La Pucelle was an ok game I guess. It reminds me alot of Eternal Eyes
for the Playstation. It has a similar art style, similar monster
capturing, and how you venturing from town to dungeon are almost
identical. On both La Pucelle and Eternal Eyes, the battle systems are
mediocre at best.
I do like the weird humor this game has, I
love the art style. I really dislike the barebones world map, and how
tiny this game feels. I can't stand the hit-rate ratio, I had a problem
with missing attacks this bad since Lord of the Ring's The Third Age.
Also the lack of variety in stages is pretty weak, everything is a flat
square or rectangle. Hills, or the way your characters face don't
factor into the game, so there's less strategy, so you can't get an
advantage if you wanted. Also you can walk half way across the screen
without a pentaly in energy or anything like that. I put 30 hours into
this game and it felt like there was 10 hours of content.
----------Battle System----------
La Pucelle: Tactics is a turn-based Strategy RPG. The turns are moved
in rounds, you get to move all of your characters first, assign them to
their spots, assign them the move you want them to perform, and then
you select "End Turn", which will start all of the animations of the
battle sequences at once, or you can pre-maturely start battles as soon
as you move if you want, either moving your character and select
"Battle" or just select a special move, which always attacks
immediately. After you can't possibly move, the enemies move and do
their attacks.
You can only use 8 characters per battle, but
one creative thing they did with this game is keeping a portal open for
your characters to return to during battle. For example, you can only
use 8 characters in the battle, but if one of your characters is
nearing death and you can't heal them, so you return that character
back to the portal and put another character in his place. If a
character dies in battle, and there's 7 characters on the field, you
can't replace them during that battle. None of your characters
permanently die within the game either, but your characters to die
quite often in battle, which can be frustrating.
Another cool
feature in the game is the ability to gang up on an enemy to create a
massive attack. All attack animations are shown in similar fashion to
Fire Emblem, the enemy on one side, and your teammates on another. When
you initiate the battle, then whoever has the best speed will attack
first. When you gang up on an enemy, every character that's near that
battle will jump in and attack the surrounding enemy or enemies. To
even things out, the enemies have the same advantage.
You gain
experience and skill points for each monster killed. Only if your party
member was part of the gang that killed the monster then he will get
the points. So for example, if one character fought and killed a
monster, then he with be the only person to gain the experience, but if
you had a team of three characters that attacked at once and one of
those characters killed the monster, then all three characters will
gain the experience points without a penalty. You gain levels after so
many experience points, that boosts your overall stats.
You
gain skills similarly to Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced. Each weapon or
piece of armor has a 'skill' attached to it, for example a sword might
have HP and ATK attached to it. If you kill a monster with this sword,
then your level in HP and ATK will permanently go up, each stat has a
level system all of their own. If you gain enough levels, you'll gain
stat boosting skills. Some skills boost your defense in a battle, or
your evade skills, or your attack power, it all depends on how you
level up your skills.
You can equip up to 4 items in the game,
it doesn't matter what it is either. Any character can equip anything,
any number of times. If you want 4 weapons, then slap on 4 weapons, if
you want 1 weapon, 1 piece of armor, and 2 accessories? Do it! Whatever
you want. My biggest grief with this game is how much weapons and armor
cost in stores and how little money you get after battle. For example,
a half-way decent sword will cost you around $20,000-60,000, but you
get about $2,000-5,000 per battle.
The game's biggest gimmick
in the game are the colored crystals on the battle field. Theres many
things you can do with these crystals, but overall they harvest new
enemies for the bad guys if you don't destroy them right away. You can
use them to your advantage because each crystal on the field creates a
line across the field, if an enemy is on top of one of these lines and
you destroy the crystal then the enemy will take damage. Sometimes you
get items if you break a crystal, and at the end of the battle you'll
get extra money for how many of these crystals you break. Overall, this
is a gimmick I could of done without.
Another gimmick is
monster capturing, but it's really the only way to recruit characters
outside of storyline required characters.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Prier, a 16 year old girl, who is on a quest to become the
Maiden of Light. She goes to school with her younger brother, Culotte
(who looks like a girl), and her always collective and cool friend
Alouette who has amnesia. These three team up together to hunt Demons
in their spare time. On a mission, given out by the ultra creepy Father
Salade, who leads the Church / School, the team comes across another
amnesia victim and fellow Demon Hunter Croix. As these four team up and
investigate sightings of demons, they learn of a bigger plot that
involves human genocide.
While the main storyline sounds
cliche, the rest of the game is freaking weird, in a good way I guess.
Everything is so cutesy, but also violent and bloody and highly
religious, with some weird skin crawling sexual innuendo you'll ever
see.
There's really no main characters, all storyline
characters share just about as much limelight as the rest, there's only
a couple characters that could be considered background characters, but
they still get plenty of lines within the game (mostly the cat
characters). Prier is probably the most involved character in the game,
since she is your avatar when walking through towns, and she's usually
up front during cutscenes. Otherwise, this game feels like Final
Fantasy VI, how it has a load of characters, but you're never forced to
play as one central character, even though some team members might
leave your party during the story.
----------Graphics----------
I love the art style of the game, but on a technical level it doesn't
exaclty push any boundaries of the PS2. There are plenty of things I
enjoyed and hated about the graphics. I love how overly cute the game
is, even mean giant monsters like giant Whales or giant Dragons look
cute. The over the top cuteness of the graphics are usually balances by
alot of scenes of murder, blood crime scenes, and other weird
cutscenes. One minute you're overdosing on cuteness, the next minute
you see an old dude punch a little girl in the face. Everything in the
game is 2D sprites, there's a TON of animation put into the sprites.
You won't see the same sprites over and over again. The battle
animations and special attacks look really nice too.
I hate
how small towns are, I hate how you walk within these towns in a 2D
plane, all non-playable characters stand right above or right below
your walking plane. It's just weird, and not nearly as creative looking
as Radiata Stories, which had a similar concept. The graphics are very
blurry for some reason. There aren't very many dungeons or towns or
things to do in the game, it feels like an incomplete game. The world
map is very bare bones.
----------Sound----------
I like
and enjoy the voice work in the game. They only include voice overs
during the most important scenes of the game, mostly at the start and
end of a chapter. The voices are very cartoony and over the top, but it
fits the overall anime style of the game. The only problem is the
voices sound very condensed and muffled. The music is good and
rememberable.
----------World Map----------
The world map
is a very basic, point and click map. Each town and dungeon are
represented as a dot on the map, you hover your icon over and click.
The location you need to visit to advance the story is always blinking
red, so you'll never get "lost". There's only a couple real towns in
the game, and only a handful of dungeons, the world is not very big at
all. In each town, or 'safe zone' you'll find atleast one person that
sells wares. Each dungeon has various floors, you can go in different
directions and that can affect the storyline too. For example, you'll
start on floor 1, but within that lever theres 2 different exits,
depending on what exit you take, you might initiate a storyline arch,
if you go the wrong way, you may screw up that arch, there's really no
way to know which way to go. If you do go the wrong way, at the end of
each chapter they will tell you if you get the Bad Ending, Normal
Ending or Good Ending, depending on which ending you get, you might get
a reward.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
29:03:14
There is no save after beating the game, so that hour going through the
final dungeons and fighting the final boss wasn't included into my
overall time. I did spend quite a few hours skill grinding in this
game, so the final time is also a little overbloated than it should be.
Also this game ends with the LONGEST freaking credits I've sat through
in a long time.
