Tries to be different and it succeeds at least in 1 aspect, but fails to completely enthral.
I began this game several times. The first 2 times I hated it with a passion. However I figured out a couple of things on my third time after having read a FAQ on GameFaqs and things changed a bit. Sad... I know. First rule ofa bad game, if you require a huge ass book or a person speaking in a slow soft voice for hours to explain it.
Than I stumbled upon other major problems in the game and have kinda given up on it, for the time being.
However I keep coming back to it because of it's unique features that attract me.
CHARACTERS
The characters are all pretty interesting. Of course it being a Japanese game you get bogged down a bit with the retard prepubescent teenage angst with certain personalities, but in general they are alright.
They actually have certain characters with grey hair, which was a bit shocking to me who is used to playing most Japanese games where everyone's voice is still breaking. Infact I really liked the older characters, it's too bad they were all bad guys. Maybe one day Japan will stop putting old people down and we'll be playing characters who are...... never mind, I can see how that could never work in our young people, pop culture laced society.
The main character is the most generic and boring of the lot but other characters provide a bit more interest. Some of the banter between characters can be quite entertaining while other times the dialogues are so bad and cheesy that they grated on my nerves and I was forced to skip them.
A major critique of Japanese games in general is that they always force the player into the role of some goody two-shoes moron who is forced to endure all kinds of humiliation or irrelevant plot twists while the player simply sits back and shakes his head. This game is no exception, with choices being rammed down your throat at full force and at times inducing major cookie tossing. Thank god you can skip/fast forward all yappy interactions by holding down a button.
STORY
The story is so generic when it comes to these types of high fantasy strategy games that I will not bore you or myself by repeating it. The interest of the setup appears in one particular moment in the game where you are forced to make a choice. This choice decides whether you get ending A or B but other than that everything is linear paved form beginning to end.
Putting different characters next to each other in every battle will elicit different dialogues between them, and since you can only have X characters per battle the possibilities are pretty large. Not all characters have things
to say to each other however so certain party setups will leave the crickets plenty of space.
There are a couple of hidden characters that you can find and recruit which is a nice touch and opens up the story ever so slightly but not enough to really make a difference.
In general it's all fairly standard and doesn't push the envelope in any sense of the word but it's sufficient for the type of game that Rondo is.
GENERAL GAME DESIGN
I really enjoy the fact that they tried a different system from all other standard SRPGs. By that I mean that characters pass through each other on the grated map to deal damage, hence a character can pass through multiple enemies in one turn, dealing damage to all of them.
My friends have told me that the leveling up systems and the way the level design is done is practically a rip off of the Shining Force series and other RPGs on the Sega systems of old.
However I didn't play those games so this was a first for me. Leading to some serious irritations.
The game pretty much runs on rails, there are no random battles, no choices for battles, everything is decided for you.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, I loath random battles, but more choices in how you want to run your story or what encounters you wish to partake in would have been nice.
Unlike in other SRPGs once a battle is concluded there is no way to go back and replay the battle.
You have to actually play the battle and quit (at any time) and you can farm the different enemies and the EXP that they give. This is a completely obtuse and obscure system that makes very little sense. It took me forever
to figure this out.
Once you figure this out the game becomes a major grind-fest. It takes only 100 EXP to go up a level but you get progressively less EXP per action and kill the greater your level. Since the enemies levels remain the same in a battle you max out pretty quickly.
Unfortunately only characters that you use gain EXP and levels so at some point you have to level even the useless ones up by playing with them. This is a bit annoying but at least when they attack an enemy that is many times their level they get a massive boost and can jump several levels per action.
Another major hassle is the Skills in the game. Characters unlock skills as they level up. Then the player can put skill points of which they gain 2 per level to activate and upgrade said skills. Because upgrading them costs exponential points it costs somewhere around 22 or so points to max out the 5 levels of a single skill. That's a lot of points considering that at the end of the game you will probably be only at around level 30-50. Not a lot of points to spare or go around.
Adding to this you cannot really tell what each skill will do. The explanations aren't very useful and you can only really figure out what's going on by trying them. Since once points are used they are gone forever, you often waste them in order to try out a skill just to be disappointed. Also since you don't know which skills the character will learn later on you often waste points
on a skill that is useful only at the beginning of the game and you don't have enough points later to sink into a skill that might mean life or death in the later battles. Suggestion is to have all skills greyed out so that you can plan on using points now or keep them later for better skills. Not providing this information is not strategic game-play but simply being a tosser.
For mages it's doubly painful because you cannot see the area of attack of a spell before you buy it. So you might waste your points on a dud.
The most crippling stat in the game is movement. Characters that don't have a high enough movement are practically worthless and quickly become bench warmers as the game progresses. Meaning that even though you have a slew of characters to choose from, no-one in their right mind will pick the losers of the bunch, especially considering that it's a strategy game.
Replayability is rampant in the game with a New Game + feature. You even keep the skills and items you've gotten, but you don't keep the levels or the class upgrades you've collected. The levels isn't so much of a problem but the class upgrades is a pain that you don't keep (I could be wrong about this, I obviously haven't gotten that far yet) but I read about it somewhere.
I really love the New Game + feature, and am totally for it. So many games lack this possibility where you can just breeze through the game enjoying the fruits of your hard labour and enjoy the story..... sometimes it's a blessing that you don't have to suffer through the badly written plot again, but in this case it's really not a waste of time if you can get to it.
COMBAT
The game's balance in this regard is completely broken. Archers are ridiculously overpowered, and you only get one.
But that one wreaks major havoc on all battle fields slaughtering everything. Next is units on horseback. They have massive ranges and destroy everything in their path. All other characters are fairly ineffective and largely rely on the skills they can learn.
Mages are the worst touched, they can only attack or move but not both in one turn making them difficult to use frankly very weak as far as the player is concerned. On the enemies side however mages pose a major threat, second only to archers and bosses as they have massive ranges and are commonly set up as traps where they can eviscerate your entire platoon.
Although battles are set up on a top down grid with characters moving through each other, the actual damage dealing is done on a 2D plain with animated sprites that engage each other for your viewing pleasure.
The lack of interaction when you character is actually attacking in a 2D viewpoint is a bit disappointing, it would have been great if you could interact somehow to influence the battles' outcome, rather than be forced to watch the boredom or simply pressing a button to skip the entire 2D attack sequence each time.
Moving about and passing through enemies to attack and allies to buff up is really cool. Having different effects from the terrain is not so cool especially since it really doesn't translate well. I still have no idea what it means if I'm standing on grass or a "waste"? Does it drop or boost my stats, or only certain stats, or my movement, or what the @%#&!
When you check an enemy on the battlfield it shows you where they can move to, but it doesn't show where archers can attack to or mages can attack to making it practically impossible to tell if you're in the danger zone or safe.
USER INTERFACE (UI)
One of the worst I've seen in a game for a long time. They tried to be sexy and smart but it's simply painful.
You can only pick one character at a time. Equipping weapons, armour and items is a boring, long and tiring process.
Thank god that you never have to give any character new weapons or armour because they are stuck with what they have from the beginning, but the items is another matter. And since you can only have X amount of characters in a battle and they all have to be leveled up you will be de-equipping and re-equipping the same items over and over and over and over...
Trying to find the information for each character is like pulling teeth. Because you cannot switch from character to character it's requires to be going up and down the chain of menus constantly. Also the buttons you use don't follow convention resulting in pressing the wrong button and the interface doing something other than what you intended.
Choosing which character will join a battle is also not simple. Why couldn't this be simple? You can only have a limited number of characters yet the enemies can have many many more.... how does that make sense. What are your other party members doing, sitting around with their thumbs up their butts while you're getting slaughtered? They wanted to be so clever and depart from convention but they forgot that this aspect of the game has never made much sense and it still stands out like a sore thumb.
Between battles you can send characters on missions, but that means they will miss the following battle. You have way too many options all of which are so horribly explained that you can't tell one mission from the other. They all have generic explanations which have nothing to do with what kind of upgrade they will bestow on the character sent. Some of these mission are consecutive so you have to send the same character X times in order to upgrade their weapon or increase in some vague and random manner. However nowhere does it show you how many times they have to be sent or how many times they have been sent, so you need to write all this down on paper or try to remember from memory. It really really really SUCKS!
Also since most of these mission are unimportant it's easy to send someone on a mission that gets you diddly squat. This extra convoluted mission system needs to be streamlined, cutdown or removed completely in order to drive players into frothing frenzies
of anger and violent hatred.
CAMERA
Top down camera for battles and a side view camera for when your character is attacking. Pretty good, no complaints here.
ART & ENVIRONMENT
The top down environments are really boring and bland. The characters portraits are especially hideous and they take a bit of getting used to. Reminds me of those Japanese cartoon drawings that my students in junior high school used to scribble on their note books.
It looks like the anime but all the angles are kinda wrong, a bit like the way pokemon looks, all cheap and half assed.
Compare this to the 2D characters used in the battle sequences and you get a big surprise. They are lavishly drawn and animated.
They look awesome and I wish, I wish so much that you would see these characters more in the game. The top down characters aren't bad either on the battle maps. In all there is some seriously good art stuff going on kinda mashed in with some generic looking and plain bad visuals.
LEVEL DESIGN
The difficulty curve is busted pretty bad. Some maps are super open, while others have choke points in bizarre places. Some enemies are very
aggressive, others simply stand around looking stupid until you mop the floor with them. Because it's a strategy game it requires major testing and balancing and I guess they did some but probably not near enough.
Since you send certain characters on missions to get better weapons or upgrades and stuff you can really get your ass handed to you just by missing that 1 exra character or two. That's where the grinding comes in and sometimes not even that is enough for you to pull off the victory that you were hoping to have.
MUSIC & VOICE ACTING
Atrocious as all DS musak is. I turned it off because it gave me a headache with it's plinky plinky 8 bit soundtrack of endlessly looping 5 second tunes.
CONCLUSION
This game is like my guilty pleasure. It's got a lot of kinks and bad things going on but it's done in such a way that I can't help but keep coming back trying it again and again. Not sure how much this game retails now but unless you're an SRPG kinda person I wouldn't recommend it. If however you like SRPGs and don't mind the anime dribble that contaminates this game than it's worth a look, if for anything than for a system that hasn't been seen too often, and actually comes off fairly well.