La Pucelle: Tactics

[Dracos]

La Pucelle, the much awaited and hoped for predecessor to Disgaea.  Released a year before it in Japan and only crossing seas because of the success of the follow up Disgaea.  It plays much like it is...  A year before Disgaea in design.

And you know...that leaves some things I definitely am going to hold against it.

The gameplay is decisively lackluster.  There's quite a few inherent problems with it, problems that were fixed in Disgaea thankfully enough, but definitely detract from the experience in La Pucelle.  Combat, for starters, is too slow.  It took me hours to build up something that hit more than one person and the fact that they have a little minifight for every single action in combat really sort of starts to drag after a while.  These things are effectively 20 seconds long on the short end, which makes the turn resolution for a given turn last longer than it really should.  Splitting up attacks and special attacks didn't help this as not being able to just go "Okay, done giving commands, everyone go now" was rather annoying.  There also was a few balance issues, as the further you got up in the ranks, the more noticible the 'random alway miss chance' got.  Things with 50000 hit should not miss something with 300 evade.  If it is, then there is a problem with your math.  That's all I can say.  The purification thing can actually even get annoying at points and I can't say I had much fun with all the monsters.  They just didn't feel like they were part of the game at all.  That they belonged there in any way beyond it being a game mechanic.  Some may have a lot of fun with the monster raising aspects, but I think the system has problems and could've been integrated into the game better than just a 'hey let's capture monsters!  It'd be fun!'  One I'll actually note is that the training commands were based on battles fought, not altered whether you have one monster or three thousand.  Naturally this meant that monsters became exponetially harder to make good with each one you got.  Rather than with the humans who could pretty much stack up alongside each other and gain experience in troves.

Yeah, this part is a long rant against the gameplay, but I found it to be considerably flawed and poorly balanced.  Another thing I swipe at was the xp, money, and weapon level gain rates.  Which really were a bit too slow I think for a game that has a ten thousand level range.  Weapon levels in particular were bad.  I really did not want to have to go ahead and pull off several hundred 'purify the entire map summoning four spirits of doom' just to get myself a couple of levels.  Disgaea's item world was slow, but sheesh, I could at least gain ten item levels in an hour if I tried.  Not so with La Pucelle it seemed for the time I gave to it before getting really bored with the mechanic and totally ignoring it.

Anyhow, point is, the gameplay just didn't carry the game.  So what about the other aspects?  The sound, art, secret design, level design, and story?

Well, each of them had problems as well.  The sound for starters never really impressed me during it.  it wasn't bad persay, just pretty much average.  The art was as well, and really could've used some added liveliness to it.  Overusage of a small number of character portraits detracted ever so subtlely from the effect of the game at points.  The art, while a bit animesque, never really wow'ed me and didn't help draw me in either.  It was just on the wrong side of the border from attaining that subtle stylistic effect that draws people in without being ultrarealistic.

The secret design was minimal.  It was sort of 'we put it there because it's an rpg and we should have secrets'.  They 'almost' went somewhere with the gateways to hell.  It could've been really cool if they added some extra production value and presentation to it.  Make it less of an 'oh yeah, going to hell, whoopidie doo' setup.  Unfortunately, not only did they sort of just leave what could've been a really cool secret setup hanging, but they also went out of their way to make it trite.  I mean, there are two secrets in it.  Secret one requires you to build up to a 300 dark world index and then beat ten floors.  Okay, not so bad (even if it didn't give me the reward item with it, bidah).  The second secret requires...you to do this 20 times!  'huh?'  Did someone fail their 'fun' check?  Doing twenty runs of pretty much the same set of ten floors worth of battles is not fun.  You have to add things to it to make it fun.  There was nothing added to it.  It sat out there as just a 'why do this?  It's not challange.  It's not fun.  it's just 'Whee, I win.  Am I bored enough to repeat this another 18 times now?'  Bad idea!  Baal made his first appearance there and is the uber secret boss of the game.  I give him credit, he was kinda cool...even though they gave him no presentation whatsoever, no unique sprite, and really no hints towards him being there that I could see besides a 'hey, there's a dark shrine over there.  Let's raid it.'  Oh, did I mention you could fight him over and over again and get an army of him?  Sorta cool...even if really stupid "Meet my 8 BAALS!"

The level design mm.... I think the first level was about the most interesting when it came down to it.  When they first introduced event squares, I figured they'd be used often, there'd be cool stuff going around in them.  But they really sort of disappeared within a couple of chapters and never showed up again, the whole investigating things, learning about them, and other stuff just getting totally dropped for the far less interesting main plot.  Basically they were 'there'.  The number of interesting stages could be counted on one hand.  They really had nothing much going for them.

The story is what everyone said would save the game.  I mean, it was kind of known well beforehand the game didn't match up gameplay wise with where our expectations would be.  It was known that it was a year before Disgaea in game design, but that shouldn't have effected the story, and we should've been laughing enough to enjoy it anyway, right?

Bzzt.  The story does not save the game.  And the censorship doesn't help it either.  Prier's orginally displayed as a foul mouthed young woman with a penchant for hitting/destroying things.  This is really played up in the advertisements for the game, but more importantly, people act like it.  But you know, she never really does it.  The high swearing point of the game is 'wimps'.  What the fuck is that?  That's not a bad word.  That's a bunch of pussy shit.  Did this go through censorship?  I really can't say, but it kind of feels like it got toned down.  The brattiness, vulgarity, and general feeling of life from the main character feels dulled and that hurt the game.  Her being way out there was an important balance with the 'goodie two-shoes' cast that most the cast was made up of.  And yeah, the characters could've used a lot more balancing in general character design.  Too many goodies, too little personality.  It just felt weak in that area.  There were many points where people would comment on how a character has matured...when nothing had changed whatsoever.

Hell, a side step while on the character subjects to something that really ticked me off.  The dubbing was WRETCHED.  Whoever the FUCK picked a snivelling gayish sounding voice for the "I'm the fearsome wretched demon general who cannot be stopped and follow the evil guy only to get into fights" was a complete assmonger who should be taken out and beat across the face with a microphone.  It totally ruined any drama behind the scenes and they couldn't be taken as funny with the dramatic music blaring and all the characters being serious and worried and scared.

You know, I could go on like this for hours, but really, the main point is the game fell on the wrong side of the border between cool and stupid.  Like Rhapsody, it needed a lot of polish in the gameplay area (not quite as much, but a lot).  Like Rhapsody, it could've used some serious work on the characters, how they were presented and developed, more screen time, and better overall writing.  The story was there, it just wasn't told well.  The character concepts were good, but they just weren't delivered well.  And finally, the censorship didn't help it.  The most notably one was the removing of Croix' smoking for no apparent reason...which of course makes his compulsive hand actions that they didn't take out or edit at all look really weird.  If I didn't know they'd taken it out, I'd have thought he had some kind of hand disorder or something.

Anyhow, it's an okay game.  Nothing spectacular.  Nothing too bad.  Just sort of middle of the roadish.  Better for it's story than it's game, so if you got a hack device, hack your way right through it.  You'll have a much better time than actually playing it.

Dracos