Battle Princess of Arcadia
so yeah another N1 game came out and it was finaly time to give it a spin...
...
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, i'm unimpressed, there is no plot, the character are all unfunny anime stereotype (well except the goose king) who keep flashing their anime stereotype at every occasion (it has not one but two pervert character! but don't worry, one of them is a lesbian! yay for gender equality!) the action is clunky and difficulty spikes that you have to overcome with grinding are plenty
the game is divided into 3 parts, battles, skirmish and raid...
- battles are your standard side scrolling action, you have a 4 hit combo and several other moves like a dashing attack,a launcher to launch enemies into air for air combo's, and you can tag between 3 different character who all have their own move sets, unfortunately monster selection is small and you are going to see the same birds and panda's a lot though new monster like scorpions or poisoned cactus do get introduced once in a while, the stages are small and it's pretty easy going through them just by spamming your normal combo over and over... next!
- next we have... skirmish! in skirmish each character has an army associated to their weapon (so the princess who uses a sword has a swordswomen army, the mage has a mage army and so on) and instead of character duking out, the armies do in the background while you fight enemy commander's so that there is some actual action going on, this is stupid for a number of reasons...
1) the armies have their own level, to raise an army level you have to pay money, LOTS of money
2) there is a rock/paper/scissor system in it but since there are 8 different kind of armies it's more like the variant with spock and the lizard that nobody understand
these two element together kinda promote you to grind so that you can 1) get enough money to level up the army properly and 2) get an army strong enough to ignore the dumb system in the first place, another really dumb thing in skirmish is that you can issue order, but issuing order seems to barely make any difference and the orders are issued with your super attack bar (which increase the more enemy commander you defeat) if the order seems to barely do anything why i would consume my precious bar when using a special attack instead does actualy something?
- lastly we have... raids! raids are your character and your army together against a giant boss, it's nice beating on a giant monster but once again the game screws up on several aspect, the boss has a shield around him which you have to break by hitting him over and over, the boss don't stagger so half of the time you get hit while trying to hit the boss yourself, once the shield break you have pretty much like 10 seconds to deal any sort of damage after which the shield goes back up again and has to be broken again which is annoying! a lot!
in the meanwhile the boss does slow but sweeping attack, if they hit you they usualy take a lot of your health bar but they are easy to dodge (unless of course you get hit in mid-attack) since all you need to do is usualy get behind the boss but depending on your level it's totaly possible to die in 2 hits, which adds to the aggravation, even if you are leveled enough, these attack will usualy kill some of your army, if your whole army dies you get a game over so when your army is running low on soldiers you have to retreat and let your army regroup which usualy leads to you waiting into a corner blocking while the army recharge
and it totaly breaks the momentum of the game! it's like if you were playing street fighter and suddenly ryu was like "wait wait wait! i have to catch my breath" and the whole fight stopped for around half a minute for no reason, oh by the way like skirmish these encounter too feature a super bar which you can use for useless command that won't do much for your army or a special attack that actualy does something
so basicaly the actual action segments (which would be the battle segment) are fine if cheaply done, however when you add the skirmish and raids segment you get something that is complicated for the sake of being complicated, grindy, and put roadblocks on the player way just because! and your prize for doing all this? more boring dialogue about the bubbly hyperactive princess being the bubbly hyperactive princess, the pervert being the pervert, and the old man being the old man
tl;dr N1 got square-enixed
