Lacking the depth of a real turn based strategy game. Atlus, please don't keep this up.
Game-Play: 5.5
Visuals: 8
Sound: 7.5
Replay: 6
Overall: 7.0
Synopsis: You play as a young prince who is actually the once heroic body guard of a once powerful kingdom. The actual prince is mortally wounded and hands over his crown to his double look a like body guard to act as him and continue the strife of his kingdom. The story line is quite good as it has you travel across a foreign land to defeat the tyranny of a kingdom.
Game-Play: Okay, Atlus, I have been playing their games since I would have to guess around 1999 or so. I have been buying Atlus games since and this has to be one of the most oddball games of their type. Atlus is famous for creating tactics games that incorporate CG art characters that exchange glances through sometimes audio played conversations. Rondo of Swords down grades to a 16bit CG look and no audio. We'll get to that later.
Many people enjoy this game, I however did not. If you are a lover of tactical games, you may want to question buying this one. It fails to really deliver a good sense of tactics and or role play leveling. And here goes my hard strife upon this game, but first, let's talk about the good.
In this game you use tactical streak movements with your characters. What this means is you choose a single character and move them across the field [depending on their movement amount]. They can cross over as many enemies as they want so long as they end up on an empty tile. This leads to combination attacks of hitting multiple foes. We're talking you can hit 3-5 characters at game start with your cavalry character.
Almost all the characters you acquire in the game are melee and thusly are able to hit a few foes. However your foes can do the same thing and can really take a lot of hits and deal them out. This makes you really consider your movement and end turn placement of each character. Your casters can only cast one spell a turn and each spell does something different, from letting out an explosion from an epicenter whether it is ranged or ownself, or a single square ranged attack, or a line of magic torrents down a few squares.
In between battles you can send any character but your main to run errands such as go to towns and buy goods, sell goods, train, go on quests, or excel in their class depending on the given level. These options degrade your team, making you only send certain characters, because when you task them, they cannot come with you on your next battle. Also, each character has other bonus abilities to certain tasks. Such as certain characters can sell more or buy more.
You gain characters by meeting them in the field of battle and sometimes having certain characters talk to them [by moving them next to them]. Towards the end of the game you can promote your characters to become a mighty tool, well most of them. Also, when you beat the game you can play it around again with the same characters.
Now – the bad…
My first hit, and I didn't really realize it till about level 8, you can't train by going back over other or previous levels. The game is as linear as it gets. Anyone remember that potentially great tactics game, Onimusha Tactics? Yea, it's like that, but you can't really change the path you go, until the very end. Otherwise, you're just going battle to battle, continuing through the game, never getting a chance to balance out your characters.
Characters also don't have equipment; they have medals and amulets that birth new skills, immunities, and buffs. It's a cool concept, but it feels like a child pushed it all together to avoid having to make tiered weapons and armor. You also cannot buy the items you want, you have to rely on characters purchasing random items off of a vague list of 6-8 selectable categories and sending them with a budget. Oh yea, 10% chance, you'll get robbed and your character will come back with nothing.
You can choose to train your character which boosts a single stat significantly, but at the same time, it risks that person falling behind in level/skills/stats. It sometimes doesn't even feel worth it. Your mages are not even effective until later on, that is, if you can keep them alive. The game isn't so much tactics at the heart of strategy, but more so a rush to kill everyone and avoid being in a running line of the enemy [where as in FF Tactics, you actually moved accordingly to class].
The game feels like there are only two classes. Mage and Melee. That is because that is it. Their skills often overlap each other and many of the battles require you to have all your characters present, ready to fight.
Some of the characters are seriously unbalanced, and not in a good way. They will honestly give you a half leveled character that has no attributes that will help them excel past the rest of the litter. The game is of medium length and really the story is the only thing that kept me going through it. Some of the stages seem impossible and the set up of them isn't even fun to go through because it's just a game of trial and error.
Visuals: The visuals are decent. It is your average sprite game with 16bit CG. The animations are a step above FFIII, larger sprites, a bit more depth in the movements, but really you will find yourself skipping the needless length of the running/sprinting characters. It's almost as senseless as Pokemon Stadium.
Sound: The sound is alright, the music is decent and really it's just like playing a SNES game as far as sound and graphics are concerned.
Replay: You will probably replay the game if you make it to the end because you can keep playing with your current characters.
Conclusion: This is the biggest disappointment in Atlus gaming. I hope it isn't a consistency with them. The game doesn't come close to being as in depth as your current tactics games. Heck – heroes of mana was better than this. The game features a few new ways to play, but they're not novelties to keep going in the genre of turn based strategy. The story is told by a marquee of words in between each battle and you never get a chance to really experiment with your characters, they will always be what they are.
I would suggest you rent or borrow this game. If you don't like the first 10 levels, you won't like it at all the rest of the way.
I was going to give this a lower score, but the story and the arc at the end is actually pretty decent.