The Longest Five Minutes

This role-playing game has a clever game premise, but the disjointed nature of the gameplay and overpowered characters make this only playable and fun in small doses. If your life were to flash before your eyes, what would the highlights be? Which moments would be the ones that changed the course of your life? That's the premise behind The Longest Five Minutes, only in this case, those flashbacks also hold the key to saving the world. It's a unique concept, both from a story and a gameplay perspective. By breaking things up into key memories, players wind up with a sort of anthology of shorter adventures, seeking out the common threads that connect them. It also means that players get a series of fresh starts with each memory, opening up more freedom to use items, gold, gear, etc. The game also doesn't take itself too seriously. Each memory is filled with its own tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, though more than a few of the jokes fall a bit flat after a while. For example, there's one sequence in which the player's party has a goal of spying on a group of females taking a bath. This goes on a bit too long and starts to feel a little uncomfortable. In fact, there are a number of odd bits like this that just feel a bit off and disconnected from other parts of the adventure.

While it's easy to appreciate the old-school look and feel of The Longest Five Minutes, the game simply doesn't offer much challenge. Combat is about as basic as it comes, and the player's party usually starts out overpowered in comparison to the monstrous minions. After a while, it all starts to feel a bit monotonous. Thankfully, this is broken up a bit by some of the mini-games scattered throughout the adventure, most of which are actually more entertaining and challenging than the main combat. All in all, the game isn't necessarily bad, and there's some fun to be had in its bite-sized chunks. It's just a little disappointing that the game has so much potential but seems to come up short of ever realizing it.