After a few dozen hours, you reach the climax, battle evil, marry your girl of choice and have a baby.

However, instead of ending there, the game flash-forward until your son is all grown up and you take control of him, ready to meet new companions, romance new girls and make a new stand against evil.

Agarest lasts for five generations, all working towards a final goal. Items, spells and some companions carry on, and the stats, weapons and looks of each generation's hero are determined by his parents', leading to some interesting long-term planning.

Inexplicably, despite being “five-games-in-one”, the developers decided to pad Agarest's length. Thus, while the events and story battles are interesting, you'll waste an ungodly amount of time in pointless filler fights. Moreover, the game is repetitive and really starts to drag after the 3rd generation. I honestly can't imagine the patience required to replay it multiple times to see all the routes and the secret “true ending”.

In 2009, a prequel, Agarest Zero, was released. It follows the same basic formula but reduces the filler combat and only has two generations. It also added character creation for the first hero and a lot of great post-game content – including an abridged version of the first game that removed all filler and choices.

Agarest 2 arrived in 2010 with better graphics, three generations of heroes and a new, more complex (but confusing) combat system based around combos.

It's hard to pick the best game – the first has the best characters; Zero polishes the gameplay and reduces padding while Agarest 2's fast-paced number-crunching combat might interest more some players.

Regardless, here's some advice: Agarest's DLCs are pay-to-win, so disable all of them except for dungeons and extra costumes. Otherwise, you'll start the game extremely overpowered, ruining all the fun.