The game has been out for 4 years at this point so I see no need to hold back on the spoilers, but consider yourself forewarned if you haven’t played it yet.
I finished Jeanne d’Arc a few hours ago at 35:05:37. That time includes a lot of hours spent fighting Free Battles to level up my party. I thought I was going overboard at first, but it paid off when I showed up to the final-final battle with Gilvaroth and he was level 60, which was where most of my party was as well. He wasn’t so tough, only 3000 HP. Some annoying minions on the side would heal him from time to time, but never enough to undo the damage I had done. IIRC I beat him in about 10 turns.
The ending has Jeanne and Roger going back to Domrémy to find out that somehow Jeanne’s father and most of the other villagers managed to survive the destruction of the village in chapter 2. Jeanne gets a happy ending back at home with her dad and Roger while Liane, well, we know what happened to Liane. I don’t know whether I should admit this or not, but I kind of enjoyed the torching scene.
– Jeanne?
– But my name is Liane–
– IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOUR NAME IS!
Silly Liane, you can’t enjoy the fame and glory and then try to beg out when things get hot (heh heh). Tant pis!
While we’re on the subject, I’m a little disappointed the armlets turned out to be completely benign in the end. I was hoping for a plot twist where they would turn out to be evil or at least dangerous, and that would explain why Jeanne and Liane started out as normal, well-adjusted peasant girls then went batshit insane as soon as they put them on.
The other armlet wielders didn’t seem to be similarly mentally affected. So I thought, oho, the game is sexist! The others are all male, and thus blessed with greater mental fortitude than that possessed by hysterical females. Or maybe it’s classism. The others are originally of noble birth (Roger got his armlet too late in the game to be affected), Jeanne and Liane are peasants. Of course their feeble lowborn intellects are too weak to adequately control the power of the armlets, etc, etc. But in the end it turned out Jeanne and Liane are just shrill nutcases who got what was coming to them. Oh well.
Apart from Gilles, Jeanne and Liane, the rest of the characters don’t even get a courtesy blurb to say what happened to them after the game ended. Gilles’s later ‘activities’ are explained away as being due to having Gilvaroth sealed within him after the final battle. Ho hum. See why I don’t like games based on actual historical figures. They tend to oversimplify things to ludicrous levels.
And then once the story diverted from history into a hackneyed “Historical figure X was actually demon-possessed” plot, things really slowed down for me. But I pressed on and I’m glad I did because apart from the weak story Jeanne d’Arc was above average all around. I won’t be able to play Summon Night 3 for a while because my SRPG itch has been well and truly scratched by all the battling I did in this game. Of course it would have been even better if half the story battles didn’t consist of fighting the exact same bad guys in four or five times in a row (Talbot [wtf was his problem anyway? he never said], the therion trio, Roger), but I just glad it’s over so I won’t dwell on it.
Moving on, I’m “finishing up” my playthrough of Shepherd’s Crossing. Unlike the sequel, you can’t retire when you’ve had enough so you just keep going until you get tired and then give up. There’s no way I’m going to fill out all of Brammy’s Diary, but I have one or two more things I want to grow/rear before I call it a day, so that should take me another in-game year and then I’ll be done.
