Time Stalkers (also known as Climax Landers) has been on my radar for a long time, mostly by virtue of it being a Dreamcast RPG that’s available in English that isn’t one of the more popular few, like Skies of Arcadia or Grandia 2. There aren’t many of those around (but it seems like there are people working on translating SEGAGAGA and El Dorado Gate, which is exciting)! Another point of interest is that it’s a crossover game, featuring characters from a bunch of Climax’s earlier games, like Landstalker and Shining in the Darkness.

Oddly, this wasn’t used as a selling point when it was originally released (at least, it wasn’t in English-speaking places. Maybe it was in Japan?), and as hard as I’ve tried to find one, it seems that no-one (again, in the English-speaking world) has cared enough to list all of the characters and the games they’re originally from. And unfortunately, I’ll have to pass that disappointment forward: I probably could, with an hour or two of research, be able to place all the characters and their source games together, Time Stalkers just isn’t a good enough game to be worth that much effort.

The plot is pretty generic crossover stuff, withfragments of different worlds all being drawn into some new pocket dimension by a mysterious force. An old man designates someone from each realm as a hero, giving them the ability to enter dungeons. The dungeons are procedurally generated, and you have a hunger meter that goes down as you explore them, like in a roguelike. But the combat is pretty generic turn-based RPG combat, but slower. It’s so slow and so pointless and such a big part of the game. You’ll dread missing an attack (which happens a lot in this game) not becuse you’re scared of the enemy getting another chance to kill you (they mostly only deal a single point of damage), but because it means the battle will drag on for another slow, labourious turn.

There’s other roguelike stuff in here, too, like how you return to level one every time you enter a dungeon. Which wouldn’t be a problem in an actual roguelike, because they’re all about learning how each enemy works, how to position yourself, how to use items effectively and so on. But Time Stalkers is all about getting through so many identical fights where you and the enemies slowly trade hits back and forth until somebody’s dead. you could theoretically just run past the enemies and avoid entering battle, but every dungeon ends with a boss who’s significantly more of a threat than the entire rest of the dungeon’s enemies put together, and if you don’t grind, you’ll stand no chance against them. You do, at least, get to keep your equipment between runs, so you’re not completely back to nothing every time, I guess.

There’s also a mechanic whereby you can capture enemies and use them as party members, but since they’re all so weak, it seems kind of pointless, unless you want to partake in even more grinding. The one kind thing I can think of to say about this game is that it looks kind of charming in that specific "low-poly models with high resolution textures" way a lot of low budget third party Dreamcast games are. Sometimes it’s actually really ugly, but there’s also plenty of times where the camera’s at just the right angle to make it look kind of cool. Still, it’s not enough to make suffering through the game worth your while. I hated Time Stalkers more with every additional minute I spent with it (I played for about four or five hours, up until the end of the third dungeon. Some of that time was spent running circles around the tiny overworld, desperately trying to find the next person I had to talk to to advance the story), and it definitely doesn’t carry my recommendation.