This is the worst game ever OH MY GOD if you liked Final Fantasy Tactics you will most likely HATE this.
Graphics
The character drawings are good, and *some* of the backgrounds are nice. But the character sprites look low-res when the camera zooms for an attack or skill...theyre 2D, it’s a PS2 game, so the sprites logically should look very good, but they dont. And in every stage/place (maybe except for the dungeon) you’ll see this blue shining brightness at the top of the screen, wich wont let you see well the guys that are there. There’s too much pale colors. The light effects are shown in boring-long animations like if they were cool, but they arent, they are mostly ugly. Now, i said the characters drawing were good...well that goes for the main characters only, all the other characters’ designs are UGLYYY, including allies and enemies. Not only their designs are ugly, but also their colors, theyre mostly all metal grey, you wont get to see skin here, cause their horrible outfits cover them entirely. While the backgrounds (and some of the characters) are pale, the major part of the characters are opaque coloured. Its like the characters were all machinery, except for the main ones.
Sound
The store song rocks (its an accordion song). The rest of the music is just average/unnoticeable.
The sound effects are HORRIBLE, theyre like NES SFX or like the internal speaker of a computer’s CPU (you know, the sound of old games like 1992’s Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis)
The voice acting is AWFUL. The girl's voice acting is good, the blue-haired guy’s is decent.....but the main character’s voice acting is THE WORST VOICE ACTING IN THE WORLD’S HISTORY, and Viper’s (one of the main bad guys in the game) is so forced, ridiculous and awfuly performed that it makes me want to kill myself.
Gameplay
HOLY MOTHERF****R!!!! THIS IS THE WORST GAME EVER MADE IN HUMAN HISTORY!!!! The game lacks of fun. Period.
Ok, i’ll write a serius gameplay paragraph.
There is an innovative active turn system, wich lets you perform more than one action in the same turn. I’ll explain myself: by moving or performing an action, you spend part of your turn, you have a 100 turn-points bar. So, moving one block will spend you a certain quantity of points, and performing an action will too. For example, lets pretend moving one block costs 20 turn pts, and attacking costs 30; in this case you can move 2 blocks, and still have enugh turn points left for attacking twice a nearby enemy. This system is a very good idea, maybe if implemented in a good SRPG unlike this one, it would be cool.
Everything else of the gameplay sucks. First, for every normal attack you’ll have to see a 2 or 3 hit animation, and for EVERY skill you’ll have to watch a boring-long animation. As the backgrounds are mostly colorless, playing isn’t pleasant, it’s like it had no life. The sound effects will make playing unpleasant, they’re really annoying.
This is important: you cant level up like in any other SRPG, going to places were you have fought to fight with fiends. You have to go to a dungeon (you cant choose between dungeons, there is just one dungeon) to level up there (in each floor youll find enemies of that same level; in dungeon’s level 2 youll face level 2 opponents, and so on), its the only way to level up...and it SUCKS. All levels look the same (only little changes in the shape), they are all dark grey and plain ugly. This is unpleasant too. And remember that not only the background is horrible, but the opponents youll face too, they are all about the same color as the dungeon’s background, and terribly designed.
Now, the most important thing is what i said before: THE GAME LACKS OF FUN, when I was playing I was thinking “man, there is no grace in this game, but i’ll keep on playing, maybe later on it’ll turn out to be cool”, I kept on playing, bored, cause playing it was like nonsense to me (no fun in a game means it missed the very reason of its existance: to provide fun) but the “coolness” never came.
Final words
Since I played Final Fantasy Tactics for PS I have always wanted to find a similar game, cause I LOVE FFT, played it for 4 years and it still doesnt bore me (nowadays I dont play it because I bought my PS2 for playing PS2 games). For the PS2 I have played Disgaea, Stella Deus, and now I might rent Makai Kingdom. Disgaea almost made it, it could have been soo good, but it just didnt make it. And well, I already told you my opinion of Stella Deus, its AWFUL. Dont buy this, dont even rent it, dont even consider it.
So my quest for a good SRPG continues...