Aidyn Chronicles was one of the last games released for the Nintendo 64 and one of the few among its very small library of RPGs. It came out only a month after Paper Mario, though, which probably did it no favors whatsoever. Neither did its presentation, honestly - Aidyn Chronicles is quite possibly the ugliest game on the platform, and if you're familiar with the N64's library, you know that's no small feat. For its part, the gameplay is at least relatively ambitious - an open world RPG with a day-night cycle and with an array of skills reminiscent of computer RPGs like lockpicking, stealth, disarming traps, reading books, identifying items and even armor crafting and alchemy. All of these can be trained up after battle by spending experience points, which act as a spendable currency, and at certain thresholds of total points earned your experience level increases (which mostly determines what enemies will appear as you wander around). Combat operates like a more advanced version of Quest 64 with the same movement-range mechanic, though you do get party members and more options to utilize. Oh, and there's permadeath, too, so if someone dies they're gone for good. There's quite a bit going on mechanically with Aidyn Chronicles, but it's just not a lot of fun to play - the world is rather large but pretty bland, combat is frequent and rarely has much variety, and the overall story is pretty generic, with a lot of drawn-out dialog scenes and not much in the way of memorable characterization. Aidyn Chronicles might be worth a look as a relatively unique take on role playing games for the platform (and in some ways, a much more developed Quest 64), but there's not much reason to spend a lot of time with it; especially since Morrowind - a much better open world skill-driven RPG in virtually every respect - came out the following year.
