Ever since Square resurrected the RPG with Final Fantasy VII, the RPG genre has become the Holy Grail of system sellers overnight. Climax Landers (which will be called Time Stalker in the U.S.) is Sega's first real attempt to get an RPG on the system, but the game fails in just about every way imaginable--even after numerous delays. Sent to explore an old clock tower, our hero Sword stumbles on a mysterious book. Upon opening the book, Sword and the surrounding terrain are yanked from the world and attached to a magical, floating continent inhabited by several other such outcasts. The master of this strange world immediately labels Sword a "hero" and sends him on a quest to unite the other heroes, defeat a great evil, and return everyone to their respective worlds. The story is traditional RPG fare--the kind of average ideas we've grown to accept and even like. Every other aspect of the game, however, falls far short of average. Free advice to all you budding game developers out there: If you're ever going to make a game that has high hopes of success, please be sure you understand why people like that type of game in the first place. While the story of Climax Landers is passable enough, its contradictory dungeon, battle, and experience systems undermine any chance the game has at being enjoyable. Climax Landers, like Sting's Evolution, takes a development shortcut and substitutes randomly generated dungeons for actual map design. As a result, all story development must take place in the town, turning the dungeons into endless battle sequences. If Climax Landers offered battles that were actually fun, this wouldn't be a problem. The battle system is as stale as humanly imaginable and even sinks to include ancient interface issues that RPGs had supposedly long forgotten. You can only have one of the main characters at a time in your party, which essentially translates to having only one useful character in your party.