Not yet convinced.
I beat Super Mario RPG yesterday. I feel kind of bad, because I was rushing through the game a bit. SMRPG is sort of like Earthbound in that the dialogue varies between tones of sarcastic, more sarcastic, and mildly serious.
So why rush through it?
I borrowed Disgaea from a friend. Well… More an acquaintance. I actually don’t remember his name. But suffice it to say, I temporarily have a copy of Disgaea, that game that half of Anime Club and probably more of the Computer Science students have been ranting about. So I wanted to try it. Although it looks like it has an enjoyable enough plot, and a decent enough combat system, I’m still more on the side of my editor at VL.
Why? Well, might have to do with the fact that I’m only an hour in. It’s reminding me of La Pucelle Tactics – unfortunately, mostly in bad ways. For being a strategy game, there’s very little in the way of “strategy” involved.
Let’s take an example. I got to the first boss fight at level 5 with my best character. He got fried because there are guards you essentially can’t get past near the entrance.
Okay, so let’s go around them, eh? Snippet of strategy there, what? Not so fast, old chap. There are other enemies that will swiftly surround you if you stay on the defensive. In fact, if you go on the “around them” path I believe you’re supposed to take… you have to be very careful or you’ll still be fried by the guards. You’ll probably get only one or two characters past them before *they* get surrounded by enemies. Then the boss comes out.
This isn’t strategy, it’s forcing you to grind up levels before you’ve even learned how half the mechanics in the game work. So far, I’m not impressed.