Rondo of Swords

This game is hard to review. See, I love SPRGs. As we've been through before, I'll play a bad SRPG for ages because it's an SRPG. They're addicting, to me.

I love some of the aspects of the game. It has a wide cast of characters to choose from (unfortunately only 6 can go into combat with you) and you customize your characters via giving them skills, which is something I love. The game has also managed to innovate - And have mechanics that no other game has (At least, as far as I'm aware, and I've played a damn lot of SRPGs). The prime example of this is that there is no attack option in this game. There is only movement. That sounds weird, I know, but moving through an enemy square is how you attack. Thus, you can attack movement-1 enemies in a turn. This makes defensive walls impossible, kinda. There's another new concept that the game has which makes them possible. See, each character has a 'momentum gauge', which indicates how big of a target they are. This isn't anything new, as all SRPGs have this behind the scenes. However, in this game, it's manipulatable. There are rings that increase or decrease your base MC, killing enemies increases it, there are skills to increase or decrease it... So, you can very easily manipulate who the AI will attack. Combine this with another element the game has, Zone of Control (ZoC), where you can not be moved through. This is a very rare skill, but a character with high defense, manipulated MC, and ZoC can stop an entire attacking force from hitting your weak and squishy casters.

So, this is why I decided to play through the game, despite its very obvious flaws. The game... had bad QA, or something like that. There's a number of glitches that I encountered - Stupid things, like characters managing to end their turn on top of each other, breaking both of them. You also cannot rearrange the starting location of your characters in combat. ... Mostly. If you mess around with who you use and the order of selecting them, you can kind of influence it. Which is really, really stupid.

The way the game utterly fucks up errands... Oof. This is going to be so long it deserves a paragraph. Errands are things your characters can do instead of going into combat. You can train them (Give them small stat boosts), send them on trials (PROMOTION!), send them on Quests, or send them shopping. Shopping is done in a ... really dumb way, unfortunately. You send a person out with money, they come back with item types you specified. There is no way of knowing what they'll come back with. Yeaaaah. Now, quests. There are 3 major types of quests. Card quests, Smith Quests, everything else. Everything else gives you rewards (Promotion items and gold earning items are the noted ones). Each character can only go on a certain number of Card Quests and Smith Quests combined. This is never mentioned. Card Quests, once you've gone on a certain number, bestow each character with a certain bonus. This is never mentioned *nor* does it tell you when you get the bonus. Furthermore, the game gives no indication of characters having said bonus or the amount of Card/Smith quests they've done. If the game is trying to obfuscate its mechanics, it succeeded masterfully.

Some other minor things are just ... annoying. Assigning quests is a pain, as you can't see who is going on what quest once you do and you can't cancel one quest, you have to cancel every quest people are going on. Actions can be very easily messed up - If an enemy counter attacks, you get bounced. There's been a number of times I've had to restart due to that. It's part of the system, I suppose, more than a real flaw.

Fix these problems and you would have a game that really shined. As is? It's... decent. Would I recommend other people to play it? Only if you really like SRPGs and can handle difficulty. It's not an easy game, by a long shot, but it's also easier than Fire Emblem. Characters don't perma-death, after all. If a character dies in combat, they're just Hurt, which means they have halved stats next fight and can't do errands. So... Judge for yourself if you'd like it.