天下制覇

How appropriate.

As long… very long… time readers might recall, my general approach to a new game or trial is to skip through it to get to the gameplay and see if this is something I actually want to go back and spend the inevitable hour or two of prologue for most before getting to the fun. Since I’m the kind of guy who likes playing with all the toys in the box, I have a particular love for RPGs with large party systems that encourage mass use. Or maybe I just like controlling things I can describe as swarms. Ogre Battle, Soul Nomad, Dragon Force, even smaller things like Mana Khemia and BoF4, all favorites. Martopia’s an upcoming game by a new studio with initial promos showing you as a tactician in charge of a half dozen girls each controlling their own hordes. Alas, and to get to the point of the first sentence, it’s a mess.

The biggest problem is that it’s shallow as hell. For one, the 3×2 grid of participants in battle is a lie. The back row does nothing at all. It’s also just plain slow with next to nothing to do. There are a couple gauges that fill to let you trigger effects in battle Each character has one for an absurdly overpowered special attack, and you as the tactician can do different things, but they all have only a minor effect at best, like healing about 25% of a unit’s life. And you can change one unit’s position between rounds. And that’s it. All you can do is there for 30 seconds watching the little paper figures hop around and gauges tick down. Supposedly there’s a triangle system between ranged, offensive, and defensive units, but whatever effect it has is so minor that I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t exist at all. You can’t speed it up with Ctrl either, which is shocking to me in this day and age.

And then there’s all the things that I can only imagine were implemented by mad people. Unlick every other game made in the last decade, right clicking doesn’t back you out of any menu at all, so you’re constantly hunting all over for the X or Back buttons. There’s a map where you select where to go for the next event, but there was never once more than one choice so I have no idea whatsoever why the map exists at all. The last battle in it is against a robo-grandma, which sounds amusing on paper, but first, there’s the above so nothing to actually do in battle, and second, every time she attacks, the clock and all your units stop, so the already slow and uninvolved battles are even slower.

And on top of it all, it’s just a technical mess. Granted, my laptop isn’t the most powerful piece of hardware, but there’s so much loading for so little. And sometimes it just bugs out. I’ve had units run over and attack empty space, and while they’re supposed to immediately switch to attacking another unit when they finish off the first one, it takes about five seconds for the game to actually understand that the target has switched. If you use their special attack during that time, you’ll get to watch the (unskippable!) lame little special attack empty space. And as you can see in the Robo-Grandma clip above (about 3:30 in) using a special attack while it’s attacking just makes it visually glitch the hell out.

So this was a tremendous disappointment. Not quite on par with Death March’s fiasco of a trial, but far beneath anything else I spent time with over the last month. I didn’t feel tempted at all to even prod at the story, although it begins with a sickly girl in bed before the protagonist wakes up in Fairy Tale Land, so I think I can probably make a good guess. Feh, says I. Feh!