By skyforbes It seems like everyone ever talks about when talking about this game is the sanity meter, and how interesting it was as a mechanic within the context of a horror game. Well, I won't deny it is interesting, and a good reason for that is that, when you first experience it, it fills your mind with possibilities. What could happen to me next? How crazy can these effects get? How compromised will I be if I don't watch myself around them?
However, once you have familiarized yourself with the game to a level beyond just reading about it or watching it being played for a few minutes, the mechanic itself is revealed to be extremely thin. It's basically a parlor trick, and once you understand how it works (takes one or two times) then the magic is gone. The individual effects that can happen are cool in isolation and at the right moment they can definitely cause a first time player to have a memorable scare, but something tells me it was never meant to be just that. The game's title and whole story itself revolves around keeping one's mind in the face of insanity. In that sense, and treating the mechanic as core to the experience, it is a failure.
First of all, after a certain point in the game (which might be right at the beginning or a little later, depending on the route you pick) you obtain a spell that can recover your sanity meter. From this point onward, sanity effects become entirely optional. Enemies might lower your sanity, but by the combined effects of finishing them off and this spell, there is no reason why you should ever see a sanity effect for the whole game, save in extremely specific circumstances where you are unable to access your spells for some reason (I don't actually recall if there are any instances of this). You might say hey, magic is limited too, right? Wrong. Magic renerates slowly on its own, while sanity doesn't tick down or up passively. Effectively, you have infinite magic if you just wait around a bit, and the recover sanity spell is plenty cheap anyways. If the sanity effects are optional, then they stop being scary or interesting.
So what does low sanity even do to you? Well, first of all it makes the game's camera slightly crooked. Then, whenever you load into a new area, one of many effects will play. Sometimes your head will explode. Sometimes you will enter the room only to find it's all reversed, or black and white, or generally messed up and not how it's supposed to be. Sometimes you will be very tiny. Sometimes a prompt will come up telling you that your memory card is about to be erased. In each and every one of these cases, all you have to do is wait five seconds, then the room will simply reset to how it's supposed to be. That's it. Then, when you get to 0 sanity, your health will start to tick down slowly. That's the only real downside to having depleted sanity, other than having your time wasted by the sanity effects, and again, entirely optional due to you having a infinitely castable recovery spell that you get at the beginning of the game or very near the beginning in other routes.
It feels like this game's reputation is built entirely around this silly mechanic when in fact it's probably the most poorly implemented mechanic in the game, period. I hardly ever see anyone talk about its fantastic music, its epic-scoped story across time, its very smooth controls (from an era when horror games were notoriously awakward to control), it's interesting (albeit somewhat limited) enemy design, it's very unique spell system, or it's amazing sound design (the game is STACKED with great voice actors too!).
All of these things make the game stand out more, in my opinion, than the sanity effects. So I think it's a game whose legacy is a bit misconstrued. People think it's sanity effects are front and center on the gameplay, when in fact all you want to do in-game is to minimize them as much as possible so you can actually play, and doing so is trivial.