It doesn't reinvent the genre, but it's still a solid RPG title with loveable characters, easy mechanics and a good plot
The story begins as a couple of teenagers start their pilgrimage across the world. The pilgrimage is a tradition of their village through which teenagers become adults. Jurio and Chris set out from the tiny hamlet of Ragpick to recreate the path of the legendary witches and visit the five shrines spread throughout the continent of Tirasweel. With a Silver Dagger to identify them as pilgrims, the youngsters leave their village without being able to return until they have looked into the five magic mirrors. Obviously, they are in for quite an adventure, as their pilgrimage turns out to be much more dangerous than they expected.
The two protagonists of the story are your typical RPG character classes: Jurio is the fighter, Chris is the magic user and healer. A pet (a rabbit, a dog or a cat) accompanies them in their travels, a quite resourceful furry friend. The pet will find useful items as you run around, and all you have to do is pay attention to the little "smiley face" above its head to receive one. You can also praise or scold your pet, check on its mood and feed it. Depending on what you feed to your pet, it will either use special attacks or support magic in your next battle, which is a great help especially for key fights.
The gameplay follows the cookie-cutter formula: get from here to there, fight whatever in between, get more clues at the next stop.
As you run through the different areas, monsters appear with visible "thought bubbles" above them. Depending on how strong your party is, the creatures will either chase you or run away. You can guess by the color of the thought bubbles if they're worth fighting or not, since you don't always have to kill everything. You can just run and avoid fighting altogether, but you will probably end up finding yourself in an area where you can't kill things because you're too low level. Fighting is important since you will want your characters to beome stronger, but you can pick and choose your battles.
The battle system is typically turn-based. You can have up to a party of four in a battle and select their actions from a plain attack, magic use, item use, special skills or wait. Below each character's portrait you can see a meter that fills up as you kill things. Once it's full, you can unleash your character's finishing move, which deals a great amount of damage. Attacks are only successful if the target is within a character's range, otherwise they will just move closer to the foe.
The world map is fairly large and varied in landscapes. There are many characters to talk to in towns, but only a few will be related to story progression. To make it easier for you, the game places a big red exclamation mark above the person you must talk to next. This is a really great help, since sometimes you are given only a clue as to what to do next.
For example, while on the way to the third shrine, your path to the boat is blocked by seals. You can't go by them and you can't fight them, so your clue is to get something to lure them away. So off you go to find seal food in town, and it's pretty much a run around job until you find the right person that gives you what you need. The game gives you enough to continue, but at the same time, it leaves room for you to find things on your own.
Since there are so many people to talk to, there is quite a bit of story and a lot of trivial dialog, so it's easy to get sidetracked from the main path. You will find interesting books on bookshelves, exchange witty remarks with townspeople and discover humorous conflicts, especially the ones between Jurio and Chris. At a point, you have Chris chasing him tring to wash his underwear, or constantly reminding him about the day he got lost and cried like a little girl. But then you also have Jurio peeking up her skirt whenever she climbs something. There are also a pair of clumsy thieves that provide a lot of comical relief.
Characters are depicted on the map by cute 2D chibi-style sprites and on the dialog screens they all have nicely rendered anime-like artwork. The 3D environments are fairly detailed and colorful, and the areas in the world map range from villages in ruins to forests, to sandy beaches, to spooky dark caves. I was most impressed by little graphic details such as the sun flares and the water effects.
The music is quite pleasant and takes a good background role. A little voice acting might have made the game much more appealing, since I know there are many who don't care for all the reading. Battle shouts for example, instead of the speech bubbles, would have created more impact and given the fights a little something extra.
A really good feature of the game is that you can save your progress anywhere except for in battle or during conversations, which is convenient for a little "on-the-go" RPG experience. The loading times are also minimum.
I really don't see why so many other reviews seem so displeased with The Legend of Heroes II: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch. Sure, it doesn't reinvent the genre, but it's still a solid RPG title with loveable characters, easy mechanics and a good plot.
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