Hooray! I managed to get another RPG done for the year, against the odds that my day job and my other commitments would prevent me from doing another RPG. I had this one on the backburner for a long while, having finished up stuff for Doomwiki in short order and I never managed to touch this game until about the summer or so. In any case, a game with a titular protagonist in the Playstation era that certainly combines the turn-based RPG and horror genres quite well, and also manages to be the predecessor to the Shadow Hearts franchise.
So, this is a peculiar game no matter how I look at it. Four discs, but it's not necessarily a long game. I think the four discs are there cause of all the cutscenes and FMVs, which are quite a highlight for the game as a whole. Music is interesting but it only really shows up during battles, and the setting is an old manor where our three protagonists go into for different reasons and is crawling with nightmare fuel. The navigation may perplex people with what to do or where to go, kinda like a cinematic platformer or something, so a guide may be necessary. Especially with all the items on the floor and the key items necessary to beat the whole game.
But the main meat has to be the battles and this one is full of ups and downs. The interface is thankfully simple enough, grid-based movement and turns to use, you get various weapons that can hit at a range or with melee attacks, plus the magic spells are universal for all characters and do more damage based on range. Plus leveling magic. And leveling up stats with bonus points. Which is delightful in its own right. Grinding was a thing I decided to do, though it really isn't as necessary as I thought originally. Enemies don't really get names which makes identifying them impossible, and they have their own stats and abilities I'm sure. The two things I don't like about the battle system though are the overall pacing and weapons breaking. The latter is a major issue due to the fact that weapons, along with armor, accessories, and most items, are usually random drops from enemies after a battle. Every weapon that isn't the bare hands will break after some predetermined number of uses (I checked to make sure they weren't just random). This makes grinding up weapon levels a huge pain. There's some attributes to weapons too, which are possible to savescum because some attributes like Light are actually useless. However, it makes using weapons, particularly with Edward, the overall best physical attacker, difficult. And then you have the overall pacing of the battles. Spell animations are long, the loading times between world-and-battle are also long, and some enemy movements, attack animations, or even defeat animations are quite long. Even regular battles just take a long time to get through due to this. I don't expect them to be short but it's a valid complaint because it is longer than most other RPGs, and heaven help you if you don't have your plugins set up correctly.
The story is quite nice. Again, three strangers end up teaming up not because they want to but to survive for various reasons. Koudelka herself manages real well and James has his main goal of seeing Elaine again. Edward is kinda there but he fits an adventurer vibe alright. Seeing the crazed caretakers being psychopaths is cool, as is the creepy Charlotte, the somehow creepier Roger, and all sorts of stuff in between. There's even a gargoyle optional boss. Treasure is around and about, not all is great but free stuff. This definitely has the survivalist feel to it, plus it's got multiple endings to boot. That final boss is quite annoying with its magic, you have to reflect it back to her and I really hate her healing move.
No comments:
Post a Comment