Posted by exodus on January 18, 2010 at 17:59:51 EST.
I decided to buy Hero's Saga Laevatein, a poorly named (for searching reasons) tactics RPG from Gung Ho, brought to the U.S. by Aksys. I can only imagine they're losing a fair amount of money on it, but heyyyy. Thoughts inside, cause that's easier to read.
It's like a cross between Ogre Battle and Dragon Force, basically. You walk around on a normal tactics RPG 3/4 view topographical map, and engage enemies with the usual selecting of squares. In battle, you have a commander (hero) and 8 soldiers (maybe you get more later, I dunno). You lose soldiers as they get hit, but their health is separate from the hero's health, and losing your soldiers doesn't ruin your chances as EXP (if the hero falls in battle they get nothing at the end of the stage).
With ranged combat, you basically choose the guy, and everyone attacks, they can't counter attack, and that's it. Clerics can choose to be more specific but only in close-up battles.
with close-up combat you can choose from several options - charge, attack, and phalanx. Charge sacrifices accuracy and defense in favor of attacks, phalanx sacrifices attack power in favor of accuracy and defense, and "attack" is in between the two. Then, you can choose to target the enemy's soldiers first, or go for the commander. If you go for the commander, soldiers will block hits and your damage to the commander will be weaker, but if the enemy has like two or three soldiers left, sometimes it makes sense to just go for the commander and get some tick damage. Just sort of telling you what the tradeoffs are.
then, there are valhalla attacks, which are huge devastating attacks that charge up, and which usually kill whomever you point it at instantly.
classes are determined by weapons. equipping a different weapon on someone changes their appearance as well as their soldier types, and also affects their attributes of course. In this game the "rock paper scissors" element is the enchantment on the weapons - fire, earth, lighting, water.
So, that's how it works, basically, and I like all that. Now to the things I don't like.
You basically have to pick physical or magic and stick with it, or else your character won't level well. That's dumb, because you only recruit new characters at random, except for in certain story bits.
The enemy also has those valhalla attacks, and there's no way to tell if their gauge is full, so sometimes you'll be going along just fine and then someone will come along and wipe out one of your characters just like that. It can be really annoying.
the number one thing to hate about this game isn't the gameplay though - it's the horrible naturalization. I'm enjoying the gameplay so I'm powering through it but damn, it's written like a highschool english teacher's assistant took a dump on a keyboard.
The premise is pedestrian and whatever. lead a rebellion against some dudes, blah blah. But the way it's written is very affected and attempting to be high and literary, but faaaaailing. Meanwhile, since this takes place in a fictional europe, they've decided to make the characters say "si" and "mi hermano" and "compadre" at various annoying times. More annoying than that is when they decide to sift some french in there for good measure - again at total random. It's really really awful writing, but I've gathered that that doesn't bother a lot of folks here in games, so it may not hold you back.
I'm playing this til I can find another nice tactics game, and it's pretty passable. So there you go.
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