天下制覇

I feel like I should say something.

Do note that I haven’t beaten it yet, but since a lot of people have been looking forward to it, I thought a little mini-review based on about fiveish hours of playing was in order. Also, I’m not sure how much more I will be playing it since I do not particularly like it. And I do like Kamidori… at least when it’s not glitching up my saved games.

Part of why I love Daibanchou is the challenge and variety that makes it replayable. Even knowing exactly what to do, District and early National chapters are intense, plus differences based on the characters you recruit. Moreso if you’re trying to maximize everything. Daiteikoku… has none of that. The challenge is basically nonexistent, and when you do run into issues, it’s of the Persona variety where you’re going to be one-shot… unless you reload and prepare for it appropriately, where you will then clear it easily. HP speed, weapon type, and damage are the only four battle ‘stats’ in the game… and speed only matters when you and the enemy use the same weapon types. The major problem being that unlike the previous Dais, there is almost no notion of attrition at all. You’re either going to slaughter the enemy, or they’re going to slaughter you. So then you hit a wall… that was impossible to see, get a game over, reload, and do something different or upgrade until you pass the threshhold so that you’re stronger and keep going until you hit another wall.

Most of the management has been toned down too. You get to build something when you conquer a new system that gives some bonus (+recovery, +resources, etc), so again, simplistic.  Tech points are used to ‘buy’ new classes of ships to build… and that’s the extent of the research system. Peacekeeping was carried over from BBA (but basically no other aspects of its unit/regional management), but it’s more a matter of deploying enough units in each region, which unfortunately means that if you prefer to aggressively expand like me, then you’re often going to be stymied by a lack of units. Units are also disappointingly samey, and more dependant on the ships you have rather than the character or their traits.

As for characters/interaction, whereas Daibanchou had multiple phases (prison, heroine, regional, and character) to all do things, outside of combat, Daiteikoku combines them all into one event, once a turn. Recruiting a unit from prison, visiting an ally, everything. That becomes an especially painful later in the game when there are 30+ events in the queue and you just have a scrollbar to go through all of them with very few of them actually having a point. It’s nice that you can’t do ‘useless’ events, but if you’re like me, you end up having to use most of them recruiting just to let you actually keep playing the game instead of sitting there in defensive ‘battles’ where the enemy sends peashooters into the maw of your armada over and over again. I could have built a city out of the scrap of Gamerican ships they sent straight into a battery of death beams.

Togo, the protagonist, is also extremely weak. His only personality traits are that he’s a slacker and likes to have sex… which is convenient because half the women in space are apparently eager to jump into bed with him the moment he says hello. He’s basically cut from the same cloth as Alicesoft’s Shaman Sanctuary/BBH/Escalayer protagonists… a mobile penis whose two jobs are to have sex and whine about having to do anything else. There are a lot of comparisons to be made to Tact and Lester, especially since his adjutant starts off with a stress ulcer, but unlike Tact, Togo starts the game with an armada and everybody, men and women, inexplicably awestruck by him. I think it’s because you can’t unequip the flagship from his unit. It’s certainly not for his tactical mind or wit. The other central characters are not great either, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is just because Togo is so boring and lacks chemistry with any of them… or any personal drive at all. Even Akuji at least had a personality. A repugnant one, but at least he made me feel something about him.

It also bears mentioning that it really bothers me that most of almost every turn is spent watching what all the other factions are doing while the protagonists get a clear minority of events. I can only imagine how irritating watching those same thingss play out over and over again with absolutely no control or influence on them would be on subsequent games. Hell, just skipping through them when I made that little intro vid above was irritating enough. Now imagine it once the Soviets, Gamericans, Germany, AND Aeris (British) all have events… plus the random little factions too.

So, in brief, very simplistic engine, minimal good challenge with a lot of frustrating reloading in its place, little depth, meh characters. I cannot imagine it has any replay value either, which is really kind of a killer for an SRPG that lacks challenge. I could not care less about the art or WW2 setting either, and even if I did, it would not suddenly make the engine compelling or interesting. I’m fighting to just finish a single run off so I can go back to slacking off at Kamidori instead of working on EL like I should be. At least RagnaROCK had the grace to be mercifully short. Well, this is pretty damn short too considering that I’ve conquered nearly half the map in a single afternoon. It makes me wonder just where the hell that supposedly 100,000 line script they were crowing about is hiding.