A tale of sadness, battles and the search for a lost sister.

Stupid main character

Just a warning, this game is filled with clichés. And pretty much all of them. But they have made the main hero Rush Sykes a big idiot. When you are going around, apparently looking for someone and you see this person wearing armour and going in an army towards another army.

What do you do? One thing you won´t do is start running, unarmed straight into the battlefield. Which is what Rush does, and makes a big mess.

It is even worse is that he doesn´t change troughout the game, he still acts like a idiot.

The others are a bit smarter

Being a general of a country apparently is a good thing for your head. The generals and their leader David are a lot smarter and brighter than Rush. But apparently all that Rush has in his head is thoughts about his younger sister…

A big sis-complex if I´ve ever seen one before.

Let´s ignore the clichés

For a JRPG they have made use of most clichés. But let´s ignore those and focus on what is new.

The most focus and what I enjoyed the most is the battle system. They use the Unreal Engine to simulate wars with troops fighting of against eachother. For each round you get to choose from a list of commands, like only using attacks, healing with items, attacking with fighting skills or magic.

Speed is essential and if you don´t act fast enough you might get killed. It is a bit irritating to see that if you attack the enemy you can get to go first. If you want to heal then it takes a long long time for the healing spells/items to be used, even if your characters are fast attacking.

System for leveling up is much like in Final Fantasy 2, your stats increase and you can learn skills. But you don´t get more HP for being hit or increase the atk damage of your weapons from using it. Using skills a multiple of times makes the skills increase in level sure. So it´s a bit like it and a bit not like it.

You can choose what weapons Rush should use. Dual Wielding a axe and sword? Dual wielding with two swords? Using a single sword and shield? Using a single hand axe and shield? Using one of the multitude of double hand weapons like polearms and such?

All up to you.

Enemies increase in lvl as you increase as well. Which makes it useless to try and power level. Strategy is what matters.

I´m stuck in one part now I can say. A new type of battle where I can´t attack the enemy troops in the first turn. Which makes it really hard and my opponent is way overpowered for me. So if I try to level up they will also level up. But in regards I can make more damage and probably I will get trough it. Also thinking about restarting to get Rush into a dual wield from the very beginning.

The battles are fast and fun to play. You can use different formations that will give advantages or missadvantages all depending on what formation you use. Haven´t looked into this as much as I should have.

Sidequests?

I have to say that apparently the sidequests are of big importance. They give you items, money, formations and everything. They even lead you to places that the main story never gets you into. Where you can recruit people that are great in battle I think.

So a few less sidequests would have been nice.

All in all

A really fun game to play for short sequences. This was played on the PC and thanks to a auto-save function you rarely get mad at it for losing a battle and having to start over. Scenes that you´ve seen before can be skipped. Which is much welcome.

So for a tiny amout of money you can get a really nice game and if you like JRPGs then I don´t see any reason for not getting this. But do rememeber: This is the PC version, not Xbox 360 version.