It's a good game, I think, though of course the chapters vary in quality. The Present Day chapter is fun, but feels especially half-baked next to the Edo Japan or Near Future, for instance. Still, the different structures and pacing of each make for a solid ebb-and-flow if you don't do something bone-headed like me and bunch all of the shorter ones together back-to-back. It's easy to see how Takashi Tokita took lessons he learned from this game and worked on Chrono Trigger, which is immaculately paced from start to finish.
Grinding to fight the superbosses was tedious as hell though, as JRPGs are wont to do. They changed the terrain tile regeneration formula and so now the 3x3 size Mammoth King is going to regenerate 24 hp per tile it's on, rather than a flat 24. Truly hellish.
One major mechanical change that I didn't expect was that everyone gets to keep all of their equipment (not consumables, alas) heading into the final chapter rather than simply what they had equipped. This means the crafting mechanics in Prehistory and Near Future are way more important than they used to be, and I sure as hell would have kept my robot upgrade items if I'd known.
It's obviously been a long time since I played the Aeon Genesis fan translation of the original, so I went back and skimmed through a Let's Play of that after finishing the remake to compare. Not being as bound to SNES character limits and having a ton of VO helps the script a lot. Everything is still super cliché (on purpose) but now they can really lean into it. A few characters fall flat - Matsu's English track just can't hit the right kind of gruff delinquent growl the JP version does - but on the whole the Remake can squeeze just a tad more nuance into any given line, and it really adds up, especially towards the end. "Steel Titan" is still a remarkably dry way to localize "Buriki Daioh", though. Like come on, even in the 60s they knew to turn "Tetsujin 28" into "Gigantor".
Speaking of, great soundtrack update. I got hyped as hell any time Megalomania kicked in right before a boss battle, and getting Hironobu Kageyama to sing the Buriki Daioh OP is just perfect.
