Soul Nomad & the World Eaters Review

Two hundred years after Master of Death Gig's near-destruction of the world, his three monstrous world eaters are poised to reawaken and continue their rampage. Ironically, only Gig's power is great enough to destroy them, and so his soul--previously sealed within an onyx blade--is fused with your own. The power of a god is now within your grasp, but Gig and his desire to bring about the end of everything is ever present. Such is the plot of Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, the latest strategy role-playing game to come from Nippon Ichi Software. Unlike its predecessors, Soul Nomad plays out much more like a mash-up of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen and the Fire Emblem series with that traditional Nippon Ichi flair thrown in for good measure. While it certainly does not lack the depth and complexity of the Disgaea titles, Disgaea this is not. The end result is a strategy RPG that manages to correct most of the issues present in its precursors, features an original battle system, and is still jam-packed with irreverent fun.

One of the first things you will notice is that in combat, the isometric perspective so often associated with the strategy RPG genre is gone and replaced with a flat 2D, top-down view. In Soul Nomad, you battle across a large outdoor map that is subdivided into the usual grid-based layout, something that makes each battle seem much more vast and epic than the smaller, more localized combat in many other similar games. Each square is associated with a terrain type that can affect your squads by providing attack bonuses and movement penalties.

If you can get over his genocidal tendencies, Gig is actually a pretty likable guy. Just don't let him know that.

Wait, squads? Yes, much like the aforementioned Ogre Battle, Soul Nomad features squad-based combat rather than individual unit brawls. The source of much of the game's customizability lies in creating each of these squads and tweaking them for maximum efficiency. Each squad is associated with a room, which is a 3x3 grid that serves as its home and has a limited number of positions available in which to place units. Throughout the course of the game, the number of rooms you can have at any given time, the number of positions that can be open in each room, and the number of room types you have available to choose from steadily increase. Each room has a built-in bonus called a decor, which can do anything from increasing defense by a percentage to turning the squad into a walking time bomb that explodes after three turns. Each room can be further customized with your own decors for up to a total of four per room.

Rooms can be changed at will, though the system for doing this can be incredibly frustrating at times--they are randomly generated, and each room has a randomly generated number of positions. So late in the game when you want to have a specific room with nine open slots, it becomes nigh impossible to pull it out of the hat without a huge time investment and a lot of luck. To further complicate things, you can't change individual rooms but must rather change every room simultaneously. It's possible to lock specific rooms you're already finished with so they're left alone, but you are only given a limited number of locks. Generally, you're only short one lock from eliminating this problem entirely, but there are a couple of times in the game when you've got two or more unlocked rooms.

The units that you form squads with in rooms are as varied as you may have come to expect from earlier Nippon Ichi games. As you progress throughout the game, more than 25 unit types are unlocked, each of which has unique attacks and is weak or strong against other unit types. Positioning within squads is an important factor because each unit has a different attack depending on whether you place it in the front, middle, or rear rows, and units in the rear row are less likely to be hit by physical attacks. It's generally a bad idea to put spellcasters in the front row because they're more likely to be hit and have fewer hit points; likewise, melee units usually can't attack from the rear.

The combat screen splits the action up between the attacking and defending squads.

Combat is fairly straightforward as per the genre, but not without its own unique twists. Battles always begin with your hero's squad placed on the map. At any time, you can summon other squads by paying a fee and placing them around you. Each squad takes turns moving around the map and either attacks or uses map abilities called tactics that provide temporary stat boosts or deal damage to enemies. The attacking team almost always strikes first and then the defending team retaliates with a counterattack.

Unfortunately, while you get to select which squads will fight which enemy, you never get to select which individual units will attack an enemy, instead relying on the artificial intelligence to pick for you. Most of the time, this will do the job, but sometimes, you're left scratching your head and wondering what the computer was thinking. Squad movement and damage costs it stamina, which affects attack damage, as well as accuracy. Once stamina is lowered past a threshold, the squad is able to follow up its normal attack with special attacks based on the types and numbers of units that compose it. Battles are where the vast majority of your time is spent, and typical of most strategy RPGs, much of the game's story is told amidst the confusion of the battlefield.