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I heart Nippon Ichi (and Nippon Ichi Japan, who have a nicer website than the American branch). Disgaea was my most-played game last year, a real addiction. Phantom Brave didn't get as much time dedicated to it when I bought it earlier this year, but it's still the one game I've so far spent most time with in 2005. And now I've just started playing La Pucelle Tactics properly, an older game than either of the others but one that only received a UK release after they'd proved that there was still cash to be made from TBS/SRPGs over here.
What's odd about their games is how they turn the genre on its head, completely alter the main focus. It's no longer about planning your approach to situations on the battlefield - it's now about planning the evolution of your characters. You don't so much use specific attacks against specific enemies in order to beat those enemies, you do it in order to let your characters learn more powerful versions of those attacks.
The heart of the games - of La Pucelle and Disgaea, at least - is immediately recongisable as being similar to other turn-based strats. Battles play out on grid-based maps, each of your characters (read: units) possesses a set of statistics that change depending on that character's class, battles play out in turns - you, then the enemy, then you, then the enemy, until the objective you've been given for that battle is met or failed - each character can move a certain number of spaces on the grid in any one turn, some have ranged attacks while some can only hit enemies in adjacent squares...
You know the drill. In extremely basic terms, it's chess. Or, if you want a comparison from the same medium, it's UFO: Enemy Unknown. Very close to the latter in that your characters evolve as they're used - gain experience points, become more proficient at certain skills as they use them, can be equipped with armour and weapons.
The kick in Nippon Ichi's games is just how much power the player's given to customise their characters, to take them to ridiculously powerful levels. The challenge isn't in the battles themselves - they're rather easy and, if truth be told, all a bit random, with little evidence of their having been laid out with much consideration. The challenge - the real 'game' - is in working out how it all works.
You're given a huge amount of freedom as soon as the games start. You can create new characters right from the off, buy items, create your own items, develop items, create and explore random dungeons - all seperate from the standard storyline battles. You're also given masses of different explanations as to the rules in effect for all of these things. What you have to do is put it all together and figure out how it all interlocks, how those things work in practice.
Which is why Phantom Brave is less successful than Disgaea. Everything is *too* tightly intertwined - you can't make a single decision without it having a knock-on effect elsewhere. In Disgaea, characters learn new weapon skills the longer they use a specific type of weapon - each character has a gauge for each weapon type which fills up as they execute attacks with those weapons and they learn a new attack when that gauge reaches a certain level. Get their sword gauge up to level 20, for example, and they'll learn a sword attack that causes damage to any unit within a nine-square grid. Equip them with a different weapon once that skill's learned and they won't be able to use the skill, but give them a sword again and they won't have to relearn it - it'll be available immediately.
Phantom Brave does things differently. Skills are learned by the items themselves. Instead of the character's having weapon gauges, the items themselves level up. The more they're used, the more mana they gain - mana can then be spent on 'teaching' the item a new attack. Equip a character with that item and they can use the attack, but equip them with another item of the same type that doesn't know the same attack and they can't.
That can be overcome by fusing the character with the item, at which point the character will learn whichever item skills you've selected from those the item knows and the item will cease to exist. Problem then being that the character still won't be able to use those skills unless they're once more equipped with the relevant item type - only now, that item doesn't need to know the skill itself.
Which is all far too confusing. You then have to decide whether having the character learn the skill is worth losing an item that may be granting a large bonus to the character's health, speed, defence, etc., when they're equipped with it. Skills transfer through fusion, but the majority of stat bonuses don't.
And that's one of the basics of Phantom Brave's larger system. It doesn't take into account the Title system, where everything in the game is given a ranked title - Failure, Great, Super, and so on. When fusing an item with a character or two items together, their titles affect the stats boosts that do transfer, meaning that you have to take that into account.
It's all too tightly packed together and means that you spend far too long agonising over the slightest decision - if I fuse this item with this character, I'm going to have to steal another item of the same type from one of the maps in order to use the skills. Is it worth it? And then there's the issue of stealing items in the first place - you call cahracters to the battlefield by manifesting them inside the items lying around it and they disappear after a set number of turns. As they disappear, they get a chance of taking the item back to your base with them, which then adds yet another complication as you try to decide whether you want to drag the battle out simply in order to stand a chance of stealing some of the items. It's a headache-inducing never-ending circle of cause and effect. Still very much worth playing, but definitely not a game that newcomers to TBS/SRPGs in general and Nippon Ichi in particular should go anywhere near.
Disgaea's far more elegant, probably as a result of its revolution being built upon years of small alterations and additions to the regular SRPG formula, rather than a total rewrite. Being the game that preceded it, La Pucelle is also much easier to get along with.
It's really very good. Not as good as Disgaea - some aspects of the presentation aren't as polished (the lack of character portraits on the stat screens means having to remember who's who from their names) and the Dark Portal system (where linking and destroying chains of coloured floor panels in any battle provides you with significant experience bonuses and cash) isn't as well-developed or intuitive as Disgaea's equivalent - but it's an easier game to get to grips with than PB and has all the same addictive qualities. I'm still a bit confuddled by its personal reinterpretation of learning skills and developing weapons, but I'm getting there.
Anyway. I know there are at least a couple of other people here who've played Disgaea. Not sure about the other games, though, or the latest release in the series - Makai Kingdom, which is still to make it to the UK. Anybody? |
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