The Longest Five Minutes review

Publisher: NIS America
Size: 1GB
Players: 1

The Longest Five Minutes is an unashamedly retro RPG from Japan that spins the usual concept on its head, starting with your team facing off against the ultimate nemesis. This means there's no time to build a team, spec them out or choose roles.

Instead, the hero Flash suddenly gets a major dose of amnesia leaving his team floundering in the face of their biggest enemy. To get things back on track, Flash has to remember what led up to these epic scenes.

This sends the party jumping back through time to how they set off one fine day, and the various adventures they undertook to get to the current crisis. Each mini-adventure has no reward-based outcome on the fixed stats of battle at the end, but you can learn what decisions to make in the final battle to beat down the evil lord.

In reality, that means lots of pixel-fun light RPG adventuring with short and longer quests across a bright and fun pixel world linked by a series of boats, trains and bridges spread across the map. This approach means there's no need to care about leveling up, and hitting auto-equip and auto-battle will see you fight quickly and effectively.

Each part of your past has one key objective to meet and a few side quests that you might want to follow up on. In its fast 8-bit style, there's not much to look at, and most characters have a couple of quirky or funny lines to make them worth talking to, but its not exactly a chat-fest.

A basic adventure?

With landscapes and buildings ranging from the modern to classic RPG fodder, the simple pixel design is bright but effective. The pan-pipe led tunes are also charming and expansive, and perhaps the only major annoyance is a lack of signage or detail on the map screen.

The story itself has plenty of humour and little quirks to it, with enemies taking on the form of wherever you happen to be, which is better than generic rats or random creatures that many JRPGs throw at us.

Add in some mini-games and there's a lot to enjoy, but you could easily finish the adventure in under six hours. If you like plain and simple retro adventuring this is a decent effort, but if you a little more dash or verve to your adventuring, then probably better wait for something more menacing.

My main issue is the price at $40/£40, which for a retro light RPG is way overboard. This feels like it is ripping off Switch owners, when there are so many lower-cost and indie games with way much more to do.

Score: 3/5