No this is not a review, I have not played Nestalgia enough to call this a review, I have entered the game and played for a while and felt that I was able to see the general gist of the game and I'll share my impressions:

It's pretty good.

The problem of course with Nestalgia is that it was marketed and hyped as something that would actually bring a new wave of people into BYOND and completely stir up the community and what have you. It is not up to that level, I know everybody would like to see something that lives up to a description like that, BYOND has been moving at a very slow pace in terms of game releases and general excitement and a new wave of interest in the community would have been fantastic.. but this is overly optimistic.

The good:
The game is well done, this is more than a rarity on BYOND. Almost no games ever get to the point in which they feel polished, where the game maker focuses enough on the user interface and story scenes in such a way that the player feels any sort of immersion. Not only is it hard to make a game feel like an actual nintendo era game with a consistent graphic art philosophy applied everywhere (most games hire many hobby artists whose graphic work clashes and is not consistent in terms of quality or style.).

The party system and PvP are solid implementations of a fun multiplayer component into what is supposed to be a tribute to single player Nes games, to have these features on launch day is quite a pleasant surprise, most games procrastinate on PvP support especially until the majority of the playerbase has already lost interest in the game and left. The solid release of a game that has its vital gameplay components all implemented at once is strange to see as the average hobbyist game maker usually likes to rush completed components to the public for the fame and attention and then hype up modular additions such as PvP or extra quests/classes months and months later. Silkwizard deserves props for setting an ambitious scope and implementing them before release.

It is Nostalgic. There is something that made me genuinely interested in the game when I entered the first town, I really felt a lot of good memories of my experience with games like Final Fantasy 4 which was one of my favorite games from my childhood.

Legitimate Criticisms:

The main criticism I have which isn't really a criticism but more of the main reason why I wont be investing a lot of time with Nestalgia is that its general theme and intended product is simply not something I'm interested in. It may sound silly to say this but in my opinion the concept of bringing back nintendo era JRPGs and making it online is extremely limited in what it can accomplish even with the most ambitious of programmers and graphic artists. The issue with the entire gameplay design is that JRPGs actually had the majority of their value in the fast paced story and character progression that isn't particularly compatible with the gameplay philosophies of MMORPGs. You think of a strong JRPG like Final Fantasy 4,FF6, Chrono Trigger and the like and the one thing that really stands out about these games is that they had absolutely phenomenal story, pacing and characters.

Nestalgia lacks on story, pacing and characters for the following reason:

The story is not phenomenal, and it is very difficult to make a story exceptional when the characters that comprise your party are real people. You can't build a story without character growth and involvement, so when you design the game to be online you essentially lose non-player characters altogether. What you have to do under this gameplay philosophy is essentially create a story that any single protagonist can fill.

I didn't feel very strongly for the story itself.. I didn't feel involved in the story as I was thrown in as a hero who was sent back in time with no back-story or interest in doing anything other than getting gold to buy some leather armor. I understand this is a story-telling device to get the tutorial across and that it directs you on into the story by telling you where to go but I didn't really feel immersed because I didn't really.. care about my objective at all. This happens when you simply appear from 4 red balls coming together and are spoken to telepathically by some unknown person to go to X town and talk to X npc.

Credit where it is due though, in terms of hobby game standards the fact that there is any effort to have a main quest and a story is an accomplishment, however when you consider that the game is trying to bring the love back from years of playing Nintendo and SNES JRPG then you sort of have an expectation that the story will be somewhere in the ballpark of those games, in this case the story was a very weak point for me.

Combat and grinding. Out of all the reasons that certain people will not play this game is simply that the combat is boring. You have skills and you have attack and you have items, in the name of nostalgia the game did not attempt to really innovate anything for combat and unfortunately because the story wasn't particularly compelling the game ends up feeling like an 8 bit MMORPG where you run back and forth on hostile terrain until you run into a blob, you wait your time between attacks and collect your very small experience and gold bounty. The online and PvP focus has really caused the gameplay to go on a tangent into party based creature grinding for the majority. People say that if you join a party then it isn't really grinding, but I don't really see the strength in that argument. Any time you are fighting the same opponents predictably over and over again whether it be by yourself or in a stacked team, you're grinding. Now here's the thing about that, there is this HUGE audience of people who like grinding, they are very happy having a short and a long term objective and just spending hours doing their repetitive tasks and then leveling up and moving on and socializing and what have you. These people will play this game, and they will like it a lot. There's also nothing wrong with being one of these people or having a game that appeals to these people, however for people like me who really never had an interest in MMORPGs and was hoping to see more qualities of the Nintendo RPGs of my youth, well, we will be disappointed.

I basically expected this to be the case, and its unfortunate that this isn't my type of game. Still If every game on BYOND set up an idea that they wanted to achieve and put the same effort/polish/promotion that this game had then we would have a very successful community of presentable projects. At very least a release like this should serve as an example of how to release a game and to put a focus on presentation instead of just trying to implement a bunch of half arsed features which mesh poorly with the rest of the game (a big issue with many projects on BYOND).

So Kudos, hopefully we see some new interesting projects in the upcoming months.