I'm probably one of the few people in the United States who owns a Generation of Chaos game. I beat and reviewed GOC III, bought part IV, and the Limited Edition version of Part V. So, I was pretty happy that someone finally had enough common sense to bring the game to the US and localize it.
Nippon Ichi decided to bite the bullet and publish Generation of Chaos here in the US on the PSP. This is a good thing for PSP owners, as there's not a whole lot on the RPG front for us to talk about at this point. Time to see how the PSP fares handling 60 sprites in combat.
Story
The world is once again plunged into war. That's easy enough to deduce from the title of the game alone. Wouldn't be much chaos if everyone were getting along, now would it? The game basically takes the characters from Generation of Chaos IV, and puts them into a new storyline. There's really not much to the events of the world, essentially, you're caught up in the swell of the war and try to bring peace to the Lost Grounds realm.
Gameplay
Well, this is kind of tough to explain. Generation of Chaos looks like a board game, but is essentially like what you'd get if you stripped down Civilization and condensed it into only caring about the warfare and land aspects, and then fleshed out those aspects.
What you end up with is a game where you're going to get a bunch of armies that you can recruit with an economy, and generals that you have to keep happy. You can move 5 of your units a day to take over land and such. Along the way, you can have them stop at locations to search for items, appoint them as lords of the land to try and develop the economy and fortifications of your cities, have them cast offensive and defensive spells against enemy cities, recruit armies and a myriad of other things.
If you do not like micromanagement, you're probably going to want to pass on this game. If you take out all those bits, you lose about a good 1/3 of the game. So if you're not going to be using that portion, you might as well spend your cash on another title.
The majority of your interactions, though, are going to be with the combat interface, just because combat takes the longest to resolve. You're given up to 29 soldiers in your troop, and so a pretty intense looking 60 sprite battle will occur with each of your units having their own HP stats and animations. There are a pretty wide and random assortment of troops, so having a showdown between a division of knights and a division of bouncy rabbit looking things is not totally uncommon.
You have a variety of combat tactics you can use. Depending on the weather and the season, your troops will get advantages and disadvantages in combat, so watch those accordingly before choosing to have your troops fight defensively against a group of enemies they could easily charge an overpower with minimal losses.
The fights are real time, in the sense that you can change formations in the middle of battle, and that you can call upon your commander to unleash some devastating attacks, as well. Each commander has 2 varieties of special attacks they can pull off. They get one for their SP, which recharges when they end their turn in a town, and they have a special gauge which charges as their troops get killed or they themselves take damage.
These special attacks mow through enemy minions, and quickly change the tide of a battle. Often times, your main character can unleash an assault that wipes out the entire enemy army, save for the leader in the opening move.
After whittling the enemy commander down to 1HP, the battle ends. Alternately the enemy can flee, but if you defeat the commander you'll take them prisoner, provided you aren't over your max prisoner limit. You can then decide what to do with them. If a commander stationed at the location the prisoner is at hasn't acted for the turn, they can try to persuade the enemy commander to join your cause. Alternately, you can release them or execute them. (Any furry or undead enemy commanders were immediately offed in my game.)
That in a nutshell is it. It's one of those games where you have a ton of different little things you can do which may or may not affect your success at all, but you have the option to do them if you care.
Graphics
The game mostly impresses with the heavily anime inspired 2D visuals. I do have to say that I wish they chose a different font for the in-game text as it seems to come out artifacted and difficult to read in nearly every instance.
But the rest of the art, the character sprites, the portraits, and the locations, the attack animations and special attacks all look pretty good.
The effects on the other hand are somewhat lacking. They're all run of the mill 3D effects, and they take way too long. You can skip the voiced 2D animation, but the 3D looks drab and goes on for far too long. Especially when you're trying to speed through a bunch of AI movement, and all of a sudden the game has to wait to display someone casting a spell against a city.
Audio
As has been their hallmark, Nippon Ichi keeps both the Japanese and English audio tracks on the disc. This is good. I was however, pretty disappointed with the Japanese opening theme. It's pretty drab and the generic. (Haven't been hearing a lot of good VG theme songs out of Japan this year. Wonder what it is.)
The effects and the rest of the background music aren't really memorable, but aren't grating, either. So, slightly an above average audio outing here.
Gripes
For the strategy game, the Generation of Chaos series seems to have a huge glaring weakness. You're able to win nearly every fight by making sure you have a healing item, and having only your leader in the battle. Take a few hits, heal if you're low on health, keep using your charge gauge, and you're in the clear. I've had my main character by himself take out 4 divisions of troops. The extra guys just cost me cash, and are slower recharges on my super gauge, so I don't bother keeping them around until I run into someone who also cheeses the super gauge.
Partially because of the lack of strategy and partially due to the length of the battles, the abundance of combats detracts from the flow of gameplay. It's hard to keep your overall strategy in mind when you run into 5 or 6 fights a turn, and find yourself forgetting what tasks you wanted to pursue and check on. The load times on the PSP also add to the annoyance of getting into multiple battles a turn, as they only further slow the game down.
The game also lacks a real tutorial. In most games I scoff at the tutorial, but with so many options, it'd really be a nice thing to have some sort of in-game help. Being a veteran of the series, I have no real problem with navigating through everything, but when confronted with all the commands, most of them abbreviated down to 4 letters, someone new to the series is going to have a tough time getting into the game. Fortunately, the manual does a good job of covering everything, and if you find yourself extremely lost, Nippon Ichi has put up a free strategy guide as well.
The computer also seems very aggressive, despite having vastly inferior troops. This makes it really easy for you to sit back and wait for the enemy to come charging in, stomp them forces, and then waltz into their turf unchecked.
I would suggest having fewer roaming commanders, and putting a cap on specials so you can only use them a limited number of times per battle or something. I think that if they were to look into a sequel, they would do well to go back to the drawing board with the combat system, and maybe go away from the pseudo real-time model, or at least stack the combat so it's more strategically based and less reliant on an all-powerful commander.
Overall
Well, if you don't discover the way to cheap the fights that I did, and you enjoy in-depth micromanagement style empire games, Generation of Chaos is a good game for you to look into. Hell, if you have a PSP and you enjoy strategy RPGs at all, you may as well look into it. It's not like you have a whole lot of choice when it comes to the PSP library at this point in time.
However, I think most people will find Generation of Chaos too tough to get into and end up overwhelmed by the amount of things they can do before they ever get settled into their own style of play. I still think it's a good game, but I do also think that given to the average person, this game is more likely to frustrate than immerse, which is a shame, because if you do get into it, it can be a lot of fun. That said, it would be nice to see this series get tweaked into a game that was a little bit more accommodating to new players but not so much that it alienated the old players so a better time could be had by all.
