Jeanne d'Arc (PSP)

“Okay. So I've been playing this sort of bizarre anime/war game with the item swallowing frog (this seems to be a theme with Level 5) and I'm finding it is most assuredly NOT Final Fantasy Tactics.

It's not better, and it's certainly not worse -- it is its own strange little monster, where you can almost get attached to the characters, and you can certainly make use of some interesting twists on the classic TBS model. Among them is the "Burning Aura" -- a tool that lets you setup another member for a more brutal follow up shot, effectively letting you create combos on the fly. The other mechanic hinging entirely on Risk vs Reward.

Now I expect as more of these posts get read, a certain number of things are going to come to light. One is that I love to beat myself up with a really difficult game. I find the screaming and frustration just as cathartic when I'm losing as the incredible sense of victory from winning. For that to happen, though, for there to be that sense of achievement on my side of the controller, there needs to be a Risk/Reward mechanic in place.

Jeanne D'arc doesn't have it all over the place (as Demon's Souls does), but it does give you the ability to create a "unified guard" when you line up units shoulder to shoulder; for those of you who are unfamiliar with this genre, putting units in a line is a lot like asking the school bully to meet you after school -- and you're half his size. Unified Guard makes the strategy viable -- the idea of power in numbers runs strong throughout both the story and the mechanics that reflect them.

That's the one thing that I really love about the game -- while it certainly goes into a box (the Japanese SRPG) it has enough interesting bits that when you look into the box, it stands out, and it stands out because of intelligent design decisions. I can't tell you yet if the game will keep me engaged; the world has yet to prove terribly compelling (Alternate History France with Magical Girls and an item eating frog? Really?) but the combat is fun & the AI isn't entirely moronic, and that's the most important starting point.”