Has no one played this? I heard it was released in English last summer already?
The similarities to Dragon Force on the Sega Saturn are unmistakeable. The overworld map with nations to conquer, the use of special magic items, the hiring of generals, the battles themselves. It could almost be a second sequel to DF.
As much as I want to love it though, it suffers from several terrible flaws which stop it from being excellent, and reduce it to a barely playable mess.
Unlike Dragon Force where you had total freedom to assign troops, reinforce castles and order generals off to war at any point during a round, in SFG each round is divided into 12 months and you can only do one action per month, depending on what is assigned to that month. This is done randomly, meaning if you wanted to assign troops in June, but June is council assignment month, you can't do anything other than that.
The game shackles and cripples you so severely by only one random action per month. This also means that in an entire year you might only fight 2 battles, and the game is so slow moving, one year might last half an hour or more. Also, most actions are useless. Council assignment is pointless, since once you've assigned 3 generals to their posts, there is nothing left to do except scout for extra generals, but you're limited to 20 so this type of month soon becomes redundant.
This arbitrary shackling of your actions makes the game extremely slow, since some castles are so heavily fortified you need to attack 6 or more times to capture them. And remember of course, after each battle there's a good chance there'll be a fortification month, allowing enemies to make themselves stronger again. The whole thing plays out like a really slow moving game of stalemate. Attack, be attacked, fortify, back to square one, start again.
Other times, you'll attack someone, take their castle but lose a lot of men, and then there won't be a troop reinforcement month before the next battle, meaning enemies will attack from all sides and, because you don't have any troops, you'll lose several castles. The game doesn't feel balanced, and there is never an opportunity to take advantage of anyone else's poor strategies.
There are tricks though, for example you can loot money from enemies so they don't have enough to fortify with, but money is easy to come by and within the first hour I'd maxed myself out to 9999 currency, and most enemies end up with so much that the 5 or even 20 that I steal does nothing. You can also steal generals, so they can't use their full supply of soldiers in battle, but the likelihood of success is like 1/10, and goes something like this:
Select nation
Select general to use
Select general to capture
Char 1: Goodluck with this!
Gen 1: I'm going now!
PAUSE
Gen 1: Damn, I didn't do it
Char 1: The general couldn't do it!
Furthermore, the generals which you choose to capture, aren't really explained. When I first started I had no magic users and, because it doesn't tell you what class a general is when you try to capture them, I ended up capturing 10 swordfighters before eventually, randomly stumbling across a magic user (who was crap). I'm sure Dragon Force allowed you to view the stats of enemy generals. Everything thing here is so opaque, you don't know the strengths of anyone until you've fought and likely lost to them - it desperately needs to show the battle class of each general, since otherwise it's just random nonsense. Worse still, there's like 30 different nations all fighting each other, and what must be at least 200 generals, so memorisation is out of the questions.
Also, each text box during an attempted stealing takes a few seconds, now multiply it by your 20 generals. It's so tedious, that I tend to skip general stealing. Why couldn't I just select everyone and get it done with a single menu selection? Every action in the game is like this: lots of unneeded dialogue boxes and time wasting.
The whole game suffers from this problem of not letting you do the actions you want to do, and then when you do them, it takes so long it's questionable if it's worth doing. Dragon Force was a lot more streamlined, with greater momentum, and a helluva lot easier to do stuff. It was a challenging game, but its system was easy to play around with. I'd often send 2 battlions to a heavily fortified castle, one to capture it, the other to boost the troops once capture. Or I'd send raiding parties after enemy platoons which were going to attack a different enemy, because I knew they'd be sent away defeated, allowing me to fight some already weakened foes and capture them.
There is nothing like this here. It is slow and very restrictive. It feels like a game where they came up with a whole bunch of cool ideas, and then let another team finish it. The battles are cool (even though the collision detection sucks and results in your platoons getting stuck to each other), and the ideas are good, but it's badly executed.
Which is a pity, because as I said, this whole thing reeks of being like Dragon Force, so much so I wasted about 8 hours on it already... But after that you''re likely to just want to quit and actually go play Dragon Force.
This is the kind of game where I hope the ROMhacking community take an interest, and do a hack job which makes the game more playable and streamlined.
The similarities to Dragon Force on the Sega Saturn are unmistakeable. The overworld map with nations to conquer, the use of special magic items, the hiring of generals, the battles themselves. It could almost be a second sequel to DF.
As much as I want to love it though, it suffers from several terrible flaws which stop it from being excellent, and reduce it to a barely playable mess.
Unlike Dragon Force where you had total freedom to assign troops, reinforce castles and order generals off to war at any point during a round, in SFG each round is divided into 12 months and you can only do one action per month, depending on what is assigned to that month. This is done randomly, meaning if you wanted to assign troops in June, but June is council assignment month, you can't do anything other than that.
The game shackles and cripples you so severely by only one random action per month. This also means that in an entire year you might only fight 2 battles, and the game is so slow moving, one year might last half an hour or more. Also, most actions are useless. Council assignment is pointless, since once you've assigned 3 generals to their posts, there is nothing left to do except scout for extra generals, but you're limited to 20 so this type of month soon becomes redundant.
This arbitrary shackling of your actions makes the game extremely slow, since some castles are so heavily fortified you need to attack 6 or more times to capture them. And remember of course, after each battle there's a good chance there'll be a fortification month, allowing enemies to make themselves stronger again. The whole thing plays out like a really slow moving game of stalemate. Attack, be attacked, fortify, back to square one, start again.
Other times, you'll attack someone, take their castle but lose a lot of men, and then there won't be a troop reinforcement month before the next battle, meaning enemies will attack from all sides and, because you don't have any troops, you'll lose several castles. The game doesn't feel balanced, and there is never an opportunity to take advantage of anyone else's poor strategies.
There are tricks though, for example you can loot money from enemies so they don't have enough to fortify with, but money is easy to come by and within the first hour I'd maxed myself out to 9999 currency, and most enemies end up with so much that the 5 or even 20 that I steal does nothing. You can also steal generals, so they can't use their full supply of soldiers in battle, but the likelihood of success is like 1/10, and goes something like this:
Select nation
Select general to use
Select general to capture
Char 1: Goodluck with this!
Gen 1: I'm going now!
PAUSE
Gen 1: Damn, I didn't do it
Char 1: The general couldn't do it!
Furthermore, the generals which you choose to capture, aren't really explained. When I first started I had no magic users and, because it doesn't tell you what class a general is when you try to capture them, I ended up capturing 10 swordfighters before eventually, randomly stumbling across a magic user (who was crap). I'm sure Dragon Force allowed you to view the stats of enemy generals. Everything thing here is so opaque, you don't know the strengths of anyone until you've fought and likely lost to them - it desperately needs to show the battle class of each general, since otherwise it's just random nonsense. Worse still, there's like 30 different nations all fighting each other, and what must be at least 200 generals, so memorisation is out of the questions.
Also, each text box during an attempted stealing takes a few seconds, now multiply it by your 20 generals. It's so tedious, that I tend to skip general stealing. Why couldn't I just select everyone and get it done with a single menu selection? Every action in the game is like this: lots of unneeded dialogue boxes and time wasting.
The whole game suffers from this problem of not letting you do the actions you want to do, and then when you do them, it takes so long it's questionable if it's worth doing. Dragon Force was a lot more streamlined, with greater momentum, and a helluva lot easier to do stuff. It was a challenging game, but its system was easy to play around with. I'd often send 2 battlions to a heavily fortified castle, one to capture it, the other to boost the troops once capture. Or I'd send raiding parties after enemy platoons which were going to attack a different enemy, because I knew they'd be sent away defeated, allowing me to fight some already weakened foes and capture them.
There is nothing like this here. It is slow and very restrictive. It feels like a game where they came up with a whole bunch of cool ideas, and then let another team finish it. The battles are cool (even though the collision detection sucks and results in your platoons getting stuck to each other), and the ideas are good, but it's badly executed.
Which is a pity, because as I said, this whole thing reeks of being like Dragon Force, so much so I wasted about 8 hours on it already... But after that you''re likely to just want to quit and actually go play Dragon Force.
This is the kind of game where I hope the ROMhacking community take an interest, and do a hack job which makes the game more playable and streamlined.
S, it's just too restrictive for me. You might like it though!
Comment