天下制覇

…Just make another Meister game, you putzes.

Eushully released the trial for their upcoming SRPG yesterday, so as I generally do before I invest the time into actually reading anything, I sped through all the blathering to get to… about twenty minutes of tutorials. I staggered on a little bit further, so here’s my first impressions of what’s clearly meant to be the spiritual successor to another game I’m a little familiar with after about 90 minutes and minimal reading. Besides, it’s about some schmuck who wants to work hard, is blithely oblivious to women, and attracts a swarm of elemental/monster girls with a magnetic attraction to his dick. I don’t think we’re talking Proust here. 

If the title to this post didn’t give it away, I’ll spell it out here. This game mystifies me. It badly needs about an hour of usability testing, or just some five year old child to ask them “Why the hell did you implement it like this?” The bigger problem is that it needed that probably about four months of game design ago. It’s filled with a thousand little incomprehensible niggles that I cannot for the life of me understand why they implemented it like they did and an interface that is a gigantic mass of over-explained crap where even bloody arrows have to have a textual explanation attached. And niggles frustrate. And grate. And grind. You either adapt to them, or like a mosquito in your ear, they slowly drive you insane. I am not, generally speaking, in the ‘adapt to them’ category and writing this all out just made the bile froth far more than when I started.

It’s very obviously built off of Kamidori’s engine, but more of a Final Fantasy Tactics setup than Fire Emblem. And of course, hex based with height being a thing now too. Like Kamidori, you deploy units, wander around a map, and kill monsters to fulfill objectives, typically killing everything that moves. The four big changes to the SRPG part are the RNG being pretty much kicked in the teeth and told to piss off, the zone of control system being overhauled to areas around units depending on unit type instead of claimed tiles, positioning actually mattering, and a shared MP meter basically that also governs unit summoning. It’s not a crafting game at all, so there’s also nothing like harvest points, monster drops, etc. Not even stuff like hidden areas or monster lairs, at least in the trial.

Instead of a regular leveling system, it also decided to gimmick the hell out of everything. You collect Medals which are basically Kamidori’s skills. Each has a cost (think Paper Mario’s badges) and a type, with different characters having different sets of types of Medals to equip. You can trade Medals at the store for other Medals (based on the Medal cost, no money involved). There’s no experience system. You get little glyphs from completing objectives which you use to fill in a sphere grid thingy where completing lines counts as a level up and gives an additional bonuses. Above and beyond that, you also get extra points (freely changeable out of battle) to put into your weapon stats.

  

Let’s start with the hexes then. They cause a number of problems, especially with the isometric view, starting with the optical illusions of extra ones when there’s a decent height difference between tiles. Anyway, Kamidori used big arrows to show you direction of attack and movement, which were minimally important there, but are much more now thanks to the ZoC system. Here, the tiles you roll over just get highlighted. Oh, and zones of control are also highlighted, as are all the spaces you can move in, so as you’re trying to actually do an action, good bloody luck being able to tell at a glance if your unit is attacking from the direction you want them to. If you zoom out, it gets even harder to tell since the highlighting is so dim to being with and green highlights on top of blue squares over red ZoC markers with blue text in every movable square does not an easy to comprehend system make. Especially if you zoom out so you can actually see the whole map.

And speaking of attacking, let’s go back to Kamidori again and remember how streamlined it was.
“I want to attack” -> click on an enemy.
“What do you want to attack with?” -> select skill -> confirm
This is a perfectly functional system used in bazillions of SRPGs, so why would you do that in bloody reverse? And what’s more, make it non-context sensitive? Is that enemy in your mage’s magic range? First you need to select one of the multiple spells. You know, all those nigh identical buttons in the lower right stacked up on top of each other instead of a sane menu? Otherwise, you’re just getting melee all the way. Want to destroy that rock in your path, which is the only possible way your character with the rock destroying skill can interact with it? Well you can’t just click on it. You have to select the skill for doing that and then and only then can you destroy the rock. Want to use some special skill to attack an enemy? Well, if you click on them because your thought process “I want to attack, but with what?” instead of “I want to use a skill, but on what?”, you’re using your standard attack. Granted, this is mitigated somewhat by the existence of an “Undo last move” button, but that’s addressing the problem in entirely the wrong way.

  

And then there are the things that simply mystify me. For example, you can trade Medals for other Medals. In the shop where you do that, there are these huge Medal tabs that you can… highlight only. Click on them? Does nothing. Only clicking on the button part of the entire big thing display does jack. Why even bother highlighting them then? Or when you’re allowed to equip Medals. In town, and in the pre-dungeon screen. On the world map? Hells no. Yeah, there’s a party button, but that’s just for looking at things. If you want to change your equipment, you’ll be needing to select an area, select a dungeon/select to enter the city, and then hit the “Medal Equipment” button. I don’t understand the thought process here.

And let’s do a little math with the sphere grid/bingo board that controls leveling. There are at least 25 playable characters and three books. From the way the books are arranged, I’m pretty sure there are a hell of a lot more books than that, but we’re already at seventy goddamned five bingo boards. You are going to periodically have to scroll through every character and fill that crap in, in addition to manually assigning the weapon stat points as you go. On top of that, aside from main attack type, the main defining difference between characters are the Medals equipped, so unless they later on start introducing a ton of character-specific Medals, they’re all generic’ed up as all hell compared to Kamidori’s characters all having their own roles and specialties setting them apart from each other. It reeks of laziness. There’s absolutely no reason to replay maps either. No money to be gained or experience to be earned. Only objectives to clear if you missed them. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from putting treasures (or locked chests) in blocked areas, so look forward to going back to that tutorial map you solo cleared after a few more maps when you finally have Medals for unlocking chests and cutting high grass.

    

Again, I didn’t even so much as read anything above and beyond the character descriptions on the website months ago with such greats as “works hard and is oblivious,” “is childhood friend,” and “is mollusk,” so maybe it’s the literary masterpiece that Eushully has been waiting its life to make. I wouldn’t know. The interface is a bloody fantastic example of how poor implementation and design can vomit all over everything else. There could be an okay, if generic, SRPG with simply ungodly amounts of micromanagement underneath it all, maybe they still have time to fix a bunch of these issues, and I suppose it’s certainly not as offensively untested as Daiteikoku was or has as godawful of a mess of an interface as Xuse/Eternal tends toward, but the way this trial flaunts every half-decent SRPG design mechanic, including so many they did very well in Kamidori, is extraordinarily frustrating and disappointing.