Tactical RPGS for the most part have been geared toward single party
strategy attacks in chessboard like locations. While Soul Nomad keeps
some of these clichés, it departs from the rest, mainly in party size.
In battles you will not only fight with just your party, you will fight
with multiple parties to form an army of combatants. The way this is
accomplished is rather complex and initially are hard concept to grasp.
You
will start off with only two characters and one room. The easiest way
to conceptualize a room is to think of it as a highly customizable
chess piece. This chess piece can hold characters with in it that
determine its strengths and weaknesses. Each room can hold up to nine
individual characters on three separate rows, though initially you will
be limited in amount of placeable characters. Which row you place the
character on determines what attack that character will perform. An
archer for example, has no move available on the front row, but has an
AOE attack on the middle row, and a powerful single shot on the back
row.
Though-out the game you will not only increase the amount
of placeable characters with-in the room you already have, you will
gain access to extra rooms where you can place even more fighters.
These new rooms will have different inherit strengths and weaknesses.
Some will be strong against ranged or melee and week against magic
attacks. Others will offer movement bonuses and other passive
abilities. Along with inherent abilities you will also have variable
slots for which to place gathered upgrades.
Although the
customization of the rooms is extensive, the way you go about getting a
room is very frustrating. In order to obtain a different room type, you
must first unlock the ability to gain another room, and then hope you
get a good one with the game's random room generator. Unlocking the
ability to obtain more than one room is the easy part. You simply
progress thought the story-line defeating enemies or bosses. The random
room generator is where the real frustration sets in. Via the game's
menu you will imitate a random room generation. These rooms will not
only generate types, but available characters slots. Room A might
generate as a strong melee room with three character slots, while Room
B could be a strong ranged room with eight character slots.
Here
in lies the inherent problem with this system. You will never at any
point gain any advantage for having a room with minimal character
slots. Having the maximum slots per level is needed to compete against
your foes pieces. If you use a three slotted room against an eight
slotted room, you will lose that piece almost every time.
Another
problem with the random room generator isn't as "random" as it would
have you believe it is. It heavily favors generating rooms with very
few character slots, even toward the end of the game when you must have
all of you rooms equipped with nine characters to even stand a chance
in battle. So you will sit, and press room generate, over and over and
over, hoping that it throws you a bone an gives you something half way
decent to work with. It is not uncommon to have to generate upwards of
fifty to sixty rooms to even get one room with nine slots. It is a huge
time sink.
Speaking of loosing pieces, how the rooms will battle
against each other is quite unsatisfactory. When you place your piece,
or room, next to another and select attack, the game's AI takes over.
The characters in each room will perform the move that corresponds with
the row they are placed on against a random enemy of the opposite room.
Each character as an individual health bar, and if depleted that
character will parish. Also each room will have a leader. If this
leader dies the room will disappear from battle even if all the other
characters in the room are at full health.
There are some rules
for the AI regarding who it can attack. Melee characters will only be
able to attack what is in the closest row to them. If there are units
on the front row, they can only attack those front row characters until
they have all been defeated. Then they can move on to the middle row
and so on. Ranged characters will attack units behind the front row.
This is as in-depth as the AI gets for attacks. Which characters out of
available attackable units they decide to strike is completely random.
Your units will never actively seek out the leader. Most times it will
attack other units and kill them off one by one, instead of picking off
the leader and defeating the room out in one round. This inability to
choose which unit to attack makes battles drag on at a snail's pace.
As
if sitting though thirty minute battles isn't enough, the way you go
about training troops is game breakingly aggravating. Since the entire
game is based around story battles with no free roaming content, the
only way to train your troops is though what is called "Room
Inspection". This will place you on a random board with random enemy
rooms generated to be around your level. Doing battle with these rooms
nets you experience points for the characters that survive each attack.
There will also be a mini boss on each board that is at least three
levels higher than you. These mini bosses will give you a three turn
head start on the other enemies before they will commence their attack,
which is usually very brutal. When all enemies have been defeated, or
you manage to stay alive for a certain number of turns, you will clear
the board and be given the option to proceed to the next board or quit
inspection.
If you decide to stop inspecting your room, you will
return to the games menu and the room that you inspected will level up.
The room's level determines not only its strength but the strength of
the rooms that you will battle during inspection. Eventually if this
process is repeated enough, usually around three times, your inspection
enemies will out level you. So it behooves you to not return to the
main menu until you have cleared many boards without stopping. The
problem with this is that if your main character in you main room dies,
it's game over. Many times you will spend upwards of thirty minutes
clearing boards, only to have a board's mini boss come over and
instantly kill your main character, causing you to loose all forward
progress.
The only way to avoid this is to quit inspection once
you feel you have gotten enough experience for one run, but as stated
before this levels your room. Soon the room that you are using will be
at such a high level that the enemies generated will easily defeat you.
To counter act this you must use the random room generator to receive a
new room that starts at level 1. You will constantly be forced over and
over again to generate these rooms so you can get experience for you
characters.
If you somehow manage to get past all these game
mechanic obstructions you will only be treated to a decent story with
above average spoken dialog. Your mute character will be placed in
charge of defeating three World Eaters which have been set upon your
planet by Gig, a god with a Napoleon complex.
Gig, was given the
mission to destroy the world so that it can be rebuilt in a better
fashion. Somehow your teacher and town leader tricked this all powerful
god and entrapped him inside an evil black sword. In the beginning of
the story you are bestowed this sword to help you in your quest to stop
the World Eaters. Upon receiving this sword Gig's trapped soul awakens
and binds to your body. You and Gig now share your body and he is able
to control some of your facets, such as speaking though you. Gig will
constantly pressure you to give up your fight against him and let him
take over your body. This naturally will mean the end of you, and
choosing to do so will cause you to lose the game.
So you will
set out not only to rid the world of its eaters, and to rid your-self
of Gig. All the wile Gig will have some pretty funny commentary. He
will call all the humans "Cows" and constantly berate you and your
comrades for their stupidity. Funny remakes aside, the story its self
is very generic. Also, anytime that you are promoted to respond to
something that is said or happening, you are given only one dialog
choice. This will leave you feeling disconnected from the events taking
place as you can not affect the story in any way. Having only one
dialog choice takes a lot of value out of the game, as multiple
play-troughs result in the exact same dialog.
Graphics in Soul
Nomad are mediocre at best. The boards you will play on look atrocious.
These boards are designed and painted so poorly that the game might as
well have been a DS title and not on the PS2. On the DS it would have
at least looked like the developers attempted to make interesting
textures. The characters fair a little better but not by much. The
animations for certain special moves are the only parts in the game in
which you will see anything worthy of being called "eye candy". But
since these moments are few and far between, you are left with an "I
could have finger-painted something better than that" taste in your
mouth.
Soul Nomad takes an interesting concept and slaps on some
crude graphics and generic story. Then it hinders your every move with
aggravatingly tedious battles and broken character advancement. It's
only redeeming qualities are quickly silenced by forcing you to stumble
your way though it's horrible game-play.
