On a positive note, Hand of the Heavenly Bride’s graphics are bright, vibrant and colourful with an almost welcoming aspect. There’s also an attempt made at humour in the writing which does make things slightly easier, especially with the mountain of text you’ll need to click through as the game progresses. One of the more entertaining of HotHB’s characters is a small Spanish man named Sancho, a lively, rotund little fella who acts as Pankrez’s assistant. But the real reason he’s so cheerfully funny is his uncanny resemblance to that of Liverpool FC coach Rafa Benitez, complete with his bumbling attempts at English and chiselled facial hair. The rotatable camera is also far more impressive than it should be, helping to remind you that this is a game released in 2009 and not nigh-on two decades ago.

As always, the most frustrating aspects of these types of releases can be the random battles. It’s a topic that splits RPG fans right down the middle, but when they are incorporated in such a lazy fashion as they are here, it’s a struggle to see the fun in them. While you can spend hard earned money on potions to top yourself up in preparation for a boss battle, the countless increasingly annoying out-of-the-blue contests you face will more than likely ensure that you stumble into the big occasion with both health and magic depleted.

And, though a genre staple for many a year, the lack of any indication of an enemy’s HP also seems an odd oversight. As the genre has evolved there’s been a variety of ways created to show this essential statistic, but unfortunately not here, and battles soon turn into a guessing game that has you desperately trying to work out what rank an opponent is and the damage they can do.

And there falls another problem. A single enemy’s attacks seem to be generated by a schizophrenic calculator; spitting out random numbers as it goes along. In one particular fight the same move jumped from dealing out eleven points of damage to fifty-five in the next wave. There didn’t seem to be any reason for this and, rather frustratingly, it killed off our character, forcing a restart and instigating another interest-sapping mission back through the random battles and set-pieces.

Hand of the Heavenly Bride is a solid, old-school adventure with the same problems and delights that any title from the period has. If you’re a supporter of the series or just a sucker for this type of action, then you probably won’t be disappointed. But for the rest of you, HotHB does nothing that will change your stubborn opinions.

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