Agarest: Generations of War

First and foremost, this is important to understand: this game is not for everyone. If you're a hardcore JRPG fan and want a new RPG in your roster to kill time with, you might consider buying this. If you hate monotonous battles that go on and on for the most part, this may NOT be the game for you. Down to business then; this is a game that plays on character customization with an evolving story. You start the game with a main character by the name of Leonhardt, who goes against the wishes of his king to save a young elven girl. The result of this is rebelling against his fellow soldiers only to be fatally wounded by a mysterious general known as the black knight. In his dying breath however, he meets a mysterious woman by the name Dyshana, who agrees to save him if he forms a pact that would force him and his descendants to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the world. As you play the game you play not only Leonhardt and his comrades in battle, but also his children; all male. Each of them has their own personality and hardships, but ultimately desire to save the world. At the end of each generation, there are available bride candidates for the main character to choose from, based on how much affection they have for him at the end of the generation. These pass on not only appearance changes to the next main character, but also stats and available weapons they can use. Combat is a bit more complex, and the head of the heated discussion of whether people like it or not. It's semi-SRPG but not really; it focuses less on individual attacks and more on combination attacks for big damage. Some enemies can resist some attacks rather heavily, and thus make them more frustrating to kill. Others can wipe your party in seconds if you move wrong. Dialogue choices and morality choices in the main story often make little sense; but there are guides available to help you get each ending. If you can get past the grinding, it's a fairly decent game, but maybe not for all.

This is a game that requires somewhere around 300-600 hours to complete in the true path, depending largely on how much you forget to come back and allocate your level-up character points. This is a game of INSANE degrees of grinding. In fact, on the PS3, its sales model was FarmVille-esque, selling level-ups and other various points for upgrades in DRM. Not new items (although there were a few of those) or costumes or characters (none of those! It takes EFFORT to make new assets!) but straight-up pay money for EXP. This game features an auto-battle system, and OH BOY WILL YOU NEED IT. Go back a generation's dungeon, tape the "up" button down, and leave the game to grind infinite fights until you get enough XP/BP/any of 7 other types of P to do whatever so you can advance one more plot point. Bosses get insta-kill AoEs and have hundreds of times the health of mobs, so grind more, sucker! Each generation involves about 2 hours of cutscenes if you see them every possible way, plus about 10-40 hours of grinding, depending upon the generation, getting geometrically more grind-heavy as the game goes on. This game also features one of the single most annoying crafting systems I've ever played. Past the first generation and a half, you can't just buy anything anymore, you have to craft it. This wouldn't be a problem, but that you have to craft CHAINS of items starting from generation 2 up through generation 5 equipment, requiring you revisit tons of dungeons you out-leveled 200 game hours ago to grind up more catgirl tails or something. And it's inexcusable that you can't just use the higher-level monster's drops that you can't sell fast enough, since they're literally just palette swaps down to the same skillset. Best of all, though, get to the end of generation 5, and SURPRISE! Your reward is to grind for 400 more hours with no extra cutscenes or anything to alleviate the boredom because you have to kill the gods.

As others reviewers have noted this game has an extremly high grinding factor. To level up your characters, weapons, etc. you have to spend hours and hours and hours in battles with the same type of enemies over and over again. Which is a shame because behind the grind there is actually some interesting ideas especially the dating and generation passing on aspect of it. And the characters are quiet likeable but the grind really drives this game into the ground that you eventually will just give it up or buy one of their many item DLCs to reduce it.

In a nutshell, if you imagine what the JP Sega Saturn game Tactics Ogre might look like if it were remade by the developers of Hyperdimension Neptunia, you'd have this game. It has some elements that seem bizarre, and some that can be frustrating, but on the bright side it gives the player a lot of choices in how to build their party, grow character stats, configure skill lists, and so on. If you like micromanagement and customizability, it's there, but you can also opt-out to a large extent. The battle system is reminiscent of chess, where the placement of units is heavily emphasized, and it's required to think ahead several moves to ensure that you don't put yourself in a bind. Characters can be revived if they die, so there's no need to aim for perfection. While each round has a separate movement and action phase, units move around during the action phase as a side effect of linked attacks. This can be taken advantage of in order to avoid enemy attacks, expand your own attack range, or setup area attacks that can hit multple targets. Enemies can be captured and added to the player's party, and rare items may be obtained by stealing them during battle or by doing huge extra damage to defeated enemies. There are also prizes to be earned by meeting other conditions (eg. 50 hits in a combo, dealing 10k damage, defeating 10 of a certain enemy, etc.). These things aren't required to advance the game. The game has several difficulty levels, and when I purchased this on GOG it included the extra areas and loot from the "DLC." When beginning a new game it's possible to choose which extra loot you want. Some of it will make you insanely powerful for the early part of the game (hence I declined nearly all of it when I played) but it's a crutch that can be leaned on for those who are staunchly opposed to grinding.