The King of Bretwalde is dead. His passing, both unexpected and unusual, leaves the kingdom in distress. As one realm mourns, another readies for war; the Grand Meir Empire, intent on conquering the world, prepares to strike the empty throne. Taken by surprise, the army of Bretwalde collapses under the vicious assault, and the capital city of Egvard is quick to fall. Only Spanta, the sacred blade, can spare the kingdom of its fate. Free it of its curse and restore honor and peace to the land!
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Game is way too hard, I'm only here for Cotton. Game is big and you definitely get your money's worth from it
Rondo of Swords is, like, 2 or 3 small tweaks away from being a great game. But as it is, there's some glaring issues that only get worse as the game progresses. Which is really a shame considering the wrinkles it adds to typical grid-based SRPG combat are all genius.
Melee units attack during their movement by tracing a path through an enemy unit and into one of the squares on the other 3 sides as long as one is open. No other open adjacent squares, no attacking. Unless the enemy is next to another enemy unit and the attacker's speed gives them enough tiles of movement to trace through any additional enemies and eventually reach clear ground.
But hitting/getting hit from behind increases damage significantly, so using all your movement to just barely pop out the other side of an enemy group with your back facing them is a death sentence. Unless you have a heavy unit with the ability to completely block enemy movement through their tile in position to swoop in afterward and cover their back.
But if you move the heavy unit in front of your attacking unit's path first, the attacking unit can run through the heavy to get a buff and maybe start doing enough damage to one-shot the enemies. Unless that would risk filling their "OverBreak" meter too much from the kills and start pulling enemy focus away from the high OverBreak unit you're using to steer the enemy AI toward a chokepoint.
All of those different stats and rules are constantly tugging on eachother during every turn of every map, and when it works there's nothing else out there quite like it. There's even a super cool non-telegraphed story decision you can make by just not attacking a specific character at a specific point, and it totally lands because the game is rewarding you for being unwilling to do something completely monstrous.
Unfortunately the ranged/magic units are extremely uninteresting compared to melee, the downtime systems are very bare-bones and RNG dependent, and (most frustratingly) the difficulty level after a certain point is just absurd. Maps have a hard cap on the number of allowed units that's constant for the entire game and feels waaaaaaay too low. And that's just the max. Some missions' unit caps dip below even that.
But even if the cap was higher you'd still be constantly running short on units since characters that lose all HP in a battle can't be used in the next battle. There's no permadeath thankfully, but the forced benching can result in situations where you literally do not have access to the units you need to clear the next map.
Case in point, I've never finished the game and probably never will barring a complete restart. My save has been stuck on a map just past the big story choice for the better part of a decade now, all because the units I have are the opposite of the ones I need.
I just hope another developer rips off this combat system wholesale and attaches it to a less punishing game some day. It deserves a second chance to shine.
Melee units attack during their movement by tracing a path through an enemy unit and into one of the squares on the other 3 sides as long as one is open. No other open adjacent squares, no attacking. Unless the enemy is next to another enemy unit and the attacker's speed gives them enough tiles of movement to trace through any additional enemies and eventually reach clear ground.
But hitting/getting hit from behind increases damage significantly, so using all your movement to just barely pop out the other side of an enemy group with your back facing them is a death sentence. Unless you have a heavy unit with the ability to completely block enemy movement through their tile in position to swoop in afterward and cover their back.
But if you move the heavy unit in front of your attacking unit's path first, the attacking unit can run through the heavy to get a buff and maybe start doing enough damage to one-shot the enemies. Unless that would risk filling their "OverBreak" meter too much from the kills and start pulling enemy focus away from the high OverBreak unit you're using to steer the enemy AI toward a chokepoint.
All of those different stats and rules are constantly tugging on eachother during every turn of every map, and when it works there's nothing else out there quite like it. There's even a super cool non-telegraphed story decision you can make by just not attacking a specific character at a specific point, and it totally lands because the game is rewarding you for being unwilling to do something completely monstrous.
Unfortunately the ranged/magic units are extremely uninteresting compared to melee, the downtime systems are very bare-bones and RNG dependent, and (most frustratingly) the difficulty level after a certain point is just absurd. Maps have a hard cap on the number of allowed units that's constant for the entire game and feels waaaaaaay too low. And that's just the max. Some missions' unit caps dip below even that.
But even if the cap was higher you'd still be constantly running short on units since characters that lose all HP in a battle can't be used in the next battle. There's no permadeath thankfully, but the forced benching can result in situations where you literally do not have access to the units you need to clear the next map.
Case in point, I've never finished the game and probably never will barring a complete restart. My save has been stuck on a map just past the big story choice for the better part of a decade now, all because the units I have are the opposite of the ones I need.
I just hope another developer rips off this combat system wholesale and attaches it to a less punishing game some day. It deserves a second chance to shine.
wow, i played an atlus game before knowing about atlus! i played this in elementary school, and it was pretty fun and unique! (at least i thought that when i was a kid).
I once spent an afternoon discovering I'm crap at Draughts. Lost about five games in a row. What I thought were good moves invariably turned out to be bad moves. I felt like my brain was incompatible with the requirements of the game, even though I understood all the rules. Very frustrating, haven't played since. But then it's a pretty basic game, not particularly exciting, am I really missing out by just leaving it behind? Nope. Sometimes it's fine to walk away and find better things to do.