With the current glut of strategy RPGs on the market, how is a gamer supposed to know which to choose right off the bat? One the one hand, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Disgaea are very good. On the other hand, Venus & Braves is very bad. Since graphics don't really come into play, though, it's pretty hard to tell games apart just by looking at screenshots and gameplay movies, and it's not like there's a GBA demo disc you can consult.
So, what's a gamer to look for in a good, possibly great strategy RPG? I personally look for a good story, nice gameplay mechanics, and an AI that makes the battles tough, but rewarding.
Friends, Onimusha Tactics possesses NONE of these fine qualities.
Venus and Braves was bad, but at least it had some slick graphics and good voices to go along with the game. Onimusha Tactics has graphics that are nice for the GBA, but not nice enough to prevent it from being the worst strategy RPG on the market this year, or, in fact, the worst strategy RPG I've ever purchased.
How can one little cart do so much wrong? I'm glad you asked...
The Story
This is the most basic element of the game, and yet, one that more often than not is what determines the player's lasting memory of the game. People love FF Tactics for its story, and hate Final Fantasy VIII for the same reason. So whenever I come across a story as hideous as the one in Onimusha Tactics, it boggles my mind that someone didn't kick one of the writers in the head and say, "Hey you idiot, this is stupid! Rewrite it!"
Rewriting the story at the beginning of development...
- Requires no change to any of the engine.
- Requires no department-wide all-nighters.
- Can be the difference in a reviewer calling your average game "good" or "crap".
So when the writer approached the other members of the team and said, "Yeah, so for this one part of the story, I have one of the bad guys capture one of the 'People of Destiny', but instead of killing him, he turns him into a robot! And then, he breaks him! So one of the ninjas in the party, who has spent some time in Southern Japan in a Holiday Inn, takes him to a secret Genma Laboratory that they know the location of, and then he repairs him! Then, in order to fulfill his destiny, he fights off his robot-ness with the help of his true love, and becomes human again. But not before the bad guys blow up Mt. Fuji with a giant gun," why was he not subsequently fired?
Except for the part about Holiday Inn, that's an actual description of a block of 5 missions in the game. Scientists say if you sat infinite monkeys down at infinite typewriters, they'd write out all the works of Shakespeare. I guess this is what you get when you sit two monkeys down with a blank wall, and an infinite pile of dung to fling at it.
Gameplay
The strategy part of the game is turn-based, like Fire Emblem or Disgaea. You take a turn, and all whup on the enemy, and then the enemy takes a turn and whups on you. You're able to bring 8 party members into combat, which is pretty nice.
You have all your strat-RPG staples: Attack, use item, blah, blah, blah. The one thing you will get that most games don't have is the "Issen" attack. The Issen move is one that will allow you to execute a 1-hit kill counter attack. However, it only works on a standard physical attack, so most people deem it useless. I find it to be a gamebreaker. You'll hear all about that in the Gripes section.
Aside from that, gameplay is very basic. At the end of each battle you're ranked in 4 stats, and depending on what ratings you get in those you'll get anywhere from a "Complete Victory" to a "Narrow Victory". Most of my fights ended in "Crushing Victory", obviously, because I crush a lot.
You won't run into any random fights, but you'll have the ability to level your troops in the "Phantom World", an area where the Genma just hang out for you to kill them. If you want to cheese this game, you're going to be doing it here, because you can't be killed while in the Phantom World, and on top of that, you can bail out of it any time you want. This place is useful for picking up additional weapon recipes and the Genma stones to make them.
With Onimaru's Oni gauntlet, he can combine these stones the Genma drop and make them into weapons, items, trinkets for sale at roadside stands, or whatever. You can also power them up by taking the Genma souls he's collected with the Oni gauntlet, and enhancing them with the Genma souls.
As your characters and weapons level up, they'll get new abilities. Sometimes, by enhancing your weapon a bunch, you'll unlock an ability and your character won't have enough SP to go ahead and actually USE that ability. So, the game recommends an even balance of lining up character advancement and weapon enhancement. I say screw that. Hit with the best weapon you can. Don't bother enhancing the bench guys’ weaponry, because you can only have 8 guys in battle at a time. If, for some reason, you need one of the bench guys, swap equipment out.
Graphics
The graphics look kind of nice as far as the Game Boy Advance goes. Instead of going with the anime style that all the other SRPGs are using, Onimusha Tactics uses a more realistic looking portrait for the characters. On the battlefield, each character sprite is big enough so that little details like a headband or different color armor make it really easy for you to pick which unit you're looking for. This is probably the only thing that Onimusha Tactics manages to actually do better than average, as opposed to just doing OK or hideously badly.
Audio
This is one of those aforementioned OK areas. Since there aren't any voices you can't really do this too badly, so this ends up being another average audio score from me.
Gripes
In addition to the story being crap, the guys who did the localization obviously did a literal translation of everything. Onimaru goes around calling everyone and everything a "Genma dog!" except for the one time he runs into...a Genma Dog. The characters go from making stupid jokes to yelling "Enough of your prattling! Fight!" within the same exchange. Seriously, stick with the old formal English, or the nowadays carefree attitude, but you can't mix the two, or you look stupid.
This is generally the hallmark of a localization staff that doesn't have enough of a background in English literature to know about tone, and therefore sees no problem with having Ekei run over and jack Onimaru's Phantom Wedge, because he thinks it's a slice of pie. Ha ha ha! You're about as funny as a cancelled UPN sitcom!
Then there are other times when the game flat out lies to you. The item "Divine Nectar" carries the description:
"Special medicine. Recovers FULL HP."
And it does...if your HP is 600 or less. This nearly cost me a battle. Onimaru was taking huge damage, and I was waiting for Akechi to charge up his Tortise Defense again. So, in order to wait out those next few turns, I decided I could have Onimaru attack, Bomaru toss him a Divine Nectar, and it'd all be good. Except Onimaru had 700 + HP, and that didn't take him up to full health, which threw off ALL the calculations. He ended up surviving with 3 HP to spare, but I was not pleased to find that between the translators, QA staff, and whoever else played through the game, that nobody noticed that an item didn't do what it said it did.
The game is also WAY too easy. I lost no party members in the final battle despite:
- Some of them only doing 12 damage to the enemies they were fighting, AFTER having their attacks amplified.
- Being an average of 15 levels lower than the enemies.
- It being my first time through the battle.
Part of the reason that game gets so damn easy is because of the Issen attack. If you have your guys ramp up their defense with the Tortoise Defense, the enemy doesn't have any SP left after spending all his big attacks on you and doing 2 damage. All you have to do is wait for an Issen at that point, and instead of occupying one character for 5 turns of doing 200 damage, he removes the enemy with 1.
The worst part about the Issen is that it automatically gives you 48 exp (the max you can recieve for any action in the game) NO MATTER WHAT THE LEVEL OF THE TARGET IS. So, you can go into the Phantom World and just sit through the first 3 rounds of attacks, so all the enemies have drained their SP, wait for the Issen command to start activating, and, Presto, you've gained 4 levels for your level 40 character while fighting enemies that were level 5 or below. Then you proceed to the next floor and do it all over again. The Issen action also gives you the most souls on a kill, so not only are you rewarded with an extra buff character, they can now have extra buff weaponry.
In addition to that, the enemy will never Critically Hit unless they use a special attack to do so, and the AI is extremely stupid. In one fight, I made my way down to the boss of the fight. We team up and hit him for 300 or so points of damage. So he then casts a Defense spell on himself so nobody besides Onimaru can do more than 1 point of damage to him. Then, every turn after that, he continues to cast the SAME spell on himself, even though IT HAS NO EFFECT ANYMORE, essentially wasting his turn, and saying, "Yeah, I know you're going to kill me, but I want to spend all my SP before I die." The stupid fight took me an additional 14 turns to kill the boss just because he kept upping his Defense. Oh, the fun I was having on that mission.
Then, in another twist of stupidity, you can't hit a character that is on a height level with a difference of 2. So, if you're on height 6, you can't hit the guy on height 8, and vice versa. What makes this retarded is that a difference of 2 in height only goes up to your character's NECK. Also, a guy with a spear on height 6 for some reason, can hit the guy at height 8, because he jumps. Hello?! Having high ground is one of the fundamental principles of strategy! Why is it now all of a sudden a hindrance?! Even more mind-boggling is the fact that that AI can't figure this out. If you're height 8, and it's on height 6, it'll pass its turn. Since the AI just attacks the nearest target, or Onimaru if he is in range, you can effectively take units out of battle by standing at a height difference while your other party members go do stuff. Un-freaking-believable.
Then comes my biggest gripe with the game: Mission design. Some missions have you scurrying to do something in a set number of turns...but half the number of turns will consist of you moving your guys to get to the enemy. Why not just cut the allotted time limit in half and have the mission actually take skill as opposed to just running his guys down there, and then since they all have different movement rates, killing off the enemy with one character?
But more importantly, the missions are useless anyway. Any time you try and prevent something, the enemy does it anyway. Most of the time, it would make things better off if you just stayed home. For example, in one mission they're looking for some guy's skull, because Nobunaga wants to use it as a sake cup. So you go and kill off all the forces there, and then one of the characters goes up to where it's buried and says, "Whew, it's safe." This prompts someone to run in off screen, and use a magical device that suck skulls out from the ground, then run off and say, "Thanks for showing me where it was!" Then, in the next scene they're chugging sake from some dude's skull.
If Onimaru and Co. just sit at home training with each other, and only fight the final battle, according to the results of each mission, the end result would be exactly the same. That makes Onimusha Tactics the most redundant game ever. Every thing you do is busy work, and none of it has any real results. Thanks for the cubicle farm simulation, Capcom! Way to go.
Overall
Easy, pointless missions, with a bad AI, and staff who can't write? Simpsons Comic Guy would say it best:
Worst...Strategy RPG...EVER.
