Jeanne d'Arc is a tactical role-playing video game loosely based on the story of Joan of Arc and her struggles against the English occupation of France during the Hundred Years' War in the early 15th century. The game has an amount of historical accuracy when it comes to the cast of characters, and contains many who were contemporaries and allies of Joan of Arc. This contrasts starkly with the many fantasy elements of the game, such as characters possessing magical armlets that give the wearer special abilities, and the suggestion that King Henry VI of England was possessed by demons and used them to aid his armies in destroying France during the Hundred Years' War.
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Very solid if unremarkable tactics rpg.
Gameplay feels kind of halfway between fire emblem (separate enemy and player phases, greater emphasis on positioning) and ff tactics (smaller maps, lot of ranged and aoe attacks flying around.)
Difficulty is a bit low. I found myself grinding a bit in the first third just to keep pace with enemy levels but as the game goes on units get a lot more options and the level curve seems to smooth out. By the last third the game was definitely too easy.
Story feels pretty flat, I think mostly down to mediocre dialogue and character writing. Characters would definitely benefit from extra dialogue outside of cutscenes, but to the game's credit there is an attempt to keep even the early game nobodies present in cutscenes throughout.
The skill binding system is a lot of fun, and generally pretty balanced. Some skills are better than others of course but no one skill breaks the game wide open as far as I can tell. Character building with skills is a bit shallow though as the limited slots fill up quickly with hp, attack, and mobility boosts before you get to the interesting stuff.
Visually the game is fine, though the in-game artstyle is way lamer than the box art would have you believe. Sometimes the field can get cluttered, and there are no zoom options. The game drags a lot between phases, moves, etc., which isn't too noticeable normally but becomes a huge slog as soon as you try to do anything repetitive like grinding or the colosseum.
Overall totally solid fun game, and while the difficulty is kind of low, with free grinding available and lots of skills to collect this might be to the game's benefit.
Gameplay feels kind of halfway between fire emblem (separate enemy and player phases, greater emphasis on positioning) and ff tactics (smaller maps, lot of ranged and aoe attacks flying around.)
Difficulty is a bit low. I found myself grinding a bit in the first third just to keep pace with enemy levels but as the game goes on units get a lot more options and the level curve seems to smooth out. By the last third the game was definitely too easy.
Story feels pretty flat, I think mostly down to mediocre dialogue and character writing. Characters would definitely benefit from extra dialogue outside of cutscenes, but to the game's credit there is an attempt to keep even the early game nobodies present in cutscenes throughout.
The skill binding system is a lot of fun, and generally pretty balanced. Some skills are better than others of course but no one skill breaks the game wide open as far as I can tell. Character building with skills is a bit shallow though as the limited slots fill up quickly with hp, attack, and mobility boosts before you get to the interesting stuff.
Visually the game is fine, though the in-game artstyle is way lamer than the box art would have you believe. Sometimes the field can get cluttered, and there are no zoom options. The game drags a lot between phases, moves, etc., which isn't too noticeable normally but becomes a huge slog as soon as you try to do anything repetitive like grinding or the colosseum.
Overall totally solid fun game, and while the difficulty is kind of low, with free grinding available and lots of skills to collect this might be to the game's benefit.
Cool concept for a tactics game, just didn't keep my attention.
Solid if a bit unremarkable, you will beat this once and never come back.
Totally played it on Vita... yup that was me... uh huh... you hear that FBI agent?
Remember it feeling like an average, run-of-the-mill tactical RPG. Don't remember much from it and should probably give it another look someday.
A 40 hour game with 20 hours worth of content that desperately wants to be FFT at times. Seriously, there's a stage early on with a windmill and a reoccurring antagonist that's camera angle and even font presentation are begging for Antipyretic to start playing.
The pacing and balance drag down what would otherwise be a very good SRPG to one that's just fine, PeevedLatias's review of the gameplay mechanics is excellent and sums up most of my thoughts in that regard. I think those issues would have been easier to swallow if the story wasn't agonizingly slow at points, there's at least 10 different fights that could have been cut from the game and you'd miss nothing of value. There's a lot of cool stuff in this game, and along with the presentation still prop the game up, but this is a grind heavy game with few ways to circumvent that.
Also Gilles de Rais is a main party member, a historical figure who did NOTHING wrong and you should not google.
The pacing and balance drag down what would otherwise be a very good SRPG to one that's just fine, PeevedLatias's review of the gameplay mechanics is excellent and sums up most of my thoughts in that regard. I think those issues would have been easier to swallow if the story wasn't agonizingly slow at points, there's at least 10 different fights that could have been cut from the game and you'd miss nothing of value. There's a lot of cool stuff in this game, and along with the presentation still prop the game up, but this is a grind heavy game with few ways to circumvent that.
Also Gilles de Rais is a main party member, a historical figure who did NOTHING wrong and you should not google.