[Games: La Pucelle: Review]

A great sign for North America

La Pucelle: Tactics Cover Before we get into the game itself, we first have to think about what it means to get this title over to North America. It is a great sign that Mastiff Games is taking the time and effort, even though restricted by a low budget, to fully translate such a wonderful TRPG title to English. For years, North American gamers griped over the fact that Japan always has so many RPGs that never make it to these American shores, translated or untranslated. Now, more and more companies like Mastiff, Atlus and Working Desings are taking the time to translate previously Japanese-only games and bring them to America. Hopefully this trend will continue and more RPGs will be brought to us!

The Japanese to English Conversion

Nobody can deny that the Japanese voice acting for this game is superb and high quality. All of the voice actors are experienced and present their character flawlessly. The english dub should also receive praise. Even though they had a small budget (especially when compared to the translation budgets for games like Front Mission 4 and Final Fantasy XI) they were able to round up a cast of talented english voice actors to do this project. Although sometimes the english dub may seem a little out of proportion and the jokes a little awkward, we have to realise that good Japanese-English conversions are hard, and take a lot of money. To compensate this, the player can chose from the options meny any time in the game to change the English dub back to the original Japanese, which is a wonderful feature in my opinion. The actual translation of the script itself, is in my opinion very good to other low budget translations, and though we (bilingual Japanese/English speakers) have the tendency to look at discrepancies in the text, it really does not matter when the English flows so well anyways.

But..it looks so...old..

When compared to newly developed PS2 games, this title will look very old in graphics. And this is very true. The scenes are mostly 2-Dimensional, and the battle screen is a combination of 3-D and 2-D. However, I found that the battlefields are actually quire pleasant to look at, as well as the character art (which is amazing!) are very good. If you can play a TRPG on the Gameboy Advance, then why do you have to look down on this title because its lesser quality in one department? I find myself liking the graphics because they remind of all the Japanese RPGs I used to play on the PSX (Atelier Marie, Valkyrie Profile, Magical Knight Rayearth etc), and I have always loved these kinds of cute looking games.

Sanrio Rating: 11

“Why are those cute little Kitties fighting those smiley-faced mushrooms?” Is one of the remarks I heard from several people that I watched me play this game. Indeed, the Sanrio value of this game is staggering, but the plot really does not suffer from it. The characters make the plot very enjoyable, and even though the plot is very cliche at first, there are a few really good plot-twist that you will find very surprising. The antics of Prier, the slap-stick humor and the general sarcasm of the game’s plot are all wonderful. I found myself laughing very frequently at things such as the rediculous names of enemies, conversations with cows and Demon Hunters who pee on over-heating engines. However, this game has some really serious themes that outline your missions, which in turn are very realistic and refreshing.

Gameplay: the Pros and Cons

The most enjoyable and addictive thing about this game is its gameplay. The gameplay is like most TRPGs and consists of moving your units around a grid map and giving them orders. However, because you can decide when the orders are carried out you can make very interesting tactical moves throughout the battles. Some battles can take very long because of a insanely good opponents, such as a Lv 100 Giant Thing when you probably only Level 25. The game has an optional Dark World that can be explored to face more challenging opponents, and is definately very fun. Leveling up your characters and making them insanely strong is also part of the fun of this game. There are many items that you can get with endless combinations of skills and elemental alignment. Also, the items you can get are not limited to what part of the story you are in. As long as you can afford strong weapons, the shop will sell them to you. The enemy AI is pretty simple, but still very good. It is pretty easy to fool enemies by luring them with your low level units, yet sometimes they will leave you baffled as they immediately detect the first flaw in your formation and kill of two of your healers / magic users, leaving your warriors without backup. In comparison to Front Mission 4 (they are only a month apart in release date, so there), the AI is pretty good and very promising. If you are not careful, the enemy team will have you running around trying to keep your team from being put to sleep or paralyzed, and some regular fights can become hard when a random enemy is given 20 bonus levels just to make it interesting.

And finally, the music

Tenpei Sato, who also did the music for Disgaea and the Rhapsody series, is in my opinion a combination of Nobuo Uematsu and Noriyuki Iwadare. Some of the songs of this title are just beautiful, and in the tradition of Disgaea there are even vocal insert songs, which are very rare in RPGs. The Dark World theme as well as some of the more emotional themes are very good, and generally the music is very upbeat and lively, like we know from games such as Grandia. The lyrics for the vocal songs are very touching and very different from your run-of-the-mill RPG. As soon as I buy the arranged soundtrack I will write a full review on it.

Should I get it or not?

Unless you have a problem with antique grahics, yes. There is no reason why you should not be picking up this title. It is definately fun and for hardcore gamers there are loads of extras you can get by going to the Dark World. Let’s hope that companies like Mastiff will continue to bring us the Japanese games that we normally do not see around here.

Game Rating:

Graphics: 6
Music: 8.5
Gameplay: 8.5
Replayability: 8
Story: 8
Overal: 7.8

[La Pucelle: Tactics]