Growlanser
The battle system is more like a severely watered down Grandia, or a more crowded (but no less slow) Trails in the Sky. Enemies can be seen on the field and there is no battle transition. When you give a physical attack command, the character has to run across the field until they are within range before delivering the attack. There is also a cooldown period for each attack before the next one becomes available. Magic has both a charge time and a cool-down period but better range and multi-hit abilitites for the most part. Both phys attacks and magic do pathetic damage so far, possibly because weapons are so expensive that I rarely update.
The story and the characters are really good so far. I’m loving my little party and their interactions, and the character I expected to turn evil (Ariost) has been pretty good so far. Everyone gets along, everyone works together and no one has made any cheesy “power of friendship” or “you are not alone” speeches yet. Even the clumsy ditz character with a crush on my main character hasn’t pissed me off much.
It also seems like my emo-looking main character might either be possessed by evil or have an evil twin brother or both. There’s something really interesting going on in that regard that I’m very eager to find out more about. It also seems like MC’s little sister, one of the first non-annoying video game sisters I’ve encountered so far, is going to end up dying at the end in order to save everyone. She said as much quite early on. Can’t wait to see how that plays out.
In short, Growlanser clears all the important hurdles for me so far, and the first 10 hours have passed by in a flash. I wish the battles were a little faster and less crowded, and I wish there wasn’t so much backtracking (the teleport spell is a life-saver). Apart from that I’m having a really good time. I hope to be able to say the same thing next time I write about this game.
Growlanser does sort of play like a really clunky RTS (since it’s made for consoles there’s no mouse) so that might be where the “SRPG” genre classification comes from.
That or maybe because most English players of this series seem to like Growlanser 2 best, which like Zelda 2/Castlevania 2/etc is kind of an anomaly in the series. Its structure is a lot more SRPG than the rest of the series (up to 8 controllable compared to 4 allies, no “dungeon” exploration, battles are set up like SRPG missions where you move from one mission to the next)
3rd theory: they’re confusing it with Langrisser, it’s spiritual predecessor.
Your comment just made me realize… I’ve never played an RTS before.
I think explanations 2 and 3 are most likely to be true. It wouldn’t be the first time a series took off in a completely different direction from the first instalment. Phantasy Star and Shining [whatever] games come to mind.
Maybe next week I’ll play Lunar and find out it was actually an FPS all along. 😀