i've been playing that unchained blades rpg that xseed has recently brought over,it's okayish,plot goes that you play as an uber powerfull dragon and he decides to go bother the goddess of the world so he can discover who's the strongest in the world,but the goddes get pissed at him and send him all back to level 1,he then meets a wacky golem prince and a white mage chick with the power to petrify men and mostly important boobs big and bouncy enough to be featured in at least 3 article about japanese videogame being sexist and after that you simply dungeon crawl in first person a-la wizardry
the game is definitely harder than your average rpg but certainly less hard than what you'd expect by a first person crawl,the main gimmick is that there is a monster collection aspect but you don't use the monster directly in battle,instead you pair monster to characters and they help the character in various way like absorbing blow and doing follow up attacks
the most important part about pairing monsters with characters is that every character has some skills that they can use only when they are paired with certain monsters,so for example the main character is fire-themed and he can use some of his fire shits only when he's paired with a fire monster and an attack monster,if you want to use the more powerfull healing spell you have to pair the healing chick with an healing monster and so on
the big problem with this system is that catching monsters is a huge pain in the ass,each time you strike a monster there is a chance he'll get "unchained" and once he's unchained you can catch him but more often than not you just end up piling all your attack on a single monster and as such he gets unchained only to get killed by the next attack before you have a chance to recruit him,you can try to solve this by attacking multiple monsters but then the chance of the monster getting unchained is so small that in the end you just end up taking more damage for no reason
even more annoying,in some part you have to partecipate in a special battle where all the monster you caught partecipate in a big brawl,so if you don't have enough monster to clear the brawl you have to walk around like an idiot hoping to catch more
there is also a system where you get charisma points depending on how you did on battle,the less damage you take and the more quickly you killed the opposition,the more charisma you gain,when you gain enough charisma,your charisma level ups and you can pair yourself with more monsters/more powerfull monsters
leveling up is a pretty standard affair,when you level up,you get skill points which you spend in a sphere grid like board,most character are themed (so for example the golem is all defense stuff,and the main hero is all about attack and such) some of the more powerfull skill can only be gained when you fill certain parts of the board so you can't go cherry pick
there are a lot of monsters in battle's in fact,it's even possible to get attacked by up to 15 monster (currently the game didn't go over 10 though) when there is a big group of monsters they are usualy lead by a single monster in the center,if you kill the master all of the minion gets affected by a random status ailment which usualy buys you enough time to kill them all before things get nasty
and uhm... really it's sort of an unimpressive game but at the same time i've played worse,i guess someone like borys might dig it
