star, and Clover the shy and gentle healer/priest/cleric), plus three of their friends (Chloe the researcher, Yanagi the merchant, and Kogure the cowardly ninja). The thing is, there's this big twist partway through where there is a sudden dramatic reveal of who Flash has really been fighting since the battle began, and the connection they both have to a new character who suddenly shows up in preparation of making a heroic sacrifice. As twists go, it's difficult to say it was a good twist or a bad twist, but it was interesting and it fits with the main theme of the game, something that SYUPRO-DX does a lot in their Japanese-exclusive mobile games: "You only get sad when you have memories." The game has three major endings, one is a short blurb, the second is bittersweet, and the third is a golden ending where Flash saves all of his friends, and they all celebrate and go home together to live happily ever after (the third ending is easier to get than the second ending). There are lots of optional achievements you can get, and they can be a bit tedious depending on how dedicated you are to getting achievements involving pixel square hunts.

this is a hard game to review its overall mid but im recommending it because i have nostalgia for it probably theres a lot of issues with pacing because of the unique flashbacks based story format, but i think that its a fun little story and is neat to play the auto runner minigame can screw itself though lol

Great game, made 14 hours of fun over the weekend for me. I'm shocked about how little coverage this game has gotten, as I was left with a lingering taste for more content about the game, but there's just a couple reviews and not even a wiki. In defense of The Longest Five Minutes, I wanna say that i get where the negative reviews come from, as i have felt the same, but the cons didn't spoil the experience for me, as I was so invested in the pros, so let me start with them: Pros: ------------------- - Great story, as good as you could expect a short JRPG to have. The characters are all unique and have great development, even those you'd think would get none because they weren't part of the main roster. The story seems straightforward, but it has just enough twists to keep you playing for more. I got invested in the character's fates before I knew it, and just had to see their story to the end. - Great graphics, in the style they are presented. Being used to retro JRPGs, the graphics all seem so fresh, and you can feel that each sprite and each animation are way livelier than you'd expect this old style to be. In a way, the character sprites remind me of Tales of Phantasia, that express many emotions as a core storytelling device. The fresher graphics (spell effects and such) also seem to fit the context perfectly, and never felt out of place. The close-up pixel sprites are also pretty cool - Ok dungeons: Each dungeon has a unique gimmick to them that explore some JRPG tropes mechanics, from sliding ice floor to pokémon's rock pushing puzzles. In that respect, each dungeon offers just a little bit more than just your regular walk'n grind Cons: -------------------- - Bad combat. Probably the one thing all negative reviews (and mine) agree upon: The combat system is shallow and, eventually, becomes a chore you'll just want to skip with permanent repel. At first, you can just win all battles by just spamming attack but, by the time I caught up with that, i had grinded enough and just avoided all uninsteresting random encouters, fighting only the bosses. The battle system follows an earthbound-like style and flow, and has lots of spells and effects but, as each flashback is short and spells are learned so fast, the the player will only learn what all of them do if they experiment by themselves (All stats up is very OP, BTW) - Unusual leveling system. Another of the games' huge flaws, this only has to do with players expectations. We go into the game expecting a normal JRPG progression because its advertised as a JRPG game, but its very far from true. All your progress (loot and gold) are contained in each flashback and don't carry over to the next, so we go expecting our grinds to be relevant, but they have almost zero impact. The only progress the player gets to keep is experience, that gives the player some bonus stats throughout the game. The game's difficulty is set as such the player can complete the game with ZERO grinding and, as such, feels very easy to players that are expecting a normal JRPG experience. When I realized that I could just cruise through the game, I could focus on the story and stop exploring every nook and cranny of every dungeon Mixed: ----------------- - The game offers very little challenge compared to a normal JRPG, and is more suited for a casual playthrough rather than a grindfest. Breezing through the game seemed disappointing at first, but then it got relaxing as I lowered my expectations and accepted that I didn't have to grind (love/hate relationship, i guess) - The game makes you care about the choices you make but, in the end, they don't REALLY matter, as all paths end up converging to the same finale. There still are multiple endings, but you don't have to fret up about choices you regret making, unless you really want to see all possibilities and dialogues the game has to offer. - The finale plot twist at first seemed condescending to the player, as it comes out of nowhere but, as the story is driven by remembering lost memories, swallowing the twist isn't as bad when you accept its role as a plot device that was there all along. The game's price is a little bit daunting, but it is justified, as the game's OST and art are very well made, and must have had many talented artists working on it. Overall, I got it on sale and it was worth every penny. but I would advise anyone to think twice if it really floats your boat before buying it at full price. I hope this review is helpful in that sense. Personally, I really liked the game, and i hope to see it getting some more love in the future :)

The Longest Five Minutes starts with a final boss, and then flashes back to many points on the journey since the main character seemingly has sudden amnesia. The characters were alright, if a bit rushed, and I think that this had a lot of potential. While I thought the idea of this game was pretty neat. the execution falls flat on its face. You can autobattle literally every fight in the game except the final boss, and that leads to dragging empty gameplay for 99% of the game. I noticed that a lot of overworld stuff was ripped from early Dragon Quest/Warrior game as well. I can't recommend this game because of its utter lack of gameplay.

This is a game that I really thought I would enjoy. I really enjoy the theme of the game, Hero at the end of a journey suddenly has amnesia and you explore all the events that let you there. It gave me To the Moon vibes, which I really enjoyed. And let's be honest. A good story can often beat out poor game mechanics. So this game is more accurately a mix of visual novel with very light and useless rpg elements. The actual "fight" with the darklord is told In a visual novel fashion. And honestly, if the whole game was just that. I think it would have worked for the better. Because the rpg sections are just kind of pointless. 100% they are made to hit on 8bit nostalgia and initially that does work for me. They eliminate grind by making your level appropriate for that story section, but also any "reexperience" earned gives you bonus stats on top of your "true" level for that segment. Which on paper, is a neat mechanic, but also doesn't matter. None of the rpg segments are difficult. The enemies are usually easily killed. The only way you will die is just from the sheer amount of random encounters. That is a mechanic from old school rpgs, that they could have done without. In later segments you are given the "repel" spell which eliminates encounters. You should use it all the time because between the encounter rate and the size of dungeons, there is so much bloat. So ultimately you have these short story segments which are fun, but then this long slog of filler battles to have an easy boss fight. Without all the random encounters, the game is only a few hours long of story. Some will complain about the ending, but I think it's the least of the games problems. Also one final note, I had an issue at 3:59 where the game kept freezing. I opted to put the text advance to auto and that either fixed it, or I did it enough times that I finally got through without it crashing. Again. I really think the concept was interesting, but the execution really needed some work.

For 4 bucks? Definitely worth it. The game is overshadowed by the outrageous price it was when it came out, but the game is amazing if you ignore it. Story and characters were well done, very interesting plot that was never before seen in any other rpg game. REMEMBER!!!!

This 5 minutes felt like 50 hours... oh wait.. it IS 50 hours.... it's a NIS game afterall, no way it can be short... lol! The Longest Five Minutes is a RPG (Visual Novel?) that does the anti-grind concept in the game but still give you the grinding tools, causing the players to end up in a dilemma. The concept is probably to teach the players (especially MMO players?) how much time we have wasted on useless grinding and how hollow it feels when the game goes reset and all those hard work gone poof. This game is definitely designed on "I dare you to go side track and grind!" type of weird mentality. So, yeah! Don't grind, it's a trap! You can play through the whole game using auto battle and easily finish the game without grinding at all! Stick to the story line! The game play goes in between 2 modes, the RPG mode and the VN (Visual Novel) mode. While we get to control the characters and move around, with rpg turn based battle encounters and all that in the RPG mode, and fully text and visual based play during the VN mode. Basically this is a story teller that uses the rpg mechanism as a story telling tool, but added that reset/adjustment part so your level gets adjusted along with the story progress, grinding higher than the next chapter will reset and lower your level to the "correct level" for next chapter, those who didn't grind auto gets the level up. So, based on that weird reset/adjust behavior. This is basically just a Visual Novel like those rpg styled visual novel back in NEC-PC88 era (Proto-RPG era before the JRPG genre is stabilized). Something we don't see a lot nowadays since the "visual Novel" has taken the format of the gal-games style with just character bust and dialog text, and that has become the staple design for the Visual Novel genre after that. But that doesn't means devs can't go old school and use the proto-rpg design again. And for The Longest Five Minutes, this just happened to be the case, and that unnecessary exp grind they didn't take away from the game is probably there to mock on the rpg grind lover imo. We don't have to do that at all and auto battle can get us through the whole game's battle part. Even the items we collected in the game that is none story related will be taken away and reset/adjust on the next chapter. Yeah, the game is a trap for exp grinder and perfectionist with hoarding disorder. Like a proper visual novel, we get [b]tons[/b] of choices in the story part of the game (no joke, there are tons of choices and quite a lot of routes in the game, so much that you need a few replay to see them all). But all the choices in the RPG part of the game are already made for us, we can't change any of that, nor can we change the order we do stuffs in the game. So don't waste time exploring the world map either, even those towns seems reachable you will always be blocked by a sleeping soldier when you tried to reach them and had to walk all the way back to where you started empty handed (and disappointed). So just stick the story and made your choices during the story, and do minimum explore and head straight to the next town the story told you to, and you will probably enjoy this game more. The game WILL try its best to waste our time when we are not doing what the game want. Level up, winning a fight you are not supposed to win, hoarding items.. all these will become a waste of effort. So my advice for those who plan to play this game is just sit back and enjoy the long long story by ignoring the basic level grind of normal jrpg nowadays, and maybe a few replay from load or fresh to get all the story routes done, it's worth it for story lover and without the grind it's actually pretty enjoyable. For the story, the story itself is pretty much the classic rpg adventure of departing from a village up to killing the overlord. But the "order" of the story being shuffled and the "plot" they used to tell the story is unique and fun. Using the "flashback" story telling patern that lets the players do time skip/travel back to the past to learn what happened (with a special twist near the end that might put your mouth in an O shape). It came with hilarious choices given to the players to make which we normally wouldn't get in a normal "right and justice rpg's story". Yet this is still the basic adventure story we normally get in a "Shounen Manga". If you are these type of story lover, you will probably agree that this game's story is good enough to be made into an Anime series though you probably have seen similar stories somewhere... And from this game we can really see how contents creators nowadays are squeezing their brain juice to keep what's been done a gazillion times looks fresh and unique again. Not only in this game, we can see this trend in Anime around this time line as well, trying to use a different perspective to tell what happened to be a "been there done that" story. The trend is probably caused by the "golden marketing age" for these contents are always "getting older" with older gamers/otakus growing old in age. (kids don't have buying power + their population is unexpectedly "far" lower than the mid-age group in developed country, so that makes them a smaller market in Japan and the creators continue to pleased the existing audience which are all growing older and older). And also the reason why MMO jumped and focus on the developing countries and seeing them as a huge potential market, where there are more (illiterate) youngsters for their gaming demands, but uhh, that's a different story to tell and not related to this game i guess... Because of the long story and quite a lot of places to visit in this game, there are more than 400+ BGMs in the game, which makes the OST collection a pretty large one too! If you buy the DLC soundtrack, they even throw in another CD filled with OST from other games Shupro-DX has made. Quite worth the price for those who loved digital music from old school rpg imo. So about, recommendation... If you are a visual novel lover, or even a walking simulator lover, you will love this game, it's more balanced on story telling than action (unless you try to break free and go your way, which the game allows it, but will take away your effort by resetting everything you did as the story progress). *don't let the devil voice gets the better of you! you don't have to do it!* If you are a story based/story rich point and click adventure games lover that doesn't like grind, this is definitely the game for you. This game's story is on par with triple A class games/anime. Although not voiced, it's backed with over 400+ BGMs... so yeah... you can be sure to have a good experience with the story part. *make sure to get some tissue papers ready!* If you are one of those players that only want one game to be played for their whole/entire life (aka endless grinding), this isn't the game for you, it will try to teach you that your way is wrong. And i guess that isn't what you want to hear, and will definitely ended up giving this a thumbs down. So, if you read this, don't waste your time on this game and go find yourself a grindy Chinese/Korean made MMO game and grind all your time (life) away as you see fit. You will probably find more friends there too! Only a masochist understands another masochist. *big grin* If you are someone with hoarding disorder (often the perfectionist). This game is gonna do what you don't like most, it takes away the items in your hoard on the start of every chapter. So i can't really recommend this game to dragons or my furry rodent friends, seeing their life's goal is to fill up their hoard... *gimme back my item hoards!! T^T* For me, the story itself is good enough to cover any flaws the game threw at me. Really enjoyed the story telling part so a big thumbs up from me.

If you think about it, Memento was a straightforward crime story, don't you think? The whole game happens in the last five minutes of your quest. The longest five minutes in your life. A deliberately nostalgic JRPG reminiscing of old 16 bit games, with one twist. You start the game at the final battle, but you have amnesia. The game is separated into two, the non chronological memory trip where you try to remember how you ended up there, and the fight against the demon king where choices you made in the past and in the present would affect how the fight goes. If you enjoy classic jrpg, you'd definitely enjoy this, but if you dislike old-timey 16 bit jrpg, you could give this a pass, since even with the twist it IS an old-timey 16 bit jrpg. Don't expect an actual old-timey jrpg though. It's short, and barely have any difficulty. You can breeze through most of the game with just auto attack. Think of it as more as a summary of an old jrpg that you never played, a nostalgia for memory that never happened... Hint: use your repel spell.

Let me preface this by saying that the core concept of the game appeals to me, and I don't just mean the idea of going through a JRPG in a disjointed format: The idea of making each flashback essentially its own single-dungeon long min-JRPG to tell the story of a considerably longer JRPG is something that appealed to me. They were clearly trying to focus on the dungeon crawling portion of a JRPG while minimizing the actual *grind* portion. Since you can't carry stuff over, that random loot you pick up in a dungeon is more meaningful: It would be a pain to grind for enough money to get the latest equipment, so that stuff you find in a dungeon, that new tier of armor, is actually relevant. Except their attempt to fend off the grind actually hurt them quite a bit in the design stage. So, you will never need to grind in this game. Not for levels, not for equipment, not for money. Every Flashback starts you off with everything you'll need to clear the stage with a little bit of difficulty -- assuming you aren't getting like 20 extra levels worth of stat boosts, which you probably are. Meanwhile, while towards the start of the game those chests are meaningful, by the time you get roughly halfway through the game, most of the time you open up a chest and get armor that's a tier lower than what the team already has. [b]They frequently start you off with equipment far better than you'll actually find in the dungeons[/b], which ends up meaning that even with the game having complete control of your equipment, most of the stuff you find in dungeons is [i]still[/i] little more than vendor trash. I suppose you could return to town to sell them so you can buy the next tier of armor, but that's also pointless: As mentioned before, the game's already given you everything you need to clear the thing, so why bother? And thus the dungeon crawling and monster fights turn into a chore: You already have way more levels than you'll ever need, your equipment will always be sufficient even if you don't touch stores at all, and the dungeons give you little more than vendor trash, leaving the elaborate dungeon setups as little more than mazes that slow your progress, since you're probably constantly casting repel so that you're not stuck wasting all your time in pointless monster fights. With all this said, it's pretty clear that the mechanics as they are now is incredibly flawed. But let's talk about the other thing. Surely being able to flashback to several points in the story means that you'll have to go through the entire thing in an unusual order, right? Actually, no. For the most part, the game's pretty linear for the most part. There are a few points where they jump ahead, before returning to the previous spot we were shown, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, it's pretty linear, so it feels like they didn't even deliver on the game's gimmick concept. As for the plot itself, it is indeed pretty standard JRPG fare -- whether you consider that a good thing or a bad thing is up to you. Perhaps the biggest thing to note however, is that when taken as a whole, the game's plot seems to be split into two distinct segments, with the majority of the game in the first segment, and a second segment for the finale (roughly the last "minute" of the boss battle). While the first part at the very least [i]feels[/i] reactive, the second part ends up feeling less like you're a participant and more like you're being forced to watch someone else's carefully devised plot and suddenly it feels like everything you did in the first part was completely meaningless, because... As far as the game's concerned, it was. Further explanation veers into spoilers, so please try and ignore the upcoming black bars. [spoiler]The game's final minute introduces two previously unmentioned characters, and immediately establishes them as pivotal to the plot. What, you're not invested in characters we just made appear [b]now that the game's almost over?[/b] Here, have a bunch of arbitrary flashbacks to show why you should care about them. You don't even have gameplay during these, not really. You just have flashback after flashback of "you should care about these characters", and I can't help but feel that I might have cared about them if these flashbacks weren't all offloaded onto me [i]during the finale[/i]. By the time they're finally revealed in the plot, you basically have no time to be invested in them, but they are constantly pushed as The Characters You Should Care Most About. You can't seriously expect us to be invested in a rival and love interest that literally aren't even mentioned until the end of the game, can you?[/spoiler] [spoiler]I might just be a bit bitter that the constant shiptease with Clover was arbruptly dropped because of course the protagonist's one true love is this character that wasn't even mentioned before now, though.[/spoiler] Fourth minute stuff aside, I did actually enjoy this game. I mean, I actually finished it, which is a good indicator that I was actually pretty invested in it and cared enough to play it to the end. That being said, looking at it from an analytical standpoint, I absolutely can't recommend this game to people, especially at its current price tag.