La Pucelle: Tactics

La Pucelle was an ok game I guess. It reminds me alot of Eternal Eyes for the Playstation. It has a similar art style, similar monster capturing, and how you venturing from town to dungeon are almost identical. On both La Pucelle and Eternal Eyes, the battle systems are mediocre at best.

I do like the weird humor this game has, I love the art style. I really dislike the barebones world map, and how tiny this game feels. I can't stand the hit-rate ratio, I had a problem with missing attacks this bad since Lord of the Ring's The Third Age. Also the lack of variety in stages is pretty weak, everything is a flat square or rectangle. Hills, or the way your characters face don't factor into the game, so there's less strategy, so you can't get an advantage if you wanted. Also you can walk half way across the screen without a pentaly in energy or anything like that. I put 30 hours into this game and it felt like there was 10 hours of content.

----------Battle System----------
La Pucelle: Tactics is a turn-based Strategy RPG. The turns are moved in rounds, you get to move all of your characters first, assign them to their spots, assign them the move you want them to perform, and then you select "End Turn", which will start all of the animations of the battle sequences at once, or you can pre-maturely start battles as soon as you move if you want, either moving your character and select "Battle" or just select a special move, which always attacks immediately. After you can't possibly move, the enemies move and do their attacks.

You can only use 8 characters per battle, but one creative thing they did with this game is keeping a portal open for your characters to return to during battle. For example, you can only use 8 characters in the battle, but if one of your characters is nearing death and you can't heal them, so you return that character back to the portal and put another character in his place. If a character dies in battle, and there's 7 characters on the field, you can't replace them during that battle. None of your characters permanently die within the game either, but your characters to die quite often in battle, which can be frustrating.

Another cool feature in the game is the ability to gang up on an enemy to create a massive attack. All attack animations are shown in similar fashion to Fire Emblem, the enemy on one side, and your teammates on another. When you initiate the battle, then whoever has the best speed will attack first. When you gang up on an enemy, every character that's near that battle will jump in and attack the surrounding enemy or enemies. To even things out, the enemies have the same advantage.

You gain experience and skill points for each monster killed. Only if your party member was part of the gang that killed the monster then he will get the points. So for example, if one character fought and killed a monster, then he with be the only person to gain the experience, but if you had a team of three characters that attacked at once and one of those characters killed the monster, then all three characters will gain the experience points without a penalty. You gain levels after so many experience points, that boosts your overall stats.

You gain skills similarly to Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced. Each weapon or piece of armor has a 'skill' attached to it, for example a sword might have HP and ATK attached to it. If you kill a monster with this sword, then your level in HP and ATK will permanently go up, each stat has a level system all of their own. If you gain enough levels, you'll gain stat boosting skills. Some skills boost your defense in a battle, or your evade skills, or your attack power, it all depends on how you level up your skills.

You can equip up to 4 items in the game, it doesn't matter what it is either. Any character can equip anything, any number of times. If you want 4 weapons, then slap on 4 weapons, if you want 1 weapon, 1 piece of armor, and 2 accessories? Do it! Whatever you want. My biggest grief with this game is how much weapons and armor cost in stores and how little money you get after battle. For example, a half-way decent sword will cost you around $20,000-60,000, but you get about $2,000-5,000 per battle.

The game's biggest gimmick in the game are the colored crystals on the battle field. Theres many things you can do with these crystals, but overall they harvest new enemies for the bad guys if you don't destroy them right away. You can use them to your advantage because each crystal on the field creates a line across the field, if an enemy is on top of one of these lines and you destroy the crystal then the enemy will take damage. Sometimes you get items if you break a crystal, and at the end of the battle you'll get extra money for how many of these crystals you break. Overall, this is a gimmick I could of done without.

Another gimmick is monster capturing, but it's really the only way to recruit characters outside of storyline required characters.


----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Prier, a 16 year old girl, who is on a quest to become the Maiden of Light. She goes to school with her younger brother, Culotte (who looks like a girl), and her always collective and cool friend Alouette who has amnesia. These three team up together to hunt Demons in their spare time. On a mission, given out by the ultra creepy Father Salade, who leads the Church / School, the team comes across another amnesia victim and fellow Demon Hunter Croix. As these four team up and investigate sightings of demons, they learn of a bigger plot that involves human genocide.

While the main storyline sounds cliche, the rest of the game is freaking weird, in a good way I guess. Everything is so cutesy, but also violent and bloody and highly religious, with some weird skin crawling sexual innuendo you'll ever see.

There's really no main characters, all storyline characters share just about as much limelight as the rest, there's only a couple characters that could be considered background characters, but they still get plenty of lines within the game (mostly the cat characters). Prier is probably the most involved character in the game, since she is your avatar when walking through towns, and she's usually up front during cutscenes. Otherwise, this game feels like Final Fantasy VI, how it has a load of characters, but you're never forced to play as one central character, even though some team members might leave your party during the story.

----------Graphics----------
I love the art style of the game, but on a technical level it doesn't exaclty push any boundaries of the PS2. There are plenty of things I enjoyed and hated about the graphics. I love how overly cute the game is, even mean giant monsters like giant Whales or giant Dragons look cute. The over the top cuteness of the graphics are usually balances by alot of scenes of murder, blood crime scenes, and other weird cutscenes. One minute you're overdosing on cuteness, the next minute you see an old dude punch a little girl in the face. Everything in the game is 2D sprites, there's a TON of animation put into the sprites. You won't see the same sprites over and over again. The battle animations and special attacks look really nice too.

I hate how small towns are, I hate how you walk within these towns in a 2D plane, all non-playable characters stand right above or right below your walking plane. It's just weird, and not nearly as creative looking as Radiata Stories, which had a similar concept. The graphics are very blurry for some reason. There aren't very many dungeons or towns or things to do in the game, it feels like an incomplete game. The world map is very bare bones.

----------Sound----------
I like and enjoy the voice work in the game. They only include voice overs during the most important scenes of the game, mostly at the start and end of a chapter. The voices are very cartoony and over the top, but it fits the overall anime style of the game. The only problem is the voices sound very condensed and muffled. The music is good and rememberable.

----------World Map----------
The world map is a very basic, point and click map. Each town and dungeon are represented as a dot on the map, you hover your icon over and click. The location you need to visit to advance the story is always blinking red, so you'll never get "lost". There's only a couple real towns in the game, and only a handful of dungeons, the world is not very big at all. In each town, or 'safe zone' you'll find atleast one person that sells wares. Each dungeon has various floors, you can go in different directions and that can affect the storyline too. For example, you'll start on floor 1, but within that lever theres 2 different exits, depending on what exit you take, you might initiate a storyline arch, if you go the wrong way, you may screw up that arch, there's really no way to know which way to go. If you do go the wrong way, at the end of each chapter they will tell you if you get the Bad Ending, Normal Ending or Good Ending, depending on which ending you get, you might get a reward.


----------Time to Complete Game----------
29:03:14

There is no save after beating the game, so that hour going through the final dungeons and fighting the final boss wasn't included into my overall time. I did spend quite a few hours skill grinding in this game, so the final time is also a little overbloated than it should be. Also this game ends with the LONGEST freaking credits I've sat through in a long time.