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.