It was going to be “first impressions”, but after ten hours you kind of lose the right to call it that. Anyway if I’d written my first impressions when I just started out, it would have been a real disaster: “I hate this game! WTF is this! This isn’t a tactical RPG! It…it’s TRASH!” and other expressions along those lines.

I confess I didn’t really pay attention to what the game was about before starting it. I didn’t feel I needed to, I just saw the grids and the top-down view and thought it looked like Fire Emblem with a few gimmicks and that was all it took to draw me in. I’m easy like that, but I’m learning fast not to judge games by appearances any more.

Rondo of Swords may look Fire Emblem-like but it’s a completely different kind of game. Sure there are different classes, and all units have set ranges, and enemies and allies take turns to move and you can recruit people by talking to them and if your main character dies then it’s all over… but still! The fundamental part, gameplay, is waaay different.

Instead of walking up to to an enemy, you draw a path on the map and run (skate? fly? your legs never move) through them, inflicting damage on the way. You can also run (skate/fly) by allies to get all kinds of abilities. It follows then that if you can’t run through an enemy then you can’t hurt it, and vice versa. This makes no sense, but no need to sweat the small stuff. It works in your favor more often than not, because you can hole up in alleys or create chokepoints that will hold out for pretty much ever.

Before you get to that point, though Rondo of Swords has one of the steepest learning curves I have ever seen. If you can make it through the first stage, “Escape from Egvard”, alive, none of the other chapters will make you break a sweat. It’s that hard. I had muddled my way through the tutorial because I thought I’d learn by doing… WRONG. Gawd, that was a nightmare, I don’t even want to talk about it.

See, with future chapters you can just quit if things aren’t going well. You get to start all over again with your items restored and all gained EXP still with you. It’s like the Egress skill in Shining Force, for the older gamers among us. “Escape from Egvard” doesn’t have that: succeed or perish miserably. And I perished, oh how I perished. I was on the verge of giving up, really, but mentally I’d been really, really looking forward to playing this game so I just couldn’t bring myself to. Eventually Youtube came to the rescue and I followed a step by step guide to a Chapter 1 Rout. I failed three or four times, and the whole thing took me 3 hours to do (especially after I lost Margus to a mage), but I got it done in the end. Phew. What’s that saying about appreciating things we have to work hard for? After having to work this hard to pass the first stage, I’m not going to let Rondo of Swords get away that easily!

Now that my Serdic is ridiculously overlevelled and I can use him as bait without worrying too much, the game is a hundred times more fun. It helped that the subsequent chapters were a lot easier, especially since I had more characters. Having learnt from my Saga 3 experience, I looked at a FAQ early on so I’ve been getting all the side characters I need to create a powerful team. I let Rukia die though: the world doesn’t need any more thieves. I’ve also been sending them on Errands regularly, though I’m not sure it’s making any difference to their stats.

Anyway, thing are really smoothly now and I’m having fun, more or less. The layout of some stages is a bit frustrating, and I hate, hate stages with lots of mages, but since you can withdraw from battle and restart as many times as you like, it’s not a deal breaker. The fact that you can’t can’t move and use magic/items/skills on the same turn would bother me if I wasn’t used to it from Tactical Guild (copycats!) but luckily I am. And the story is a bit barebones and the characters are bit shallow, and it’s sad that optional characters don’t get involved in it, but these are all things I can live with.

I’m at the “Thunder Emperor” stage, dunno how much further I have to go. Probably a looong way, because the real bad guys have only just started to surface. May is going to be a busy month for me, though, so I might not finish it any time soon. Well, no rush.

Related posts:

Tactical Guild – Bad Budget Game (1) Tactical Guild – Bad Budget Game (3) First trailer of Nora to Toki no Koubou Rondo of Swords – Path A Finished (spoilers)!