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[3DS] Langrissre Re:Incarnation -Tensei-

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    [3DS] Langrissre Re:Incarnation -Tensei-

    The quality of 3DS games can become apparent the moment you highlight their icon on the console's dashoard: good games (or games that developers care about) have their logo and something spinning, with the spin getting faster if you blow on the microphone; bad games just have their logo going up and down if you blow on the mic.
    I was delighted when Langrisser Re:Incarnation proudly announced "Now you will suffer!" when the game's logo and nothing more came in existence.
    Being the first new Langrisser in a while (since the Dreamcast, IIRC), developers chose a new direction, at least in the art department, ditching Satoshi Urushiara for a new illustrator, Hiroshi Kaieda. I don't particualrly mind this swap, but the overall presentation is bad. Very bad. Cuts between dialogues (even between people in the same location) is a 1-second-long black screen, no transitions at all, and the game already goes for heavily dithered recoloured backgrounds within the first 15 minutes.
    During the introduction several characters are shown but there's no context, nothing tells you where they are, the nations in this world, or anything else: here's a bunch of generic characters, stuff's happening, have fun.

    Anyway, your character wakes up (in full armour, of course), he's greeted by his maid, you get to know the loli healer, city falls under attack by artillery fire. Your character runs up to a church (I think it is, because everything looks out of a PS1) and takes the magic sword Langrisser and you can get your first taste of the game. This mission is essentially a tutorial about the very basics (movement, attack, magic), with the following missions explaining more elements; these tutorials do the wrong move of explaining the unit triangle (who is strong or weak against who) during the third mission, when it could have been useful before. There are three unit types: infantry, lancers, and cavalry; infantry is strong against lancers, lancers against cavalry and so on; ranged units like archers don't get to be countered when attacking from afar, holy units are strong against demons...the usual stuff. No mention on where pegasus riders, gunners, and motorcycles sit in this whole hierarchy, but who cares? It's hard to undestand the unit type even when completely zoomed in: I failed to realise that my new cavalry unit was in fact a pegasus rider until I sent her into battle.

    And yeah, the setting is now a techno-fantasy with gunpowder and motorcycles. Not that I mind, especially when the BGM is friggin' rock! I like well-done guitar solos, and here in langrisser they aren't just guitar masturbation thankfully, but they overpower everything and don't really fit with the overall tone. Despite being out of place, the music is possibly the best thing about the game, because everything else feels like the game was developed on a Saturn/PS1 and ported to the 3DS in a couple of days.

    From the second mission onward you get to recruit troops like the old games, and the units' movement turns always comprise the leader and his/her troops. Active troops are animated differently from the rest, but there's no button to select your next unit, you have to move the cursor all over the battlefield to select it. Out of all the buttons (and touchscreen) on the 3DS, A and B confirm/cancel selection, L cycles through zoom levels, start pauses the game, the d-pad moves cursors around; every other button is left unused.

    Graphics are bad, strikingly so. The battlefield is shown in the usual top-down perspective, with tiles clearly marked by tick black lines; it's difficult to discern terrain types or impassable tiles due to the map being represented with as little detail as possible; every map has some trees, buildings, or other objects to break the monotony, but they are so shallowly modeled that sprites would have been better.
    Or maybe not, because sprites are used to represent units. Ive already written on how difficult is to discern unit types (cavalry from pegasus riders), but every unit has her health overimposed, and that magic number becomes unreadable when zoomed out, to the point that 9s look like 3s. The only way to reliably move and attack is to look at the numbers before battles, but this means moving the cursor around a lot and possiby losing sight of which unit you have to move.
    When two units clash, the game cuts to a 3D representation of the two, and this is where you might want to quit the game. Backdrops are circular arenas with the terrain fading out over a heavily blurred static background; units are represented with only an handful of polygons, their head towering over everything, even weapons; detail is scarce, and there's just one animation, the unit gently lunging the equipped weapon forward; the rest is done by simply moving the whole 3D model around. Timing during these scenes is really, really bad, with sound effects and knockbacks due to attacks delayed by two-three seconds. Defeated units explode (?), every battle starts with a dragon roar (??), highlighting units on the map triggers a sound like coins are dropped in a money bank (???).
    Units stats include a green bar below their names, to the right of the available HPs. I thought it was a health bar, but that bar just never moves. Why would I have though it was a health bar? How silly of me.
    Between missions your army, represented by your character's sprite, moves around the world map; that sprite is static, and the bottom screen is barely used. Depth effect? It's there, only battle cutscenes, and it's so subtle that it's hard to notice.

    So far I've fought three battles. During the first I thought: "this is bad". During the second: "oh please make it stop". During the third: "it's fun to point out all mistakes!". Only that it wasn't, really. Videogames can't be like movies that are good when they're terrible, they are just terrible.
    Regarding the game mechanics, I can't point out much, everything has been a series of rather uneventful move-attack orders to units I couldn't figure out their tactical value (if any at all), as the main character and archer units were able to lay waste on pretty much every unit. Maybe, just maybe, there's an half-decent tactical game buried below so much crap, but the audiovisual presentation makes hard to play the game.

    And if you want to hurt yourself, here's some footage.


    #2
    A more complete post on my progression will come later, but here's a preview: some units can actually walk through walls. Movement through walls cost more than normal terrain, but some units can pass through walls that are theorically meant to keep a building up.
    Langrisser Re:Incarnation surely is a quality game.

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      #3
      With few more hours under the belt, impressions about the game are getting worse and worse.
      Langrisser Re:Incarnation wants to stage large scale battles, on large maps. Criminally so, I'd say, as half or more of all maps is empty. Enemies are placed in groups in what feels like an invisible line from the starting position to finish (either a boss or a location), and between these groups absolutely nothing, leaving turns only to troops movement where you wish that some of your units would enter into the enemy's aggro range to speed up things. Sometimes an allied army will assist you on a completely unrelated side of the map, and when that happens you'll spend the vast majority of mission time looking at the AI completely flunking attacks by ignoring the unit triangle, travelling through the roughest terrain, or trying to move in a straight line to...somewhere...only to hit a wall and panic the next turns, moving a tile or two in opposing directions.
      But infantry is there to help, as they can pass through walls; I can understand if they expend most/all of their movement points to climb high walls, but not when they can go straight through walls that are implied to support buildings. This wall thing builds up on top of the rest, and has become my biggest point of scorn toward the game, although there are factors that should be more damning.

      For example, the combat mechanics. You know, the core of the game. Characters related to the story can bring one or more secondary units to battle; when a leader is defeated, his/her secondary units will be automatically defeated as well. Leaders and secondary units take their turn at the same time but are otherwise free to roam the battlefield as you see fit, though you'll want them to stick together.

      Units have attack and defence values, based on unit type and level. When two units battle, the attacker's attack is compared to the defender's defence, and viceversa; the two parties get the difference of these two values subtracted from their health. Simple enough, right? Then you need to factor in bonuses given by proximity between leaders and between leaders and their secondary units; bonuses between leaders is influenced by relationship levels, increased between battles; these bonuses are clearly shown before a battle.
      Then there's the chance of critical attacks, and the willingness of the game to follow its own rules. More than once I had units deliver less damage than what the numbers would suggest against units of the same type (swords VS swords) or favourable type (swords VS lances), or your character (the main protagonist wielding the Langrisser, in game terms a sword) that seems outside the unit triangle, able to take on all kind of units without a scratch.
      The thing is that you're not quite sure where certain units fit into the triangle until you engage them: the cavalry "branch" is incredibly wide, featuring knights, pegasus riders, wyvern riders, motor- and hover- bikes. There are spellcasters, that can attack at short range, where do they fit in the triangle, or are they outside? What about gunners, that can attack at close range? Archers can't attack at close range, how gunners and archers compare in ranged battles? Magic users cannot use magic if they move, and deliver a staggering 1 or 2 damage points without chance of reprisal, are they useful?
      The whole combat system feels cobbled together from previous Langrisser games and other strategy games without rhyme or reason, and what really carries you through the game is your character (able to ignore the unit triangle, apparently), pure leader levelling, and how the AI stumbles during movement and attack.
      Fun this game is not, and every new mission brings something new to the table to mock.

      This low level of quality is ported to the technical side as well, and this is the most apparent thing. I don't really mind the new character designer, but he only worked on character relevant to the story; portraits of secondary units have been done by someone else and the two styles are drastically different. Background, wheter in cutscenes or terrain during missions, are boring and bland, with terrains looking pixellated and in the worst cases showing texture seams. Maps have a bad case of wrong scale too: in one you're fighting in a castle, but there are buildings outside (like churches and barns) that are not even half the size of the castle's folding bridges. As mentioned before, maps are large but only portions are ever used. Details are sparse because the game cannot handle too many of them: try to scroll in the same castle as above and you'll get half of the FPS of plain terrain; the 3DS might not be the most powerful console around, but Langrisser Re:Incarnation uses PS1/Saturn level graphics.
      When the best effect in the game is a pre-rendered 5 seconds clip of a page flipping over, you know that noone cared how the game looked.

      The only salvageable thing are the BGMs, composed by a series veteran: nice guitar tracks with a good rhythm and style, completely unfit for the game and its setting, but it's the only thing that I'm looking for in a new mission...and then being remembered that loops are short and that a bass line or a drum roll would be nice once in a while.
      For the most part, I've been skipping dialogues as spoken lines are non-existent, only the first words of a sentence are. It was rather surprising to hear some good VAs in the mix, but I think developers just cut words from animes to put them in the game.

      I'm now at around 5 hours into the game, and there are paths you can choose. The story seems complex, with a lot (too many maybe) named characters, but everyone seems to pop up for a mission, gone for two, pop up again...I don't know how long the game is supposed to be, but I'm finding hard to keep playing it (doesn't help that Etrian Odyssey Untold 2 arrived two days ago), let alone play it multiple times for different endings.

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