Legend of Heroes II; a grand adventure of Tiraswheel! Indulge yourself in an epic... novel?
In this adventure, you join the duo of Jurio and Christina in their one-year pilgrimage across the beauteous region of Tiraswheel, searching for traces and clues of the Moonlight Witch, her mission, and the trail of omens that follow in her footsteps.
As expected by those who have played Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion, the graphics and audio in this are simply fantastic, with a much larger emphasis on aesthetic detail of scenery going into this entry. The graphics are bright and vibrant in everything ranging from the landscapes to the deeply detailed 2D sprites.
As something that may feel strange when transistioning from Tear of Vermillion, Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch takes a more light-hearted and relaxed approach to narrating the adventure. As you navigate the world of Tiraswheel and visit the shrines to gather visions, there are no massive, vicious guardians protecting the threshold of the mirrors, and very little emphasis on the combat at all. Instead, Moonlight Witch takes a more narrative-based approach, as to simply add a scenaric world to what would originally be a novel. Being so, Moonlight Witch is focused largely on adding definition to, and defining the characters of the story while the tale unfolds.
Problem is, making this more of a narrative than a game makes the action-involved segments very underdeveloped, and leaves Moonlight Witch feeling like an adventure game. You can literally slack off and participate in battles only every once in a while and still have very little challenge to deal with. The battle system is more of the same as the last game. You have normal attacks, special character-specific skills, and a number of spells, as well as special techniques that can be performed once a sort of "tension" gauge reached 100%. Although this gauge seemed to already fill too quickly in the previous Gagharv trilogy title, it seems to fill even quicker this time around, making special attacks all but difficult to accumulate for and execute. On a positive note, however, the specials are much more impressive looking than in the previous Legend of Heroes game - but a shame because there's only a handful of bosses to try them out on.
The pet system has undergone quite a few updates, but actually caused more trouble than anything. Analyzing your pet's emotions and hunger are now much more convinient, and the pet can pull off a lot more useful combat movements, but for those of you who remember your item-hunting little friend from the first, you may find that you'll soon want to strangle it in Moonlight Witch. The new pet upgrade has, simply, made the pet a mess of mood swings, to the point in which you'll feed it and praise it into happiness, and then twenty steps later it's mad at you for some reason or other. As for actually finding items, a good mood on the pet will make it shower you with items... endlessly, and at the least opportune of times. While it's quite amazing to see the your pet has found five potions lodged in the bridge you're walking across, its continuous icon shuffling and getting in your way can get quite annoying.
For those looking for story, this game is jam-packed with it, if the first title didn't make that something to anticipate. Interesting and well-defined characters, well-planned scenarios, and much humor are all throughout Jurio and Christina's pilgrimage, and each major character has their own ways of making themselves memorable. If you happen to have kept the clear file from Tear of Vermillion, you can even import the chronology from the first to build upon your Legend of Heroes history.
The translation is slightly better this time around, but the game is still riddled with all kinds of grammar, spelling and proficiency errors in the script that an honest day of work could have done wonders for. It's painful at times, and sort of tears at the artistic flair - which is important is such a narration-heavy title, but gets the job done.
Although not as dramatically powerful as the first title, and so little focused on action that it could just as easily have been pulled off as a graphical adventure title, Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch is a nice and lengthy narrative with a great storyline and masterfully defined characters.