The Witch and The Hundred Knightsi think someone warned me this would be bad (was it bebs? he's the most likely culprit) whoever it was,they were right... here's the thing unlike every NIS game ever this game is an action rpg instead of being an SRPG and these guys really don't know how to do one... it's also in full 3D with absolutely no 2D sprite in sight
the controls are somewhat clunky and your options are pretty much limited to attacking and dodging,the enemies trudge around and do nothing other than bum rush you (frustatingly enough,sometimes enough enemies appear on the screen,bumrush you all at once and kill you before you even a chance to react in the first place or force you to play hit & run tactics) enemies are always at your same level so there is no way to power level your way through the game in the most anti-NIS move i've ever seen and i swear it took me forever before the game decided forest enviroment were enough
weapon are also divided in 3 kind,most enemies resist some kind of weapon forcing you to switch all the time or alternatively running away which makes combat against certain enemies very annoying... you can make custom combo where you swing different type of weapons in different part of the combo (so like the first hit is a sword attack,the second hit is an hammer attack,and the third hit is a magic attack) but then you'd find yourself in a situation where half of your attack deal shitty damage
if that wasn't enough to sour the whole thing,you have a limit to how much you can stay around in a dungeon in the form of a hunger meter (which the game call the giga-cal meter), such a feature make sense in game like roguelike to give a player the much needed boot in the ass so that he doesn't spend too much dilly dallying but here checkpoint are super frequent so there is really no reason to have one, and it's even worse because everytime you run out of giga-cal the only way to recharge it is to warp back to your home base and back to the level again which force you to suffer two 40-50 second long loading screens for no reason at all
the game has a bunch of other features but they are all badly explained in the form of tips screen while the game is loading or just introduced once and then forgotten forever (which is pretty funny when you consider the game start with a lenghty tutorial about dumb stuff like "PUSH STICK TO MOVE!") which like the enemies that are always your level is very un-nis like considering how their game often have huge help section explaining lot of stuff
some feature include a karma value which dictate how town NPC react to you,enemies that drop special purple thing called anima which you can use to buy special perk, and a somewhat half assed job system where you can switch your weapon proficencies and stat by changing helmet,there is another feature where you can barge inside a home,punch the habitant of the home and claim the item they own for yourself but the whole thing basicaly boils down to being to an higher level than the house so while it sounds cool on paper,it just ends up being a boring level check
if there is two thing i enjoy in this game the first would be the OST,it's pretty good
i especialy like the music when you enter a town,very laytonesque
the second would be the character,the plot focus on this witch called metallia, basicaly she decided to conquer the world but she can't do so because she can only move inside her swamp so she summon this demon which she decide to call the hundred knight (which is what you play as) so that the hundred knight can expand her domain by making the swamp bigger and therefore letting her fight with all the other witches
and here's the thing,metallia is as far as removed from a JRPG hero as you can get,she's sadistic,mean and use enough swear word to make a GTA game blush, if you played soul nomad it's basicaly like she's gig,with boobs and without any plot device holding her up,in fact most review i've read point how exagerated this is and how they hate it and i've even seen a
gaf thread mentioning an early scene (which is not as graphic as the poster make it sounds mind you) where she turns another witch into a mouse and then summon a "bunch of horny little boys mice" (actual in-game text!)
here's another early scene where she kidnap,bound and turn into a giant this princess turned into an half-dog in an unholy trifecta of animu shame
spoiler (click to show/hide)
mmm what else,the last thing worth mentioning would be the boss,there are a lot of them and there is a gimmick with them where you always deal shitty damage to them unless you hit them as they are doing their own attack animation which force you to play somewhat smarter when fighting them at least
