Sunday, April 24, 2005

La Same



After playing though Katamari Damacy and finishing it, then playing it again some more, I decided to check out La Pucelle Tactics today. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a while now, so I thought it was about time I actually played it.

As with most of Nippon Ichi’s SRPG’s it takes some time to get used to the new game system and it’s pretty much the same with La Pucelle Tactics. The battle system is pretty much the same as Disgaea, where you dispatch you characters to defeat the enemy. Also similar to Disgaea’s geo system is that La Pucelle has a dark energy system which can be altered, and then destroyed to produce powerful combos, and while it’s not overly complicated it does take some time to get used to.

Where as Disgaea and Phantom Brave allowed you to create characters, it seems La Pucelle required you to “Purify” monsters who once defeated will join you team and battle for you. With these monsters you can then train them and build their stats to create powerful aids in battle, none of which I have gotten into yet.

One thing that is quite good is that like Disgaea you can use characters close together produce combination attacks on an enemy. Also the counter attack system is quite good and allows for some decent extra damaged to be dealt even when it’s not your turn. Though one thing that I’m still undecided about is how the battles are played out. Instead of you character just attacking on the battlefield, the game fades to a separate close up of the action and it plays out from there. It’s all well and good, and looks nice, but takes so goddamn long to go from Battlefield to Fight Sequence and then back to the Battlefield, especially when it happens several times.

So far of what I’ve played the game seems very similar in style and gameplay to Disgaea and isn’t anywhere as hard as either Disgaea or Phantom Brave. Maybe it’s just me, but La Pucelle Tactics just seems to be more of the same, which is great if you’re a fan, but I think I’m just loosing interest. Especially as the cut scenes seem to take forever and are very slow. I might play further into it and see if it grabs me, but I really don’t know, maybe some other time.

I’ve got Initial D and Beatmania IIDX9 arriving next week so I’ll post up some info on those. Can’t wait to get into Beatmania again, it’s been quite a while.