Jade Cocoon is best described as a next-gen Final Fantasy set entirely within Legend of Legaia and trimmed where necessary. It's short, lush, and extremely scant on actual gameplay.

Jade Cocoon really shines in terms of backstory, and a good deal of its characters are genuinely human (in part due to the extraordinary amount of spoken dialog in the game), but its plot is a confused (and confusing) effort to take advantage of the interesting setting.

Jade Cocoon is unique in its method of exposition: its hero is an incredibly low-key player in the flow of events. Being totally mute, he is a lesser character than any other in the game (keeping in mind that constantly changing conversational banter makes up a huge part of the plot).

The world surrounding the tiny forest village is full of mystique, and it eventually drowns the game. The jungle disgorges a swarm of Onibubu - Locusts of the Apocalypse - which put many of the townsfolk into magical sleep. With the town's cocoon master missing in search of a greater truth, presumed dead, his young son, Levant, is summarily promoted, wed, and dispatched into the forest to find a cure.

However, the plot soon tackles deep philosophical topics - reincarnation, original sin, man's destiny and God's wrath - and becomes too abstruse and meandering to engage the player.

Interestingly enough, no matter what kidney stone the plot is currently passing, Levant's mission is exactly the same: he must plow through dungeon after dungeon, where he engages in a token form of gameplay.

All gameplay in Jade Cocoon can be roughly divided into two parts: combat and breeding. However, both aspects are so limited that even trivial flaws cripple them severely.

Breeding is the more interesting of the two. Levant, being a cocoon master, has the ability to trap supernatural forest creatures - minions - in cocoons, while his sorceress-wife can "purify" them so the can be summoned in combat. Furthermore, any two purified minions can be combined into one - which, stat-wise, is their mathematical average.

The real challenge is breeding a minion with all the best special attacks. However this task is virtually impossible for two reasons: a: all magic is useless; and b: ensuring that the proper special attacks are passed on to the offspring is an extremely chancy business: the player must keep track of the available slots, the attack's and the minion's elementality, and various bonuses.

If you get tired, minions can be spun into salable silk, but the husbandry is nevertheless a chore more often than not.

The battle system is turn-based and extremely simple. Levant (or one of his minions) squares off against the opponents, with the usual options of running, attacking, magic and item use, defending, and changing the active combatant. Unfortunately, winning is usually a matter of getting out a minion of the proper element fire beats water, which beats earth, which, in turn, beats air, which beats fire) and attacking long enough.

Defending is absurd, since it only reduces the damage, and, in any case, only one combatant can be active at a time - and a minion can't heal itself since they cannot use items. A lot of the magic is useless, and a number of other special attacks are either trivial (HP Absorb) or unreliable (Critical).

Commands execute very slowly, and the turgid battle music does not fit at all. Whereas minions handle the bulk of combat, weapons and equipment can only be purchased for Levant, who never much gains in statistics, only increasing in his "capture" ability. And while the minions supposedly evolve as they go up in levels, this metamorphosis is extremely gradual, and isn't even complete by the game's end (though there is an option to continue playing past the end in an endless dungeon).

Graphically, Jade Cocoon is without peer in its general timeframe. The prerendered backgrounds are absolutely stunning, and what few FMVs there are (the opening and closing anime, and the smattering of narrated legends throughout the game) are very fluid and artful.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the minions, which look drab and animate poorly. Disappointingly, a good deal of the base stock minions are palette (element)-swapped versions of each other (weirdly enough, the same is true about a lot of the later dungeons). The game offers an option to save and pit minions against each other, but who would bother?

It's theoretically possible to avoid the random battles, but the control is extremely loose. The right and the left are relative to the on-screen character as opposed to the player. Almost all dungeons are mind-bogglingly labyrinthine, forcing the player to draw maps, unless he likes to get lost, thoroughly and consistently. Furthermore, a number of paths are obscured by vegetation, and the items are barely visible and very hard to find.

While there is a lot of spoken dialog, and it is reasonably well-acted, the actual music ranges from nature sounds to tribal rhythms, and not all of it is palatable. Sound effects, on the other hand, are crisp - the sound of drawn blades and the trumpeting minions being especially dramatic.

Ultimately, this is great art, but horrible entertainment.