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.
BlazingWaters
1 year ago
Very good read. I knew about this game from looking into PSP RPGs at the time, and it hit a double whammy of being an SRPG, something I want to dabble more with, as well as being about Joan Of Arc, a figure I'm super fascinated by due to her place in history. Rather saddened to hear that it does indeed become more typical fantasy as it goes on - not that I mind it but again, my main draw was for the loose adaption of Joan's story - but I'm at least glad to hear it does deliver on some level for a chunk of it.