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NIS's new game: Last Rebellion
KiTA
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Anyone else playing this? My copy arrived yesterday, I've been giving it a quick go today. I was worried about the reviews but it's actually pretty good.
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I do like the voice acting. And the fact the two leads don't exactly get along perfectly and have two very different goals. And the combat system is pretty damn interesting.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
I actually wasn't impressed with the voice acting, but I generally don't care for anime/gaming voice acting work in general.
The combat is fun as hell but really weird. I donno why, but randomly I'll get a ton of extra CP out of the blue. I'm guessing it's... crits? Maybe?
Because I moderately enjoyed some of Nippon Ichi Software's earlier games. But I have not heard of this, or seen anything about it, or read a review.
Is it a Strategy RPG?
Isn't that par the course for every NIS game not named Disgaea?
Grim Grimoire's pretty fun, I hear. (But that's Vanillaware, so of course it is)
Every screenshot I've seen has the player character and one monster standing in a giant, incredibly bland room with a big inelegant HUD crowding up a lot of the screen real estate.
Also Grim Grimoire is the hotness. I liked it better than Odin Sphere.
The graphics are nowhere near as bad as what they say it is. It MIGHT be able to be put on a PSP but you'd have to cut a lot out. I could see it being a PSP game that was fancied up for a PS3 audience, however. It doesn't screenshot well.
Story is... odd. As far as I can tell, the God of Life is on a drunken bender, and has basically said "Ya know what? FUCK Death." Of course, this doesn't work because there's only so many souls to go around, so all kinds of soulless abominations are running around.
Enter the Goddess of Death, who is rather upset at being puked all over by Lord Fancypants the Life God. Recruits random people to be Blades (Warriors who can kill things very efficiently) and Sealers (Warriors who can rip the souls out of unconscious monsters).
The hero and the heroine end up stuck sharing one body, a-la that one anime I can't remember the name of now. You switch between them at will, but share a HP, MP, and CP bar. Nine (the blade) focuses on melee damage, Aisha (the sealer) focuses on magic damage.
Combat is really quite fun, although I can see it getting very easy very quickly. Basically you have 3 bars -- HP, MP, and CP. HP and MP are standard stuff, health and mana. CP is your chain points, and is used up when you make melee attacks. They regenerate slowly, at about 10% per turn.
HP and MP regen on the field (based on who you have on the field), CP doesn't regen, although you can heal it with MP and use consumables.
You attack monsters' bodyparts. Each monster has a good chunk of parts you can target -- for example, the A'Bubu I'm fighting has 7 spots -- Eye, Arm - L, Arm - R, Abdomen, Back, Leg - L, and Leg - R. You can attack any of them, but can only attack them once per turn.
There is a combo system, and it's fairly important and I believe a reason the combat gets easy. Basically, there's a right "order" to attack the bodyparts, and doing so gets you combo points (bonus damage, bonus XP, bonus item droprate) and increases the Stamps on the parts. When you hit the bodyparts in the right way, you get "bingo" on the screen. When you do 2 or more in a row, you get "combo" on the screen.
The problem is, the game keeps track of the right order, once you do it once.
For example, by hitting the "go all out" button, you'll do 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ... That sometimes will get you one or two bingos, for example, 1 2 x x x 6 x 8. After that, you can figure out the rest of them, like 1 2 5 3 4 6 7 8 or whatever. For example, A'Bubus? They're 7 1 2 5 6 3 4 -- doing those in order will give you 5 stamps on every body part, and raise the bonus score a lot.
You can even save the order you want to attack in, so repeated combats become a case of "hit R1 then X." It's actually a really fun system, I do however wish there was some randomization, or some way to break it up -- like monsters that move around, or block, or whatnot.
Anyway. Once you have stamps on a monster, you can cast magic. Magic costs MP but uses no CP -- and hits the enemy once per bodypart. Yes, this is as overpowered as it sounds. Basically meleeing does 100ish damage for me right now, maybe 7 times, when I cast a level 5 spell, I can then hit everything with a stamp once. Since level 5 stamps last 5 turns before fading, I can switch between 2 or 3 mobs and potentially do something crazy like 35 hits with a single spell, each for 300-400 damage.
After you kill monsters, you're not done. Nah, you're up against the god of life, so the mobs, they just don't die. You have a couple options here -- if you do nothing, after 2-3 turns they stand right back up, full health, WITH a XP boost.
You can have Nine absorb them -- this gives you free MP at the cost of 1 CP, but hastens their resurrections. You can do nothing -- this gives you another monster to fight, of a higher level. I'm absolutely certain there's some mobs that only drop special items this way -- namely cause it's the exact kind of thing I'd do if I was making a game. Or you can have Aisha seal them away -- this takes them out of the fight and gives you a goodly amount of healing for each mob, too.
Combat is kind of a juggling match -- you only get a very LIMITED number of CP a turn -- I get 4 per turn, which isn't really enough to set up enough stamps to do much. I could use MP to regenerate the CP, but... MP runs out, real quick.
After the end of the fight, you get a wrapup page straight out of Microsoft Excel -- You get the amount of XP you should have earned, the Bonus points you got, the XP you got from the bonus points, and the "Last EXP Obtained" -- which doesn't mean "the XP you got last fight", it's a mistranslation of "EXP Total". Herein lies the problem -- once you get the combo system up and running, you end up with a LOT of bonus XP each fight. Eventually it craps out (at level 10 the A'Bubus give 0 XP -- X% of bonus XP from that 0 XP is still 0).
For example, this last fight against 3 new enemies of 2 types (Mob A, Mob B, Mob A style), I was able to learn both patterns and gained 458 Bonus Points. My end of fight spreadsheet was:
Obtained XP 240
Bonus Point 458
Bonus XP 1099
Last XP Obtained 1339
Which was enough to take me up a level and most of the way to another. 660 to go to level 12. So for 458 Bonus, I got... 458% extra XP. That's freaking huge, and it happens every fight. The last boss I fought I left with something like 999 (I believe this is the cap) bonus -- I gained 3 levels on the spot.
Storyline, I'm not sure. The god of life has turned into a royal ass, and is generally filling the earth with soulless abominations. You're the adopted son of some king who has managed to create a shield that has... failed recently, leaving his country finally open to attack from the hordes of the unliving. Pretty quickly something happens, a MacGuffin is stolen, and you get to head off to chase down some random guy.
The hero and heroine could have came straight out of a Takahashi manga, btw -- the hero is a random, lazy jerkass, the girl is a sickeningly pure angelic type. They fight crime!
The story is told Ninja Gaiden (NES) style -- a single hand-painted scene with a text caption. There are a lot of these scenes, and they are swapped out a lot. One of the criticisms I saw on Gamerankings was that the scenes stay up for 2-3 minutes at a time, which simply doesn't match up with what I've seen.
All in all I've been playing it all day, it's not bad. The 2chan ranting and raving, as far as I can tell, is because they decided to release it in English in Japan with Japanese subtitles -- a crime in 2ch's eyes. But then again, there are still 2ch silly geese troll rating Dragon Quest 9 on amazon.co.jp because they dared to use 3D, so... whatever.
I do find it to be an interesting example of where I think gaming is heading. Sure, you can do FMV-quality real time graphics on the PS3... If you have a 50 million dollar budget. If you're a mere mortal gaming company, well... I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of these titles that don't use the full features of the PS3 or 360 going forward, cause companies just can't afford to. The WiiHD or whatever is coming from Nintendo is in a really great position to capture this middle market.
Personally, I look at the iPad and see a vast new frontier for shovelware... but that's just me.
As for buying / renting... Normally I'd say if you weren't sure, wait till the price goes down or rent, but Nippon Ichi is apparently not doing so hot this quarter, so my answer is of course: Buy a copy. No, buy 2.
Apparently this game bombed so bad in Japan (no idea why, except that 2ch is hosting a boycott because they dared (-insert offended Victorian French/Japanese hybrid accident here-) to use Japanese subtitles with the English dub instead of re-dubbing it in Japanese) that they've decided to start work on Disgaea 4 and stop doing games like this (where they just publish a smaller named company's game).
The first bit (Disgaea 4) -- yay. The second (smaller companies no longer working with NIS/NISA)? Boo...