Natural Doctrine is a Japanese SRPG that I played the PS3 version of but this will not be a review, the reason for that is the hour I played failed to do anything but bore or aggravate me.

Normally a game I can’t be bothered to really get into would go without mention or just be one of the entries in a Playlist post,

so why give this game a post all to itself?

The reason is due to me wanting to have a quick look into why I gave up on the game.

The first JRPG that I got into (like a lot of people) was Final Fantasy 7 and while I did go back to play a lot of the classics I had missed out on FF7 did spoil me, the massive production values mixed with great visual design and story that always seem to have way more going on then you will be told about, how could any older RPG even compare to that.

Even so I found many RPGS to love but the one thing the PS1 FF games did so well that all developers need to give more thought to is the introduction. I’ll go into more depth on each of them in a post later this week, the main thing for now is that they have prologues that start the game at what could very well serve as the grand final for most other games. 7 has a new recruit into a eco-terrorist group that is going to sabotage a facility that is protected by a group who that new recruit used to be one of.

In about an hour the player knows the basics of combat, as well as the new things like the limit break, the fights in the intro are never that challenging but that is more than justified by how this both gives greater control of pacing to the story tellers as well as letting new comers like me get through it while ‘learning on the job’ as it were. By the time the safety wheels are removed and each encounter could be a full party wipe the player has invested enough time to want to get better and see what happens in the story and to the characters.

Natural Doctrine (ND from now on) starts you in a little area with goblins to kill, lots of chitter chatter from characters who seemingly only exist to kill goblins and steal their shit.

One out of nowhere line from the main charter hints that maybe going and commenting genocide for junk isn’t very moral.

That one line is the one thing that sets up what the story might become in the future.

The games is 3D with voice acting and the option to choose to have static art on screen to show who is talking during the story sections, the whole thing is very obviously low budget and that’s why I question my lack of engagement. Did I not give the game a fare shake due to its tiny budget?

I don’t think so. The intro taken as is inspires to interest but that is exacerbated by the graphics, the models are just detailed and animated enough to show that they are a complete waste of resources. I can’t help but feel like it being simple sprites and the man power being put into presentation of the story.

So I look at RPG for place, story and character but this game has a stronger focus on mechanics, so I should at least try and look at it on its own terms, as with the story complaints all this has to be taken in the context of only playing an hour, give or take.

To move in combat you use the left stick to take direct control of the character, the D-Pad is used to to select the action be it ‘attack’, ‘potion’, ‘end’ and many others. The stand out feature is that the areas are segmented into mid sized sections, by any grid based standard the sections are about 5×5, you are free to move around a section as much as you want but you’ll only be able to move a few sections at a time, this plays into attacking via a bonus when multiple team members are in the same section but not too close to one another, on paper this is a smart concept but using the system is not enjoyable at all. Getting a bunch of moves up and then having no idea what will actual happen when I trigger them removes me from the battles, being filled with so many misses, counters and blocks that it may as well be random.

On top of this is the camera that is far too close, almost no sense of the environment layout, meaning you have to just keep rushing in head first setting off fights blind, then struggle with the camera to even find the baddies. What’s worse then then fighting is the not fighting, there is no difference between being in combat and not, so something as simple as going from one room to another is a plodding and dull few minutes of moving one character after another then picking ‘guard’, over and over for every character for every round. Horrible.

In the end ND’s biggest failing might be that it shows what it is too soon, no game is it’s highlights all the time but they at the very least try and hint at what good stuff you can work your way towards, rather than ND that throws you head first into filler with no light at the end of the tunnel.