I said I would post once I’d trained my first batch of knights, so here we are. Grand Knights History is, after all, a game where you train generic soldiers to take part in a never-ending war against two other countries.

I haven’t been playing very long (5 hours), but the flow of the game looks like this so far:

1. Go to the Guild and create 4 generics. You have 3 main classes to choose from, Knight, Archer and Wizard (in Union, anyway, other countries might have different classes) and a couple of sub-classes within each one.

2. Outfit them at the Item Shop and Weapon Shop. Each class can use two or three different weapons with corresponding skills. What you can equip/use depends on the unit’s stats.

3. Take them out of town to complete quests and fight random battles. I’m not 100% certain, but it seems quest enemies scale to your level but random battle enemies don’t.

4. When you a) finish a quest or b) run out of time, return to town and prepare to sally forth again.

5. When you complete a quest, you get a permit that allows you to use the training hall to raise stats. You pick the course you want your units to take (e.g. Evasion, Agility, Defense) and let them at it.

6. Repeat steps 2 to 5 in whichever order you want for 60 ingame days, after which your squires cannot be trained in the halls any longer and can be sent to the front.

7. Have your squires knighted and send them to the battle front. Start all over again from Step 1. Or you can do like I do and ignore step 7 because you can’t bear to let your people go. They can continue to level up on the world map, and you can deploy them any time you want.

That’s about all you need to know to play the game. If Play-Asia sells a detailed Grand Knights History strategy guide if you want super-knowledge of the game, but if you understand enough Japanese to follow such a guide, then you know enough to make your way through the game without help. There seems to be a bit of a story in there as well, which you can progress by taking certain quests.

What works: It goes without saying that the visuals are stunning and highly-detailed, though the heavy use of yellow rather depresses me. The battle system is a twist on the usual turn-based system. Fights take place on a 4×3 grid that plays out like this:

You have attacks that can knock the enemy back a row, attacks that can hit a whole row or column, or two squares, or three, etc. I’ve seen enemies setting mines on certain squares as well, though I have yet to learn that skill myself. It’s quite similar to what went on in Radiant Historia, except as far as I can tell you can only knock enemies back, not forward or left or right.

There’s also a class triangle of sorts, where Knight > Archer > Wizard > Knight. At least I think that’s how it goes because I don’t actually put it to use in battles. You have to focus your attacks, not mix-and-match and hope something dies before it kills you.

Attacking and defending are done through the use of AP, which fill up at the start of every turn. You start out with 6 AP (4 if your party has low Brave), standard attacks cost 1AP and it grows from there. Each enemy you defeat gives you 1 more AP, and if you defeat several at once you get bonus AP, allowing you to use stronger and stronger attacks as the battle progresses.

I’m not too impressed with that aspect so far. After all, the time you really need all that AP is at the start of battle, not when the enemy is almost dead. Plus my units were low-level for so long that I haven’t been able to use anything fancy. It’s only now that they’re level 10 on average that they can dish out the heavy stuff, and now it’s time for me to part with them and start all over from level 1. Screw the war, I’m not letting them go!

So there’s all kinds of strategy built into Grand Knights History‘s battle system, I just haven’t been given the chance to use it yet.

Why I’m not feeling it to far: I look for 3 things in games: story, characters and gameplay (fun or not fun?). Grand Knights History has you playing as a mute, there are barely any NPCs and all your units are generics, so there’s not much in the character department. I’ve gotten rather fond of my party though. The story has only just started to develop, so no comment there. It doesn’t seem more complicated than finding 13 secret treasures for the King so he can take over the world.

At least GKH has a decent battle system, but it’s nothing exceptional so far. There hasn’t been that much variety in the enemies either, just palette swaps up the wazoo. Yes the enemy designs are wonderfully detailed, but I don’t want to stare at the same goblins all day long.

The training system isn’t as deep or intensive as I’d hoped either. I was expecting some serious micromanagement of your unit’s growths and stats and skills, but the game does all the work for you. In the training hall you pick a card that determines your success. On the field you just fight till you level up. When you pick a unit, you’re told their likes and dislikes, but this only affects whether they gain or lose Brave when you feed them stuff, it has nothing to do with their stats. I had the patience to do it once, but I’m not ready to repeat the process until I’ve built up an army. It’s waaaaay too tedious for that.

And since I’m hoarding my current batch of troops and not letting them out of my sight, I can’t really take part in the “War” portion of the game. Well, not so much “can’t” as “I’m not really interested” right now. I’m going to ignore that aspect of Grand Knights History for a little longer while I do a couple of quests and try to progress the story.

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