Dawn of the Conquista — Actively User Unfriendly
May 20th, 2020
How are you so bad at making a basic SRPG, Eushully?
As the title and the above hook probably give away, I'm not a big fan of Eushully's newest SRPG. And yes, Dawn of the Conquistia is a somewhat poor translation of the title. It's a pun/homophone of dawn using the kanji for heaven/hell. But are we here for linguistic explanations of bad puns in a badly designed Bunny Black ripoff? Nah. That's probably a little unfair to call it such though, despite the protagonist being a vat-grown clone of Darx.
As usual, I skimmed the story at most, although there's not really any of it in the trial to begin with. It's probably a bit more accurate to describe it as Himegari with angels instead of demons, and using Divine Rhapsody's engine. That right there should set off a bunch of warning flags, because Rhapsody was unwieldy and unmanageable crap. Luckily, it's still using Himegari/Kamidori/Amayui's actual engine as the skeleton holding it together with things like leveling, equipment, and skills, but the musculature and outside parts remain a painful to use mess, made worse by these trial battles being grindy as all hell.
Seriously. The first battle it tosses you into has, if I remember right, three slimes and two undines, but everything has ~20 HP, your characters average only around 5-6 damage per attack, the slimes regen a healthy chunk of HP each turn, and the undines cast healing magic that recovers ~15 HP, you have no ranged units, and everything only moves 3-4 squares at most. If you can't surround something, it takes a solid 3-4 turns of just wailing on it to kill it, and it takes that long to surround an enemy anyway. It's a goddamned slog with no strategy except to beat your head against the walls.
But even something as simple as choosing where you want a unit to move is an overdesigned mess. You choose a square to move to, and then the unit is there. Period. You can't cancel if they're in the wrong spot, or you didn't realize that the ranged attack didn't reach. And by the way, you don't get to see the attack range for ranged skills unless you choose a unit and set their move spot. There's only the rewind turn button (a poorly thought out band-aid for other bad mechanics that encourage savescumming), which whites out the entire map and kicks you back a move. Being able to cancel and reposition a unit has been a standard in SRPGs since… Christ, since the NES era, I'm pretty sure, if not earlier than that. Why do you need an awkward workaround here?
Anyway, the core gimmick/mechanic of the game is that all your female units have a pansexual seduction kind of attack. Enemies have an extra health bar for that. That determined whether you capture them when you kill them. Most of the main units will max it out in one use, so it's largely just a question of whether or not you've used that one extra attack on each unit. Captured units can then either be recruited or sacrificed into money, and yes, of course the female units are raped into recruitment, by a particularly creepily faceless protagonist at that.
Which is to say that I'm not much of a fan. It's far more simplistic than even Kamidori was, and yet so much more difficult and painful to engage with on every level. I'm mostly confused that Eushully is struggling with things they got right half a decade ago. Basic things! At this point, they could just straight up re-release Kamidori with different character designs and a new story, and it would be a vast improvement over any of their recent SRPGs in just about every aspect. Well, except perhaps stoking the angel/valkyrie fetish, but it's not like there was any lack of those with Melodiana and Elizasleyn, and they were both already fantastic.
Posted in Dawn of Conquest | 4 Comments »
Ah, was looking forward to reading the yearly Eushully trial impressions. Unfortunate to hear the same old song and dance as of recent years. Sounds like the early fights aren’t too well designed in terms of respecting the player’s time. I think good srpgs are more like puzzle games but with multiple solutions of varying degrees of success. Any padding shouldn’t really exist since srpgs take a lot of time even without it. Oh well, see ya next year, and hopefully the news will be better.