Tactical RPG - Soul Nomad and the World Eaters
This game by Nippon Ichi Software (NISA) is a fairly obscure Tactical RPG that just drips with awesomeness. Even among fans of NISA games it seems like this one RPG seemed to have just slipped by. It even slipped by me at first! The truth about this game, though, is that it is a really cool Ogre Battle clone. If ever you've played Ogre Battle, you know how cool it is... or how frustratingly complicated it is (the SNES one, at least), unless you devote some serious efforts and time into understanding what's going on in it.
First let me give some background info about Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, and a bit about its system, then I'll explain what Nippon Ichi did to swap things up for Soul Nomad. Ogre Battle was a game developed by the now defunct Quest, and was published in America by Atlus as a somewhat limited edition game. Its combat system involved setting your units in row formations which would alter what attacks they could do, as well as how many times they could attack per battle. The movement system was a real-time system with small chess-piece like characters moving around on the map, meeting up with enemy units and engaging in combat. The game was essentially a drawn out campaign to defeat an evil empire and save the world. The story was very compelling, but I won't tell you much about it just in case you happen to play and don't like spoilers.
Fast forward to the N64 era. The N64 version of Ogre Battle was a watered down version of the game, which was much easier to manage and handle. The reason it was so easy to handle was because the alignment system got dumbed down a lot. The system in the original Ogre Battle on the SNES was incredible fickle and a single mistake or mismanagement of a unit could spell doom for your alignment rating for a very long time. You needed to manage this fickle system very closely, and make sure you didn't make any mistakes, lest you face the consequences. Ogre Battle 64 made the alignment requirements for class upgrades a lot easier to keep in check, causing the game to go more closely to the way YOU wanted it to go, as opposed to going how you allowed it to go through poor unit management and bad Tactical planning.
Fast forward this time to Soul Nomad. The Ogre Battle main series has not had any other incarnations since OB64, sadly, and I thought its battle system would disappear from gaming forever. Of course, NIS had something to say about that... Because they're so awesome. NIS brought out Soul Nomad, which is a game whose battle system, anybody could tell you, is very much like that of Ogre Battle : March of the Black Queen. If anybody disagreed with you on that point they were either wrong, lying, or never played Ogre Battle. The game basically uses a standard Tactical RPG movement system, and implements the row based combat from Ogre Battle.
I will be going into more detail about Soul Nomad and the World Eaters when I have time to make a bigger post about the system and how to break it. I will push it up in my schedule if requested, so leave a comment or email me at alsburyt at gmail dot com if you have a request for me to push up my article on Soul Nomad.
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