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.
Solid if a bit unremarkable, you will beat this once and never come back.
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.
Solid tactics game with a nice mix of ideas and a nice bit of difficulty with the limited turns. The armlets are a fun touch, as are story characters that come and go, and the skill stone system was fun to dig into. The graphics are nice, if a little cutesy, though the character models don't really match the characters themselves at times (why are her eyes open when she's sleeping!?). The music was also quite good in this game, especially the main theme. The story can drag quite a bit, and by the end of the game I'd felt I had played more than enough, but I'm still quite happy that I finally got around to playing this one.
This review contains spoilers
Jeanne D'arc is a game that's been bouncing around in my mind for over a decade now. I played it at a friend's place on his PSP when I was little, but never got back to it until this April. I always thought that the game had neat systems from what I remembered, and Fire Emblem Engage's release brought it back into the spotlight for me due to similar mechanics in some ways, so I thought hey, what the hell, time to give it a shot after all this time.
Starting with the positive, from the perspective of a Fire Emblem player mostly when it comes to SRPGs, this game has a few very interesting mechanics. The bracelet transformations are similar to the engage mechanic, but more and less limited at the same time. They last less turns and cannot be used on turn 1, which is weaker, but they also give Godspeed (take another turn every time you land a killing blow) for those turns, which is about as strong as it gets. They also give huge stat bonuses and access to unique skills to boost your damage output. The final difference is that it can only be used once per map, per gem that your bracelet has, which is locked behind story and free quest progress. It's a pretty neat system, and I really like how strong it is since it ties into the gameplay pretty well. Bracelet holders are meant to be insanely strong, and not only is the act of transforming powerful, it also gives you an incentive to get a bunch of finishing blows with those units, giving them a level lead which further feeds into the whole "they are your strongest units" thing.
The mana system is IMO better than anything Fire Emblem has ever come up with for combat arts. While in those games you are either trading HP (easily recovered with a heal from a different unit) or weapon durability (literally just money, who cares) for a boost in power during battle, in this game you are trading the finite resource that is your mana. While in theory you could wait an extra turn to gain more mana back, because every map has a turn limit, you really do not want to do that if you can help it. There are items that let you gain MP back, but you'd waste one of the unit's turn to get it back, since there is no dedicated mana transfer type character. At best, you'd waste someone else's turn to use one such item, but then again, these items are limited so you don't want to use them if you can help it.
A lot of the maps in this game are pretty good. Making you walk up a fortress while being pelted from archers from the top, chasing down a boss who spawns enemies until you kill his first phase, escaping past enemies on a desert plain, and so on. But despite this, if I had to give it a ratio, I'd say it's around half of the maps being pretty good, and then the other half are unremarkable at best. I've never really had a map that made me go "Aw man, this map stinks, I hate this, I never want to play this game again because I'd have to play this map again", but just... Nothing maps. Where you go through the motions, clear enemies out, and finish the map without really thinking too hard about it.
Lastly, moving on to the story, I actually quite like it. Jeanne's characterization is really the highlight here, and this is where spoilers start. She's a commoner. She knows very little of the war. She knows that the English are bad, that they kill her countrymen, massacre her village, and have been invading France since before she was even born. Of course they're the enemy, of course she wants them dead, and of course she is more than eager to put herself in harm's way to fight them off. Anything else would be improper. And for a while, this works out pretty well for her. Until she learns the truth behind the war. The English nobility is nothing but an offshoot from French nobility, which makes this a petty family feud for control of France. It is nothing but a conflict between rich men vying for control of the country, making the common folk suffer for their own benefit. She supported the dauphin, yes, but this war isn't nearly as righteous as Jeanne believed - it is nothing more than a territory dispute, and killing her fellow man over it is a tragedy, one that she has been outright eager about for a while now. Her worldview is shattered, and it's just a pretty great character arc.
Likewise, I like where they went with Liane, her friend. At some point, Jeanne took a dive off a cliff and Liane ends up replacing her as Jeanne, pretending to be her to be held up as a figurehead to continue rallying the French behind. However, Liane is not Jeanne, and in trying to be her she ends up being ruthless, aggressive, vengeful, amplifying all of Jeanne's bad traits as she tries to be her. She is credited with the failed attack on Paris, and is the one who is captured in Jeanne's stead and burned at the stake. Seeing her go from meek village girl to this was likewise a fun arc.
These two just carry the story for more or less the entire game. I don't necessarily care about the plot all that much in itself, "Hundred years war but with demons/fantasy elements" and slight changes don't appeal to me that much in reality, and those fantasy elements feel undercooked, but I don't care all that much about that when Jeanne herself is there to carry everything. She works really well as a protagonist.
Moving on to the bad, then, and to why this game is "shelved" rather than "Completed". I decided to take a break from this game around chapter 27, but these issues started to show up a little earlier than this. While this game can be beaten with no grinding, and having peeked ahead at the endgame, my units are nearly leveled up enough for it just off of natural exp thanks to the generous amount of rubberbanding the exp curve affords you, it's also starting to feel like a slog. Enemy HP values have skyrocketed, and some of their defense stats have as well. The deployment limit is inconsistent, and this means that you'll often end up deploying underleveled units due to them having been benched for a few maps. If you don't grind free quests, or at least do a couple, you'll end up having a 6th or 7th unit that's just woefully underwhelming as a result. If you're the kind to do grinding maps, then this is probably fine, but for me it kinda took the wind out of my sales because I treated them similarly to how I would treat skirmishes in Fire Emblem - entirely optional, only if you want to grind. On a future run, I'd definitely do at least every grinding map once just to get the bonus reward once and keep up in levels on more units that way.
Next up, the game is frustratingly unreliable at times. By this I mean the reliability of your strategizing can be thrown into chaos due to random chance. I'm not saying the RNG is bugged, but rather that there is too much variance. While I haven't looked behind the curtain to see what kind of RNG the game uses, it feels like it uses the actual displayed chance (as opposed to lying to you like Fire Emblem), but those chances in themselves are not as high as I'd like them to be, particularly when fighting bosses. Bosses are already HP sponges as it is, so having to choose between hitting them with a normal attack for 150 damage, or having a 50/50 of missing the big special skill from Jeanne's bracelet that does 400 damage, it's just frustrating to have such low reliability where you're either guaranteed to do meh damage or likely to miss . While there are abilities with guaranteed hit - spells - they also don't hurt nearly as much, and are limited by mana, not to mention some units just not making very good mages. On top of that, the game has inherent damage variance, so if you read for instance 50 damage on attack 1 and 50 damage on attack 2, for a total of 100 damage for an exact kill, if one or both roll under the 50 damage listed, you'll miss your kill. If this messes with godspeed, it can be incredibly frustrating. Bare minimum, it'd be nice to be able to see the entire range. Instead of showing 50, she me 45-55, or whatever the variance actually is.
Actually, just in general, this game lacks a way to preview enemy damage. While you can verify their standard attack damage by attacking them and seeing how much damage they do on the counter, there's no real way to verify the damage they'll do to you if you can't reach them to preview the forecast, and even less so if they have a skill they're using on you like helmsplitter. How much damage does helpsplitter add? Who knows!
Next up is the skill system. I don't really care for it. I think it's nice that you get more slots over time, and having to choose from the high amount of skills with the small amounts of slots you have can be nice, but the actual way that you obtain skills is a little annoying to me. Most skills are earned through killing enemies, and then you can get ahead of the curve by fusing them, but you can't know what it'll give you utnil you make a fusion, and the actual way to fuse them UI wise is bad. You need to select one skill, then scroll through the entire menu, all 4 menus in fact, to see if it has a combination with something else. Then, when you cancel the fusion to pick the next skill, it'll keep your cursor where you ended rather than go back to the start, so you need to go back to where you were, select the next, then keep going. It's just a little too tedious to check everything, and the only thing saving this system is the existence of a guide that lists the fusions. It's still a flaw within the game itself, though. A potential solution would be to only show possible fusions rather than your entire skill list once you select one of your stones.
My last major complaint is with the game's run speed. It feels incredibly sluggish at times. Not only does the game encourage ball of death strategies through enemies that are so strong that you need to gang up with nearly your entire party, but the actual act of moving your units is just sort of slow. Rather than have animations in their own screen for full fancy animations, and then fast on-map animations if you turn off the fancy ones, this game only has on-map animations that are not particularly fast. Coupled with death animations, loot dropping animations, enemy fading away animation, the actual slow movement over the map, and it can just feel somewhat tedious to move your units to where you want them to be, especially if you have to move through a stretch of empty map which has happened to me a few times.
All in all, this is a very interesting game. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. It had a lot of moments that I really loved, but that was balanced out by tedium in the late game and in some of the systems. The skill system particularly feels worse as the game goes on, as you get more and more options for fusion which makes the flaws appear more obvious. If nothing else, it was a memorable game to revisit, and I really enjoyed the story, so I'm still shelving this game with a positive mindset. Will I continue from this save? Will I play it from the start and just do free quests a few times to smooth out level curve a bit? I'm not sure, time only will tell, and hopefully I have a better time on the replay now that I'm more familiar with the systems and quirks of this game. I'd definitely recommend at the very least giving it a try, especially if you like me are willing to drop a game once it outstays its welcome.
Starting with the positive, from the perspective of a Fire Emblem player mostly when it comes to SRPGs, this game has a few very interesting mechanics. The bracelet transformations are similar to the engage mechanic, but more and less limited at the same time. They last less turns and cannot be used on turn 1, which is weaker, but they also give Godspeed (take another turn every time you land a killing blow) for those turns, which is about as strong as it gets. They also give huge stat bonuses and access to unique skills to boost your damage output. The final difference is that it can only be used once per map, per gem that your bracelet has, which is locked behind story and free quest progress. It's a pretty neat system, and I really like how strong it is since it ties into the gameplay pretty well. Bracelet holders are meant to be insanely strong, and not only is the act of transforming powerful, it also gives you an incentive to get a bunch of finishing blows with those units, giving them a level lead which further feeds into the whole "they are your strongest units" thing.
The mana system is IMO better than anything Fire Emblem has ever come up with for combat arts. While in those games you are either trading HP (easily recovered with a heal from a different unit) or weapon durability (literally just money, who cares) for a boost in power during battle, in this game you are trading the finite resource that is your mana. While in theory you could wait an extra turn to gain more mana back, because every map has a turn limit, you really do not want to do that if you can help it. There are items that let you gain MP back, but you'd waste one of the unit's turn to get it back, since there is no dedicated mana transfer type character. At best, you'd waste someone else's turn to use one such item, but then again, these items are limited so you don't want to use them if you can help it.
A lot of the maps in this game are pretty good. Making you walk up a fortress while being pelted from archers from the top, chasing down a boss who spawns enemies until you kill his first phase, escaping past enemies on a desert plain, and so on. But despite this, if I had to give it a ratio, I'd say it's around half of the maps being pretty good, and then the other half are unremarkable at best. I've never really had a map that made me go "Aw man, this map stinks, I hate this, I never want to play this game again because I'd have to play this map again", but just... Nothing maps. Where you go through the motions, clear enemies out, and finish the map without really thinking too hard about it.
Lastly, moving on to the story, I actually quite like it. Jeanne's characterization is really the highlight here, and this is where spoilers start. She's a commoner. She knows very little of the war. She knows that the English are bad, that they kill her countrymen, massacre her village, and have been invading France since before she was even born. Of course they're the enemy, of course she wants them dead, and of course she is more than eager to put herself in harm's way to fight them off. Anything else would be improper. And for a while, this works out pretty well for her. Until she learns the truth behind the war. The English nobility is nothing but an offshoot from French nobility, which makes this a petty family feud for control of France. It is nothing but a conflict between rich men vying for control of the country, making the common folk suffer for their own benefit. She supported the dauphin, yes, but this war isn't nearly as righteous as Jeanne believed - it is nothing more than a territory dispute, and killing her fellow man over it is a tragedy, one that she has been outright eager about for a while now. Her worldview is shattered, and it's just a pretty great character arc.
Likewise, I like where they went with Liane, her friend. At some point, Jeanne took a dive off a cliff and Liane ends up replacing her as Jeanne, pretending to be her to be held up as a figurehead to continue rallying the French behind. However, Liane is not Jeanne, and in trying to be her she ends up being ruthless, aggressive, vengeful, amplifying all of Jeanne's bad traits as she tries to be her. She is credited with the failed attack on Paris, and is the one who is captured in Jeanne's stead and burned at the stake. Seeing her go from meek village girl to this was likewise a fun arc.
These two just carry the story for more or less the entire game. I don't necessarily care about the plot all that much in itself, "Hundred years war but with demons/fantasy elements" and slight changes don't appeal to me that much in reality, and those fantasy elements feel undercooked, but I don't care all that much about that when Jeanne herself is there to carry everything. She works really well as a protagonist.
Moving on to the bad, then, and to why this game is "shelved" rather than "Completed". I decided to take a break from this game around chapter 27, but these issues started to show up a little earlier than this. While this game can be beaten with no grinding, and having peeked ahead at the endgame, my units are nearly leveled up enough for it just off of natural exp thanks to the generous amount of rubberbanding the exp curve affords you, it's also starting to feel like a slog. Enemy HP values have skyrocketed, and some of their defense stats have as well. The deployment limit is inconsistent, and this means that you'll often end up deploying underleveled units due to them having been benched for a few maps. If you don't grind free quests, or at least do a couple, you'll end up having a 6th or 7th unit that's just woefully underwhelming as a result. If you're the kind to do grinding maps, then this is probably fine, but for me it kinda took the wind out of my sales because I treated them similarly to how I would treat skirmishes in Fire Emblem - entirely optional, only if you want to grind. On a future run, I'd definitely do at least every grinding map once just to get the bonus reward once and keep up in levels on more units that way.
Next up, the game is frustratingly unreliable at times. By this I mean the reliability of your strategizing can be thrown into chaos due to random chance. I'm not saying the RNG is bugged, but rather that there is too much variance. While I haven't looked behind the curtain to see what kind of RNG the game uses, it feels like it uses the actual displayed chance (as opposed to lying to you like Fire Emblem), but those chances in themselves are not as high as I'd like them to be, particularly when fighting bosses. Bosses are already HP sponges as it is, so having to choose between hitting them with a normal attack for 150 damage, or having a 50/50 of missing the big special skill from Jeanne's bracelet that does 400 damage, it's just frustrating to have such low reliability where you're either guaranteed to do meh damage or likely to miss . While there are abilities with guaranteed hit - spells - they also don't hurt nearly as much, and are limited by mana, not to mention some units just not making very good mages. On top of that, the game has inherent damage variance, so if you read for instance 50 damage on attack 1 and 50 damage on attack 2, for a total of 100 damage for an exact kill, if one or both roll under the 50 damage listed, you'll miss your kill. If this messes with godspeed, it can be incredibly frustrating. Bare minimum, it'd be nice to be able to see the entire range. Instead of showing 50, she me 45-55, or whatever the variance actually is.
Actually, just in general, this game lacks a way to preview enemy damage. While you can verify their standard attack damage by attacking them and seeing how much damage they do on the counter, there's no real way to verify the damage they'll do to you if you can't reach them to preview the forecast, and even less so if they have a skill they're using on you like helmsplitter. How much damage does helpsplitter add? Who knows!
Next up is the skill system. I don't really care for it. I think it's nice that you get more slots over time, and having to choose from the high amount of skills with the small amounts of slots you have can be nice, but the actual way that you obtain skills is a little annoying to me. Most skills are earned through killing enemies, and then you can get ahead of the curve by fusing them, but you can't know what it'll give you utnil you make a fusion, and the actual way to fuse them UI wise is bad. You need to select one skill, then scroll through the entire menu, all 4 menus in fact, to see if it has a combination with something else. Then, when you cancel the fusion to pick the next skill, it'll keep your cursor where you ended rather than go back to the start, so you need to go back to where you were, select the next, then keep going. It's just a little too tedious to check everything, and the only thing saving this system is the existence of a guide that lists the fusions. It's still a flaw within the game itself, though. A potential solution would be to only show possible fusions rather than your entire skill list once you select one of your stones.
My last major complaint is with the game's run speed. It feels incredibly sluggish at times. Not only does the game encourage ball of death strategies through enemies that are so strong that you need to gang up with nearly your entire party, but the actual act of moving your units is just sort of slow. Rather than have animations in their own screen for full fancy animations, and then fast on-map animations if you turn off the fancy ones, this game only has on-map animations that are not particularly fast. Coupled with death animations, loot dropping animations, enemy fading away animation, the actual slow movement over the map, and it can just feel somewhat tedious to move your units to where you want them to be, especially if you have to move through a stretch of empty map which has happened to me a few times.
All in all, this is a very interesting game. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. It had a lot of moments that I really loved, but that was balanced out by tedium in the late game and in some of the systems. The skill system particularly feels worse as the game goes on, as you get more and more options for fusion which makes the flaws appear more obvious. If nothing else, it was a memorable game to revisit, and I really enjoyed the story, so I'm still shelving this game with a positive mindset. Will I continue from this save? Will I play it from the start and just do free quests a few times to smooth out level curve a bit? I'm not sure, time only will tell, and hopefully I have a better time on the replay now that I'm more familiar with the systems and quirks of this game. I'd definitely recommend at the very least giving it a try, especially if you like me are willing to drop a game once it outstays its welcome.
I really took my time with this one, thankfully, this game is really easy to pick back up after awhile despite its complexity as a strategy game.
I really enjoyed it, the difficulty was pretty well balanced and the story and characters were quite charming. Such a great game that I will definitely play post-game for a while too!
I really enjoyed it, the difficulty was pretty well balanced and the story and characters were quite charming. Such a great game that I will definitely play post-game for a while too!
Jeanne d'Arc is a solid tactics game with some interesting ideas. I had a good time playing through this, but it drags, gets a bit scattered, and runs out of ideas towards the end.
Gameplay in Jeanne d'Arc is fairly standard Final Fantasy Tactics inspired gameplay with a couple of interesting twists.
The most important difference is the bracelets that the game introduces for certain characters. These allow the character to change into a Sailor Moon-esque alternate form (historical accuracy is discarded pretty early in this game, despite the name) which grants them improved stats and a special ability. Additionally, every character in this mode has "God Speed", which allows them to immediately take another turn after getting a killing blow. This leads to some interesting strategy where you are more successful if you weaken enemies and then finish a bunch of them off with your bracelet wielder. Not only do the bracelets make these characters more powerful in the story, but they also end up being mechanically more powerful because they are getting all the kills, putting them many levels above the rest of your team. This is a cool little piece of narratively coherent game design that I think is pretty neat.
One small critique here is that it really feels like the bracelets should be freely assignable, letting you adjust your character's abilities in a more extreme way, but they aren't. It is unfortunate, because it would open up the combat system quite a lot and allow you to put more focus on the characters that resonate with you the most, rather than making the bracelet wearers the defacto best characters for every map.
Character classes feel very freeform, with the ability to assign gems that give magic and special abilities to a character more or less however you want. Characters do have a specific weapon they use, and some gems only apply to some weapons, granting you special sword or spear attacks, for instance. There is a little bit of weird false choice here, unfortunately, since a character's base stats have a massive impact on how useful they will be at using a skill. Colet the dagger wielding rogue, for instance, will never really be a good magic user, no matter how many spells you give him. The system is still very expressive and character setup is satisfying and intentional.
Beyond the bracelets and the class structure, the game is a standard entry in the tactics genre and goes on for longer than its gameplay comfortably supports. It doesn't introduce new mechanics and even though you get new skill gems, they are never that different from the ones you gain early in your journey.
Jeanne d'Arc looks fine, but isn't super inspired. The graphics are sometimes cute and the character models are large, but aren't very expressive in the field and all look much less serious than their characters actually are.
However, the character portraits are well done (if generically anime) and the animated cutscenes are all extremely cool.
The story in this game starts off as a sort of normal historical fiction setting with light fantasy aspects and quickly goes off the rails. It never really drops the trappings of history though, so you will be fighting to free Paris from the English and deal with political fallout of your actions, but you are using magic bracelets to summon Sailor Scout armor and fighting against a half-man-half-animal army led by a child king (Henry VI) possessed by a demonic spirit. None of it hangs together particularly well, unfortunately. The game can't seem to decide what it wants to be and a lot of the events seem arbitrary and the character motivations aren't clear. Enemy depth leans heavily on the anime-style redemption arcs which are mostly unearned.
Even the predictable betrayal didn't land for me, since it doesn't make much sense and the game doesn't give the betrayer any motivation at all other than a more sinister hairstyle.
I did like that this game is willing to play rough with your character lineup. Without spoiling too much, I was definitely surprised by a couple of the changes that happen, though I wish this stuff was more prevalent through the whole game, rather than relegated to the back half.
Despite the messiness of the story, the setting is very unique and fun. I liked it, but there are definitely many better entries in the genre.
Gameplay in Jeanne d'Arc is fairly standard Final Fantasy Tactics inspired gameplay with a couple of interesting twists.
The most important difference is the bracelets that the game introduces for certain characters. These allow the character to change into a Sailor Moon-esque alternate form (historical accuracy is discarded pretty early in this game, despite the name) which grants them improved stats and a special ability. Additionally, every character in this mode has "God Speed", which allows them to immediately take another turn after getting a killing blow. This leads to some interesting strategy where you are more successful if you weaken enemies and then finish a bunch of them off with your bracelet wielder. Not only do the bracelets make these characters more powerful in the story, but they also end up being mechanically more powerful because they are getting all the kills, putting them many levels above the rest of your team. This is a cool little piece of narratively coherent game design that I think is pretty neat.
One small critique here is that it really feels like the bracelets should be freely assignable, letting you adjust your character's abilities in a more extreme way, but they aren't. It is unfortunate, because it would open up the combat system quite a lot and allow you to put more focus on the characters that resonate with you the most, rather than making the bracelet wearers the defacto best characters for every map.
Character classes feel very freeform, with the ability to assign gems that give magic and special abilities to a character more or less however you want. Characters do have a specific weapon they use, and some gems only apply to some weapons, granting you special sword or spear attacks, for instance. There is a little bit of weird false choice here, unfortunately, since a character's base stats have a massive impact on how useful they will be at using a skill. Colet the dagger wielding rogue, for instance, will never really be a good magic user, no matter how many spells you give him. The system is still very expressive and character setup is satisfying and intentional.
Beyond the bracelets and the class structure, the game is a standard entry in the tactics genre and goes on for longer than its gameplay comfortably supports. It doesn't introduce new mechanics and even though you get new skill gems, they are never that different from the ones you gain early in your journey.
Jeanne d'Arc looks fine, but isn't super inspired. The graphics are sometimes cute and the character models are large, but aren't very expressive in the field and all look much less serious than their characters actually are.
However, the character portraits are well done (if generically anime) and the animated cutscenes are all extremely cool.
The story in this game starts off as a sort of normal historical fiction setting with light fantasy aspects and quickly goes off the rails. It never really drops the trappings of history though, so you will be fighting to free Paris from the English and deal with political fallout of your actions, but you are using magic bracelets to summon Sailor Scout armor and fighting against a half-man-half-animal army led by a child king (Henry VI) possessed by a demonic spirit. None of it hangs together particularly well, unfortunately. The game can't seem to decide what it wants to be and a lot of the events seem arbitrary and the character motivations aren't clear. Enemy depth leans heavily on the anime-style redemption arcs which are mostly unearned.
Even the predictable betrayal didn't land for me, since it doesn't make much sense and the game doesn't give the betrayer any motivation at all other than a more sinister hairstyle.
I did like that this game is willing to play rough with your character lineup. Without spoiling too much, I was definitely surprised by a couple of the changes that happen, though I wish this stuff was more prevalent through the whole game, rather than relegated to the back half.
Despite the messiness of the story, the setting is very unique and fun. I liked it, but there are definitely many better entries in the genre.
No es la Juana de Arco de Fate y, por lo tanto, no me gusta.
It's hard not to think about the company’s weird modern state when coming to old Level 5 games. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the company’s direction towards the kid friendly. Inazuma Eleven, Yo-kai Watch, and (of course) Professor Layton are popular franchises for a reason. They’re overflowing with charm and character. They commit to their gimmicks and ambitions and craft these beautiful worlds out of ideas that really shouldn’t work. At the same time, the story isn’t often their strong suit. As the company’s direction has changed, you get the impression that they don’t want to take the same kind of risks that they used to. This is particularly notable with how they often write female characters. Professor Layton 7 categorically refuses to let Kat Layton experience the same high-stakes drama that her father experienced. They want to make a chill, slice of life adventure where a young girl helps a billionaire find a lost dog or whatever. No giant mechas beneath London or drug induced vampire fights.
I probably shouldn’t spend the first paragraph expressing bitterness towards a different franchise, but I do want to emphasize how fascinating this game is as a counterpoint.
Jeanne D’arc is a very loose depiction of Joan of Arc’s story. Jeanne is living peacefully in her hometown with her best friends Liane and Roger. They live normal lives, right up until the English invade France and raze their entire village. In the aftermath, Jeanne gains a magical armlet that allows her to hear the voice of God and the power to wield devastating magic against her enemies. Furious and increasingly fanatical, Jeanne leads her countrymen against the English with the aim of exposing the demonic conspiracies lying beneath the invasion.
The gameplay is turn-based strategy and it has a steep difficulty curve. The game certainly expects you to be grinding between chapters, building up your troops and helping them gain strength and funds to increase their supplies. Unlike other games, all characters start with zero MP, which increases on its own throughout the map. You can’t launch the big attacks right away, you have to slowly build up to your bigger guns. On top of that, stages typically have a limit on 12 or so turns. Any more than that, instant game over.
Armlet wielders like Jeanne have the ability to magical girl transform a couple turns into battle. These transformations gain a huge stat boost with unique, damage-dealing attacks. If you defeat an enemy while transformed, the character’s “Godspeed” skill activates, giving them the opportunity to attack again. With smart strategy, armlet wielders can sweep through almost an entire map before the magic wears off. You’re only allowed to transform once a map with each armlet character. This encourages players to think carefully about when and where on a map you should be transforming and whether to risk enduring a few more hits just to get into a better position.
But I think the game really opens up with the Skill Binding mechanic. As you defeat enemies, they can drop Skill Stones that you can equip to your troops. But there’s also a crafting system, where you can combine these skills into something new. It's initially annoying getting ten different dropped fire attacks from enemies. But once Skill Binding unlocks, those fireballs can be used to build Meteor Bolt for your archer or Bomb for your thieves. Meteor Bolt can be combined with Take Flight to form Sky Dart, which lets Archers attack enemies across the other end of the map. With a steady supply of MP potions, a powerful archer can take out bosses within a few turns and really change the scope of the map. Switching skills between characters and figuring out who benefits from what helps encourages building different characters with different strengths and weaknesses.
Beyond all that, there’s something genuinely powerful beneath this game’s more absurd turns. Jeanne and Liane are messy protagonists, who take their trauma and push themselves into taking increasingly violent paths. Jeanne barely seems to notice that Roger’s amnesia plotline is messing him up until it's far too late to save him from his inner darkness. The game eventually swerves away the war angle to become “the nobles are literally possessed by demons,” but the character beats both before that point are genuinely gripping. There’s a significant plot beat where Jeanne learns some broad English and French history, banal things like how English royalty were originally French and own French land or something like that.
But this fact is treated as existentially horrifying to Jeanne. She so internalized "French vs. English" that the idea of the English being descended from French, the reality that the war is mostly just a land dispute drives her into this arc of despair. The other characters can shrug this off as a part of war, but Jeanne's fanatical viewpoint needs this black and white dichotomy to justify itself.
And how that fanatical worldview ends up shaping and changing Liane is really the game's strongest height. This shy little farm girl becomes this blood-thirsty monster, who's obsession with living up to Jeanne's goals ends up putting her on one of the most gut-wrenching narrative arcs I've ever seen.
That all said, the game quickly loses its luster for me in the second half once it moves past the plot beats of how history originally went down. It just becomes another fantasy adventure. Elves. Dwarves. Talking animals. Kill the demons possessing the nobles. The character drama fades away for a more paint by the numbers story.
But that first half was delightfully intense and full of just some messy, uncomfortable, complicated characters. It felt like the kind of writing that the company has been so unwilling to give its female characters in later works. Its a messiness I'd love more of. Maybe that era for Level 5 is gone. The game sold around 60,000 copies in 2006, which hardly compares to Professor Layton's 700,000 in 2007. The company had to chase what was profitable, and the more kid-friendly fare was what kept it going. But they really did craft some fascinating experiments in the mean time.
I probably shouldn’t spend the first paragraph expressing bitterness towards a different franchise, but I do want to emphasize how fascinating this game is as a counterpoint.
Jeanne D’arc is a very loose depiction of Joan of Arc’s story. Jeanne is living peacefully in her hometown with her best friends Liane and Roger. They live normal lives, right up until the English invade France and raze their entire village. In the aftermath, Jeanne gains a magical armlet that allows her to hear the voice of God and the power to wield devastating magic against her enemies. Furious and increasingly fanatical, Jeanne leads her countrymen against the English with the aim of exposing the demonic conspiracies lying beneath the invasion.
The gameplay is turn-based strategy and it has a steep difficulty curve. The game certainly expects you to be grinding between chapters, building up your troops and helping them gain strength and funds to increase their supplies. Unlike other games, all characters start with zero MP, which increases on its own throughout the map. You can’t launch the big attacks right away, you have to slowly build up to your bigger guns. On top of that, stages typically have a limit on 12 or so turns. Any more than that, instant game over.
Armlet wielders like Jeanne have the ability to magical girl transform a couple turns into battle. These transformations gain a huge stat boost with unique, damage-dealing attacks. If you defeat an enemy while transformed, the character’s “Godspeed” skill activates, giving them the opportunity to attack again. With smart strategy, armlet wielders can sweep through almost an entire map before the magic wears off. You’re only allowed to transform once a map with each armlet character. This encourages players to think carefully about when and where on a map you should be transforming and whether to risk enduring a few more hits just to get into a better position.
But I think the game really opens up with the Skill Binding mechanic. As you defeat enemies, they can drop Skill Stones that you can equip to your troops. But there’s also a crafting system, where you can combine these skills into something new. It's initially annoying getting ten different dropped fire attacks from enemies. But once Skill Binding unlocks, those fireballs can be used to build Meteor Bolt for your archer or Bomb for your thieves. Meteor Bolt can be combined with Take Flight to form Sky Dart, which lets Archers attack enemies across the other end of the map. With a steady supply of MP potions, a powerful archer can take out bosses within a few turns and really change the scope of the map. Switching skills between characters and figuring out who benefits from what helps encourages building different characters with different strengths and weaknesses.
Beyond all that, there’s something genuinely powerful beneath this game’s more absurd turns. Jeanne and Liane are messy protagonists, who take their trauma and push themselves into taking increasingly violent paths. Jeanne barely seems to notice that Roger’s amnesia plotline is messing him up until it's far too late to save him from his inner darkness. The game eventually swerves away the war angle to become “the nobles are literally possessed by demons,” but the character beats both before that point are genuinely gripping. There’s a significant plot beat where Jeanne learns some broad English and French history, banal things like how English royalty were originally French and own French land or something like that.
But this fact is treated as existentially horrifying to Jeanne. She so internalized "French vs. English" that the idea of the English being descended from French, the reality that the war is mostly just a land dispute drives her into this arc of despair. The other characters can shrug this off as a part of war, but Jeanne's fanatical viewpoint needs this black and white dichotomy to justify itself.
And how that fanatical worldview ends up shaping and changing Liane is really the game's strongest height. This shy little farm girl becomes this blood-thirsty monster, who's obsession with living up to Jeanne's goals ends up putting her on one of the most gut-wrenching narrative arcs I've ever seen.
That all said, the game quickly loses its luster for me in the second half once it moves past the plot beats of how history originally went down. It just becomes another fantasy adventure. Elves. Dwarves. Talking animals. Kill the demons possessing the nobles. The character drama fades away for a more paint by the numbers story.
But that first half was delightfully intense and full of just some messy, uncomfortable, complicated characters. It felt like the kind of writing that the company has been so unwilling to give its female characters in later works. Its a messiness I'd love more of. Maybe that era for Level 5 is gone. The game sold around 60,000 copies in 2006, which hardly compares to Professor Layton's 700,000 in 2007. The company had to chase what was profitable, and the more kid-friendly fare was what kept it going. But they really did craft some fascinating experiments in the mean time.
Always love tactical RPG. The story and characters are good. Worth playing.
Why do so many people keep telling me this is one of the best games on the system? This is just a really bog-standard tactics game, am I missing something? That mixed with bland art, boring characters and a sleep-inducing story.
What am I missing here that everyone loves?
What am I missing here that everyone loves?
An alright tactical RPG. The gameplay is decent standard TRPG fare with a semi-interesting temporary transformation mechanic for a few characters. However the transformation mechanic does lead to over-reliance on Jeanne which can result in an annoying gap between party levels. The most interesting part of the game is that it's set in the hundred years war and follows the game's namesake, but the inclusion of magic spells and goblins and demons takes away from the novelty of that setting and makes it feel more like the standard medieval fantasy JRPG. The character portraits have a generic anime style and the battles have a pretty unappealing 3D aesthetic with chibi models. I wasn't really a big fan of any of the character designs either but the surprising amount of anime cutscenes was nice. Overall, while the game isn't outlandishly bad in any aspects, there's not a lot of good standing out to me either.
Where does Level 5 get the money to keep making bad games. They must have some mafia connections or something. Jeanne has..
No job system.
A thematically meaningless three pronged elemental system tacked on for no reason whatsoever. (I thought of another one they could use: groan, eyeroll, snore.)
An absolute childish cringefest of a story.
Tutorial box piggybacking. ("Well seeing as we've already interrupted you to tell you about this thing integral to gameplay why not we seize this opportunity to tell you about, like, I unno five to eight other things right this moment and see how much of it you remember five minutes from now!! GAm DEzinE!!") sound of Level 5 employees high giving each other
Party members don't have their own individual turns, instead you and the AI take turns moving your entire team at once. Have fun selecting a unit and moving them a handful of spaces forward at the start of a battle before manually moving the cursor back to another unit and doing the same for them. Then do the same on the next turn, and the next turn, and the turn after that. Moving cursor back 'n forth simulator 2006.
Play Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, and ignore this.
No job system.
A thematically meaningless three pronged elemental system tacked on for no reason whatsoever. (I thought of another one they could use: groan, eyeroll, snore.)
An absolute childish cringefest of a story.
Tutorial box piggybacking. ("Well seeing as we've already interrupted you to tell you about this thing integral to gameplay why not we seize this opportunity to tell you about, like, I unno five to eight other things right this moment and see how much of it you remember five minutes from now!! GAm DEzinE!!") sound of Level 5 employees high giving each other
Party members don't have their own individual turns, instead you and the AI take turns moving your entire team at once. Have fun selecting a unit and moving them a handful of spaces forward at the start of a battle before manually moving the cursor back to another unit and doing the same for them. Then do the same on the next turn, and the next turn, and the turn after that. Moving cursor back 'n forth simulator 2006.
Play Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, and ignore this.
Jeanne traz um belo jogo tático para o PSP, com gráficos belíssimos, animações bem feitas e personagens carismáticos. O sistema não é tão empolgante, mas é bastante funcional.
Infelizmente perto do fim o jogo entra em uma espécie de maratona com 3 combates difíceis e desafiadores um atrás do outro, com um chefe final bastante exigente. Ao falhar, se retorna ao começo da maratona e o chefe final exige um certo grind pra superar seus números.
Fiquei sem paciência pra isso e larguei. Fora isso, uma ficção muito bacana em cima da história de Joana Darc.
Infelizmente perto do fim o jogo entra em uma espécie de maratona com 3 combates difíceis e desafiadores um atrás do outro, com um chefe final bastante exigente. Ao falhar, se retorna ao começo da maratona e o chefe final exige um certo grind pra superar seus números.
Fiquei sem paciência pra isso e larguei. Fora isso, uma ficção muito bacana em cima da história de Joana Darc.
Cool concept for a tactics game, just didn't keep my attention.
Totally played it on Vita... yup that was me... uh huh... you hear that FBI agent?
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.
...le jeu est fun ok
Great game. The gameplay was pretty good, a mix of Triangle Strategy and Fire Emblem: Engage but not as good as either alone, still great. Unit positioning mattered like in TS which I love, the maps use verticality well although not as impactful as TS. The Gem Stone transformations were cool as an "Engage" style mechanic, limited turn use and not super uber op despite how they seem which each one gaining Galeforce essentially.
Maps were overall great, creative aesthetically and utilize the 3D well making no Maps really feel like blank spaces. The addition of a turn count limit on each map seems a little strict at first, but 90% of the time I felt it was all right and easily manageable adding to the strategy you need to take into a map.
The skill merge and build system was cool, buying and combining skills to get improved or random skills was fun. Weapons and armor were simple enough, no complaints there. Low deployment slots on most maps is annoying, but non-deployed units get exp too so it balances that well.
Bosses while they appear to be damage sponges the game gives you ways to deal with them and if you play smart you usually have plenty of turns to beat them, plus a basic axe skill can negate def.
Story, was not amazing for the first half, pretty standard free France from England with some fantastical elements. But the second half I found great, (a fairly decent Spoiler ahead) love a good protag switch, Liane was great and I loved how they showed how different she was from Jeanne, a big arc culminating in Jeanne having to resolve herself after what Liane has to go through in her absence. Didn't want to spoil but that's kinda my main big talking point story wise. It's the only event that left a big impact in me. It affected the only three characters I love Jeanne, Liane and Roger(rest of the characters are fine-good tho). So I really felt I had to talk about it.
The monsters and animal people might throw people odd aesthetically and may effect your perception of the seriousness. But they didn't bother me. The trio I mentioned are all still great and their stories are handled with good respect to intensity and tone.
Voice acting isn't amazing but hearing Yuri Lowenthal do a French accent sold me on it. It's good for clearly non French and English people trying to do those accents, nothing bad, I like Jeanne and Roger.
The 2D animated cutscenes all look great, the designs are cool, especially love how expressive the portraits are, especially Jeanne's, helps convey her emotions well. Her transformed designs are all great too.
Overall great game, certainly enjoyed my time with this. You win this time France.
Maps were overall great, creative aesthetically and utilize the 3D well making no Maps really feel like blank spaces. The addition of a turn count limit on each map seems a little strict at first, but 90% of the time I felt it was all right and easily manageable adding to the strategy you need to take into a map.
The skill merge and build system was cool, buying and combining skills to get improved or random skills was fun. Weapons and armor were simple enough, no complaints there. Low deployment slots on most maps is annoying, but non-deployed units get exp too so it balances that well.
Bosses while they appear to be damage sponges the game gives you ways to deal with them and if you play smart you usually have plenty of turns to beat them, plus a basic axe skill can negate def.
Story, was not amazing for the first half, pretty standard free France from England with some fantastical elements. But the second half I found great, (a fairly decent Spoiler ahead) love a good protag switch, Liane was great and I loved how they showed how different she was from Jeanne, a big arc culminating in Jeanne having to resolve herself after what Liane has to go through in her absence. Didn't want to spoil but that's kinda my main big talking point story wise. It's the only event that left a big impact in me. It affected the only three characters I love Jeanne, Liane and Roger(rest of the characters are fine-good tho). So I really felt I had to talk about it.
The monsters and animal people might throw people odd aesthetically and may effect your perception of the seriousness. But they didn't bother me. The trio I mentioned are all still great and their stories are handled with good respect to intensity and tone.
Voice acting isn't amazing but hearing Yuri Lowenthal do a French accent sold me on it. It's good for clearly non French and English people trying to do those accents, nothing bad, I like Jeanne and Roger.
The 2D animated cutscenes all look great, the designs are cool, especially love how expressive the portraits are, especially Jeanne's, helps convey her emotions well. Her transformed designs are all great too.
Overall great game, certainly enjoyed my time with this. You win this time France.
Replaying this for the first time in years.
While there were some aspects which could've been done better, I still enjoyed this as much as the first time I played it.
As a person who rarely plays SRPGs, the difficulty was just right and even when I first played it, it's pretty easy to grasp and pretty beginner friendly to people who haven't played the genre all that much.
In some instances, the limited turns are a little annoying and could lead to a few potential game overs, but I'd argue they're a necessary evil. The game isn't hard at all and while at first glance it seems like the limited turns make you rush the stages, they're more so there to make you avoid cheesing your way through stages by baiting enemies one by one, kill them, wait a bit, heal your characters, and repeat, thus eliminating all the difficulty and fun.
Sometimes certain characters will leave your party temporarily, which could be seen as annoying, but also emphasizes you should not neglect other characters or over invest in a certain character. This of course also leads to more overall grinding, which is unfortunate. On the positive side, the side content, although more gimmicky in nature was pretty fun and gave some pretty good rewards.
The armlet mechanic was pretty fun to use although it felt like it wasn't implemented in the best possible way. Characters with armlets are way better than those without them, making armlet users pretty much mandatory picks most of the time.
It's a little annoying how certain stages have visibility issues and how there isn't an option to skip animations, but it luckily isn't game breaking.
The setting takes place during the time period of the 100 years war and blends a part of real life history, though it's mostly fantasy. It was good for what it was and I liked a large part of the characters.
An overall pretty enjoyable and fun SRPG, although veterans of the genre might find it way too easy and if you care about historical accuracy, might be quite annoyed at the liberties they took with the story.
While there were some aspects which could've been done better, I still enjoyed this as much as the first time I played it.
As a person who rarely plays SRPGs, the difficulty was just right and even when I first played it, it's pretty easy to grasp and pretty beginner friendly to people who haven't played the genre all that much.
In some instances, the limited turns are a little annoying and could lead to a few potential game overs, but I'd argue they're a necessary evil. The game isn't hard at all and while at first glance it seems like the limited turns make you rush the stages, they're more so there to make you avoid cheesing your way through stages by baiting enemies one by one, kill them, wait a bit, heal your characters, and repeat, thus eliminating all the difficulty and fun.
Sometimes certain characters will leave your party temporarily, which could be seen as annoying, but also emphasizes you should not neglect other characters or over invest in a certain character. This of course also leads to more overall grinding, which is unfortunate. On the positive side, the side content, although more gimmicky in nature was pretty fun and gave some pretty good rewards.
The armlet mechanic was pretty fun to use although it felt like it wasn't implemented in the best possible way. Characters with armlets are way better than those without them, making armlet users pretty much mandatory picks most of the time.
It's a little annoying how certain stages have visibility issues and how there isn't an option to skip animations, but it luckily isn't game breaking.
The setting takes place during the time period of the 100 years war and blends a part of real life history, though it's mostly fantasy. It was good for what it was and I liked a large part of the characters.
An overall pretty enjoyable and fun SRPG, although veterans of the genre might find it way too easy and if you care about historical accuracy, might be quite annoyed at the liberties they took with the story.
Well-rounded SRPG built on a solid gameplay foundation and guided by an interesting story premise.
+ great skill stone mechanic that enables unit flexibility and is satisfying to progress
+ reasonably challenging difficulty with accessible ways to grind
+ charming characters in both design and personalities
+ unusual setting that blends history and fantasy well
+ frequent animated cutscenes between stages
+ uniquely melancholic soundtrack
+ a small amount of side and post-game content
- some visibility issues in spite of the rotatable camera
- tiresome early antagonists who just won't die
- several slow animations that repeat constantly
+ great skill stone mechanic that enables unit flexibility and is satisfying to progress
+ reasonably challenging difficulty with accessible ways to grind
+ charming characters in both design and personalities
+ unusual setting that blends history and fantasy well
+ frequent animated cutscenes between stages
+ uniquely melancholic soundtrack
+ a small amount of side and post-game content
- some visibility issues in spite of the rotatable camera
- tiresome early antagonists who just won't die
- several slow animations that repeat constantly
It's not a bad game, it looks nice and got soul, but the gameplay felt kinda slow at times and it wasn't that fun to me. Might pick it up again one day, not sure.
for a game that people consider to be on of psp's better srpgs. this game sure is ass
should've turned away after staring at the cover art, it's all downhill from there. the gameplay feels barebones, the art style is generic and the soundtrack is forgettable. its based on the 100 years war but the story itself is filled with generic fantasy monsters and transforming magical girls. wish it was at least entertaining but it was genuinely hard staying engaged even after 5 hours.
one positivee thing i can say is how comically evil the british are portrayed in this game, which can be funny.
should've turned away after staring at the cover art, it's all downhill from there. the gameplay feels barebones, the art style is generic and the soundtrack is forgettable. its based on the 100 years war but the story itself is filled with generic fantasy monsters and transforming magical girls. wish it was at least entertaining but it was genuinely hard staying engaged even after 5 hours.
one positivee thing i can say is how comically evil the british are portrayed in this game, which can be funny.
Difficulty spike post chapter 2 - however most victories can be obtained through strategy over grinded levels.
My UMD is missing, I have the rest complete though.. sigh
Like most level 5 games, the art is gorgeous and the game has personality. The story has that funny Japanese take on European history. It animefies it into something that's akin to that fate/zero anime without some of the more mature parts, fused with some sort of studio ghibli take. I was surprised how many gorgeous animated cinematics this game has throughout, that must have taken a lot of their budget.
The game mechanics are designed to be not to complicated, as this is obviously designed to be (also) enjoyed by younger children. Speaking of which, the childish parts and designs can be offputting by people expecting a dark/edgy take on the famous story, but it's a fun, solid strategy RPG every fan of that genre (like Fire Emblem fans) should play. I think most will get enjoyment out of it. It's not a well known game and should get more love. Of course it's not perfect. The weapon triangle like system can be mostly ignored and the transformations of certain characters make them a bit to OP. I mostly used them and the remaining spots went to one character of the axe and bow jobclasses (some review said there is no jobsystem but that's false, each job has their own unique abilities it can equip) In particular fighting the same boss characters for multiple chapters in a row i found a bit of a nitpick. But this wasn't supposed to be a complex and intricate RPG, just a beautiful and fun take on jeanne d'arc that children can enjoy. If i would have played this when i was 11/12 i would have been blown away.
The game mechanics are designed to be not to complicated, as this is obviously designed to be (also) enjoyed by younger children. Speaking of which, the childish parts and designs can be offputting by people expecting a dark/edgy take on the famous story, but it's a fun, solid strategy RPG every fan of that genre (like Fire Emblem fans) should play. I think most will get enjoyment out of it. It's not a well known game and should get more love. Of course it's not perfect. The weapon triangle like system can be mostly ignored and the transformations of certain characters make them a bit to OP. I mostly used them and the remaining spots went to one character of the axe and bow jobclasses (some review said there is no jobsystem but that's false, each job has their own unique abilities it can equip) In particular fighting the same boss characters for multiple chapters in a row i found a bit of a nitpick. But this wasn't supposed to be a complex and intricate RPG, just a beautiful and fun take on jeanne d'arc that children can enjoy. If i would have played this when i was 11/12 i would have been blown away.
Come to northeast Brazil.
I don’t understand why more people haven’t played this.