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Growlanser: Heritage of War ( Growlanser V )
PlayStation 2
Sea Slugs are the Scariest Thing Ever.
3/5 stars
The ‘Growlanser’ series is a heavily-anime-inspired Tactical RPG franchise that has had a very spotty release schedule outside of Japan. Out of six games in the franchise, which began on the original PlayStation, only three of them have made it to Western shores, and two of those were included in the compilation, “Growlanser Generations” (known as “Growlanser Collection” in Japan): “Growlanser 2” and “Growlanser 3.” After skipping “Growlanser 4” for outside-of-Japan release, Atlus, the niche RPG company that publishes the series, decided to give North Americans (and, for the first time ever, Europeans) access to the fifth game in the franchise, confusingly called “Growlanser 5: Generations” in Japan, but redubbed as “Growlanser: Heritage of War” (“HoW”) for Western release, seemingly both to obfuscate the fact that they skipped a game and to differentiate it from the Working Designs renaming of the “Growlanser Collection.”
As a fan of the “Growlanser Generations” compilation, I found myself frustrated by the lack of Western releases for the rest of this franchise. Yet, I must continually remind myself that, much like the situation with Squaresoft and the original “Final Fantasy 2,” “Final Fantasy 3,” and “Final Fantasy 5,” sometimes Japanese publishers really do have Westerners’ best interests in mind in sparing us from the releases of mediocre-to-poor titles in beloved franchises. While ‘Growlanser’ has a miniscule fanbase in the West and is certainly nowhere near the ‘beloved’ status of ‘Final Fantasy’ or ‘Dragon Quest,’ I find myself wondering if the quality of ‘Growlanser’ games is really so inconsistent. Would “HoW” be an obscure hidden gem, like “Growlanser 2” and “Growlanser 3,” or would it have been better off staying in its home country?
Presentation
The ‘Growlanser’ series has never been about mind-blowing graphics. The second and third games in the franchise may have been released on the PlayStation 2, but they were entirely sprite-based 2D, and could have easily been done on the PlayStation 1 or even, dare I say it, the SNES. “HoW” follows the trend of ‘Growlanser’ games being a generation behind, graphically, but shows that the series is actually moving forward… unfortunately by imitating the poor graphical design decisions of late PS1 games. “HoW” combines bland, blurry, pre-rendered 2D backgrounds with simple, blocky, poorly animated, jaggy-covered polygon models for characters and enemies. Also in keeping with series tradition, all of the game’s talking bits are played out through extremely-anime-styled talking heads (which have animated eyes and mouths, but otherwise do not move). A few key story segments in the game get the full anime cutscene treatment, and look incredible.
The result of this graphical mish-mash is a game that looks incredibly dull by PS2 standards, with a tiny world made up of connected rectangular areas that is ultimately smaller and less interesting than the tiny world made up of connected rectangular areas in the original “Legend of Zelda.” The poor-quality character models don’t do justice to the outrageous anime costumes worn by the cast of characters and just scream, “MEDIOCRITY!” The anime character designs, on the other hand, are sharp and clean, but also completely over-the-top. One character (a man) dresses in a tuxedo, but also complements his outfit with a bright pink (and extremely stiff) feather boa. One female character wears a hat with wings that, for most of the game, I thought were attached to her head. Another character wears a succubus costume, complete with bat wings and a spaded tail… which I’m still not sure if it’s just a costume or not. Even the main character, while fairly normal by crazy anime standards, has 5-foot long legs that, when animated as a polygon model, make him look like a giant spider in red leather pants.
Audiowise, “HoW” is a mixed bag. The soundtrack consists of several really catchy, well-done tracks that I found myself whistling while going about my daily business, but it also contains a few absolute duds that are ridiculous and annoying. “HoW” is also fully voiced, with a mostly solid voiceacting cast. Most lines are delivered well, but there are a few characters whose performances fall flat.
Story
“HoW” tries to do the multiple-character-perspective thing originally done by “Dragon Quest 4,” but doesn’t pull it off nearly as well. The game begins with several story scenarios starring characters who will become important supporting characters and background figures during the main scenario, which takes place 20 years later. In these early scenarios, the game attempts to setup some of the background for the political climate in the game’s world, but manages to both spend too much and not enough time on the process. Thus the introductory scenarios are both boring and ham-handed in their attempts to setup the power structure by which the Peace Maintenance Brigade (PMB) holds the warring nations that surround them in a forced ceasefire by threatening everyone with obliteration at the end of their super-weapon, the Admonisher.
The main scenario begins with a young orphan (as usual) named Haschen. When his orphanage is destroyed by giant mutant sea slugs, called Screapers, the PMB manages to save his life by performing a mysterious medical procedure on him. This procedure not only grants life, but also a special ability to weaken nearby Screapers, thus enabling normal weapons to harm them.
As the story proceeds, more information is revealed about the Screapers and a supposedly ‘ancient’ civilization that once united the entire continent in peace. Yet it seems that the people of the world of “HoW” must be the worst record-keepers ever, as the ‘ancient’ peace wasn’t really all that long ago, and the Screapers aren’t really all that mysterious (though they are never really properly explained, either).
“HoW’s” narrative manages to encompass enough over-used anime tropes and includes such haphazard and mismatched worldbuilding that the game’s setting and world history reminds me way too much of such horrible, generic shonen animes as “Hunter X Hunter.” It doesn’t really make sense why many of the characters act the way they do and it doesn’t make sense that giant sea slugs (and occasionally giant manta rays) can come out of the water to attack people AND somehow are nearly invincible. While “HoW” does do a pretty good job of tying up its loose ends, the few that are left hanging are utterly aggravating.
The end result of “HoW’s” narrative mediocrity is that I continually forgot what my characters were supposed to be doing next and ultimately didn’t really care about the outcome. And, unfortunately, much of the final outcome (the ending sequence) is based upon a single, missable event that I completely flubbed because I wasn’t clear on what I should have been doing at the time.
Gameplay
The ‘Growlanser’ series stands out from other TRPGs through its lack of grinding, lack of grid-based movment, and pseudo-real-time combat. “HoW” follows much of the tradition of its franchise and includes all of these features. At the beginning of each character’s turn, which is determined by a timer gauge, it’s possible to give them a command. Once they have performed their command, they will ask what to do next and pop open their menu again. While the menu is open, all of the combat action pauses, but otherwise all characters and enemies endeavor to execute their commands simultaneously in real-time. This combat engine worked well in the older ‘Growlanser’ games, and it’s still great in “HoW,” though “HoW” does feature a few annoying missions that involve stopping enemies from fleeing, which are unnecessarily frustrating.
Unlike the older ‘Growlanser’ games, “HoW” features a full-on overworld instead of a map with dots connected by lines. Every section of the overworld is inhabited by set groups of weak ‘random-battle’ style enemies. These weak enemies are really only present to justify the addition of an explorable overworld, as they are so incredibly feeble that the game doesn’t even pop-up the command menu unless the player does it manually, instead allowing the characters to run on their ‘auto-battle’ scripts for all ‘random’ encounters. While this is a great time-saver, it also makes me question the need for an explorable overworld. It wasn’t necessary in the older ‘Growlanser’ games and isn’t included in many (if any) other TRPG series. While the overworld does give the game more of a blended feel between a normal RPG and a TRPG, it mainly just makes it more time consuming to revisit towns between story missions (and in order to avoid missing side-quests, the player needs to revisit towns quite frequently).
The other big change from older ‘Growlanser’ games in “HoW” is the way weapons and skills work. In the games included in “Growlanser Generations,” characters equipped ‘ring weapons’ that were born from the blood of slain enemies. Each ring would be of a certain quality and could have a number of slots to add extra effects. It was a good system and allowed for some fun levels of tactical min-maxing with a minimum of confusion and time wasting. “HoW” completely discards the ring weapon system for a more generic ‘buy weapons and armor at a shop’ system (of course, there are plenty of ‘ultimate’ weapons and armor that must be found via side quests). Each weapon and armor includes up to three skills that the equipped character can learn (randomly). Once learned (by using the gear in combat), a skill becomes a skill plate that can be placed on a character’s skill tree. Each plate has an arrow at the end, and when plates are placed in the skill tree such that their arrows flow into other plates, any skill points earned in battle will be evenly distributed between all connected plates in the actively-selected ‘flow.’ This new skill system is incredibly confusing at first, though it eventually becomes more manageable – especially once the player figures out which skills are useful and which aren’t. It can be an enormous time-sink fiddling with skill plates and trying to exploit the game’s random number generator into providing plates with two arrows, which can each effectively double the number of skills in the ‘flow.’ Ultimately, though, it’s easy to exploit passive skills to great effect, leaving each character with only a small number of active ‘knacks’ and/or spells, but with the ability for melee characters to dish out huge damage while absorbing the same, or for spellcasting characters to unload a constant stream of potent magic without ever running out of MP.
Overall
“Growlanser: Heritage of War” isn’t quite up to the standard set by “Growlanser 2” and “Growlanser 3.” While it’s still a pretty solid ‘game,’ despite some of the questionable and confusing changes to gameplay mechanics, the bland mess of a story and low-budget presentation make the overall ‘experience’ less enjoyable.
Presentation: 2.5/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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