Done with the first playthrough. I was really impressed. That was way better than I expected. I thought the game got into the top 101 by being an inside joke game like Planescape, but no, the gameplay is really good with an addicting one-more-turn quality, and the story is oddly interesting. Having one item per unit is great, plenty of choices with vague consequences, interesting people to conquer instead of anonymous mooks, fun music, great visuals.
I didn't care for the porn, and wish there was an option to disable it, but I can't say there wasn't something addicting in playing girl Pokemon (there's a nes game about collecting generals that's much closer in spirit, does anyone remember the name?). The first twenty or thirty turns I was on my way to conquer JAPAN, but than I made the wrong war declaration and lost a lot of steam. Next playthrough I'll try to win it in less than 60 turns, though it looks impossible.
I really like that the scoring system was used as a soft losing condition... you can't really lose the game since you can always spend turns growing the army, but this will lose you points, so there's a system for players to lower the difficulty if they need to, by deciding how much they care about points. In most games where grinding can be used to adjust difficulty it has no downside, and it sometimes seems like the only disadvantage to grinding as a strategy is that it's boring. Here grinding is completely effortless (pass turns doing nothing), but it's discouraged through means that only challenge seeking players might care about. It's really elegant, and I'm sure others games have done it though I've probably missed them. This could be an interesting alternative to story-mode difficulty levels used in many RPGs, where the players could choose instead to lose points to auto-win fights, or spend points to boost their characters. So if a casual player gets stuck he can add 6 strength and win, and the devs wouldn't have to create and balance another difficulty level. Are there any other long form games (so no short arcade games, smhups, srpgs) that use scoring in a similar manner?
Anyway,
what should I play next:
- Romance of the three kingdoms 11
- Celtic Tales
- Dark Sun - Shattered Lands
- Continue Elminage Gothic
