Crystalis has forced or near-forced grinding due to level requirements to hurt bosses, so it’s on the fence. If its progression were a little smoother it would be a shoo-in.

There is a hack to remove boss level requirements but fighting a boss below the intended level may not be fun.

StarTropics on NES. It’s a near-clone of Zelda 1, but harder. I’ve heard some really bad things about how LCD lag and emulator lag affect gameplay, though.

Faxanadu on NES maybe? It’s side-scrolling, but otherwise fits. It does have a level system but leveling doesn’t seem to affect your basic stats.

If side-scrolling works for you, Faxanadu isn’t a million miles away from Castlevania II and the Igavanias, and those are closely related to the Metroid series and newer “Metroidvanias”.

How is OnlyOffice’s offline performance and support for Graphite smart font technology? I use Graphite fonts and no support for those is a deal-breaker.

Font Awesome is a font that uses codepoints in the “Private Use Area” for icons. (The Private Use Area is a chunk of Unicode specifically set aside for any font to put any image they want in there, instead of expecting a certain codepoint to display as a specific letter.)

To the OP: I don’t know much about this, but if you use a different app, does Arch’s Font Awesome show as the colored or B&W version? You might have to try a wide variety of apps due to competing color font standards.

I need local font support far, far more often than I need collaborative editing. Plus, call me old, but I don’t like storing everything on a server in Virginia for Google to read.

Do you have a school computer lab you can use? If the school truly requires MS Office and gives you a copy, they will have no sympathy for not using it.

The link goes to the wrong article. I think OP meant to post https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/07/11/libreoffice-24-2-5/ .

P.S. Torrents aren’t available yet are now available.

Undertale is the obvious suggestion, although it’s more deconstructive than Earthbound.

Did LO discontinue distribution via torrent?

Edit: torrents are now up. Does it always take a day?

Chrono Trigger is around 25 hours for a casual playthrough. Great game with a very fast pace for its genre but it seems way too long for OP.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars might work. It’s going to be difficult (fear the spear) and you’ll want to use those items, but it is overall easier than Chrono Trigger. And it has a remake coming out soon with some system changes.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was intended for your situation, but it’s balanced in all the ways you dislike.

Otherwise, possibly the very easiest remakes of old games like the Final Fantasy 4 Pixel Remaster.

WBridge5 (http://www.wbridge5.com/) is a free award-winning bridge program. It won’t teach you how to play the game, though.

Nothing else reaches the same quality as Chrono Trigger in the same way. You have to settle for lower quality with similar pacing, or try to reach the same level of quality in a different way.

Similar pacing, lower quality: Phantasy Star IV, Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy IV
Comparable quality, different style: Earthbound, Final Fantasy VII (FF6 is the real answer, but FF7 is the most similar game to FF6)
Similar aspects, lower quality: Dragon Quest IV, Radical Dreamers & Chrono Cross, possibly Radiant Historia

Someone I trust said that the Elvish dialogue that they charge extra for is badly pronounced and so garbled that it’s not even intelligible most of the time. Mismanaged?