![]() ![]() You merely have to unlock the move by placing the character in the right position in a Room. How each character functions in a Room depends on which of the three Rows you place that character in, and there’s no cost associated with using any of a character’s combat abilities. You generate Rooms to place characters in at random, often hammering the generation button for hours as you hope for something useful to spawn. ![]() Soul Nomad hearkens back to the earlier days of the genre, and has you form groups of up to nine characters called Rooms. In most tactical RPGs, you deploy so many individual units and use them to take out somewhat larger groups of enemies. Attempting to do just about any of this out of sequence either renders the plot nonsensical or the gameplay unapproachably unbalanced. N1 clearly wants players to first play through the 45 minutes or so it takes to unlock the Normal Path’s “bad” ending, then the 40 hours or so the “good” ending requires on your second cycle, then unlock the “Demon Path” and get its “good” ending with your next 20 hours, and then replay the Demon Path for the “bad” ending with another 10-20 hours. In practice, a player makes roughly four meaningful decisions throughout the duration of a 40-to-60 hour game that matter, and it’s very obvious what “order” you’re supposed to be making your decisions in. This sounds like a really great addition to the N1 gameplay, because if properly executed, it would be. You can even make decisions during the game about what to say, or what to do in certain situations. You can pick your protagonist’s gender and name, an N1 first, and your choices have a mild effect on the content of certain cutscenes and ending sequences. It wants to be an old-school throwback to the days when an RPG protagonist was meant to be nothing more than an extension of the player in the game’s fantasy world. ![]() Honestly, it’s hard to know where to start describing what this game gets wrong. Writing this pains me, to be honest, because ordinarily Nippon Ichi’s games reliably offer a tactical RPG fix few other developers can consistently deliver. The gameplay, although striving to be original, is an absolute turkey that doesn’t work on any level. Aside from a few interesting story beats and some occasional bright spots in the sprite-based graphics and sound design, there is absolutely nothing defensible about it. It is a bluntly terrible game, full of ill-conceived ideas that are poorly presented. Before Soul Nomad, I would have said that while you may be able to criticize Nippon Ichi’s titles for being overly-similar, the company had still never really made a bad game. Even the widely-disparaged Free Move system that showed up in Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom struck me as enjoyable, and I actually liked Disgaea 2’s storyline. Not just the crowd-pleasers like Disgaea, either. ![]() The result is a game that lurches awkwardly from dramatic to goofy moments, and often expects the audience to laugh at characters who are about to do or experience something legitimately horrifying (to the tune of genocide, infanticide, or rape, as the case may be)."Īs a newcomer to, I feel obligated to start this review by pointing out that, under normal circumstances, I really like Nippon Ichi strategy games. " Soul Nomad, much like Phantom Brave before it, tries very hard to tell a serious story while also purveying the jokes that it assumes Nippon Ichi fans can’t live without. Soul Nomad & The World Eaters (PlayStation 2) review ![]()
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