Record of Agarest War Review

Developer: Idea Factory / Publisher: Aksys Games / ESRB: Teen (Alcohol Reference, Mild Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Partial Nudity, Suggestive Themes) / Played on: Xbox 360 / Price: $49.99

Record of Agarest War arrived at my door in an inauspicious, unmarked brown box. I’d hoped to purchase this particular game since it contains a mousepad with protruding breasts/wrist-rest and a pillowcase featuring a yearning anime babe, and thus would provide an amusing anecdote worthy of a review intro. Instead, I accepted the innocuous parcel from the UPS deliveryman. The box promised guilty pleasures, depicting anime ladies struggling to eat a huge sausage or an ice cream cone only to have white goo melt all over her hands and face. While the game itself isn’t as filthy as the box promises, it does offer a familiar and numerically thick tactical RPG that some will enjoy. However, most won’t find any pleasure in Agarest – guilty or otherwise.

Story

Agarest’s story is plucked from the archetypes common to Japanese anime and video games. The game kicks off with smooth-faced army general Leonhardt getting the axe (literally) from his comrades for disobeying orders by not killing an elf girl that’s, to use the vernacular, incredible moe. Shortly after death, a goddess of balance resurrects him on the condition that he and his descendents serve her purposes. Thus begins a five-generation quest to save the world from evil, and though the setup sounds Greek, the execution is 100% Japanese.

The story itself meanders through the oft-tread war between countries, predictably fueled by An Ancient and Evil Magic. Characters run the gamut of anime archetypes, from the morally stalwart and perpetually hip-jutting hero, to the swarthy carefree ladies’ man, and the cute and innocent girl and her taciturn protector. The goddess, who decides to accompany Leo and his crew, shows up every now and again to command characters to perform plot-convenient actions as well as show generous amounts of under-boob. Dialogue is as uninteresting as everything else, as characters speak in rigid thee/thou tones, and conform to all the anime archetypes you can imagine. Better put, I counted seventy-five instances of characters only saying “…”

But you’re not here for the awesome story, interesting characters, or unique setting. You’re here to bang some anime chicks. Unfortunately, the game takes a long time to get there, and even when it does, it’s not very titillating. Influencing the ladies’ desires is done in the traditional way – through sporadic dialogue options – but it’s rarely clear how the given choice will affect your relationships. The greatest entertainment from the dating-sim side of this game is the laugh-at sort. Few game choices are as entertaining as those that cause a battle-hardened knight squeal with domestic glee because you chose the dialogue option with “Love” in it. And though this may ruin the surprise, the actual banging itself isn’t very exciting. All you get is a picture of your lovely two-dimensional lass in a wedding dress, then wrapped seductively in a bed sheet. You can’t even look at these videos again later when feeling particularly sad, lonely, and pathetic. While the mechanic of plowing an anime chick and continuing the story with your resultant offspring is an admittedly interesting idea, it doesn’t amount to much.

Gameplay

In grand JRPG fashion, you can’t become a philanderer without first slogging through a mountain of menu-driven encounters with monsters. Agarest is the tactical RPG formula incarnate: sit through dialogue voiced in Japanese (the publishers wisely chose to not waste their time with English VO), and then plug through the four or five battles laid out on the world map in an effort to get to the next story node, which generally contains one or more battles itself. Basically put, you’ll be fighting a lot. That’s problematic, given issues with the combat system.

Combat’s composed of two phases: a move phase and a skill phase. During the move phase, you position your party members to get the tough ones out front and the weak casters in back. Additionally, characters placed in certain formations become “linked” and can attack at the same time. There’s skill involved in positioning characters such that they can avoid damage but still link up for coordinated attacks. Once everyone’s positioned, combat switches to skill phase, which allows you to deploy the hurt. Selecting an enemy opens a list of attack abilities, which can be selected from the current and any linked characters. Queuing up these attacks in certain combinations unlocks special skills, which do bonus damage.

That’s not the half of it either – there are all sorts of gauges, points that accumulate, and special skills that activate in certain situations that attempt to add depth to the combat system. The reality is that every battle follows this flow: position all your characters so that they’re all linked, and then unload all your party’s attacks on the most threatening monster to kill it before it can attack that round. Wait for the next round, rinse, and repeat.

Another problem is that enemies can link just as the party can. This makes boss battles extremely frustrating, as multiple boss enemies gang up on a single character and you can’t do anything about it. Often, the best option is to limp through a boss fight, losing and resurrecting one or two characters every round simply because death is unavoidable. Aside from that, there’s the raw monotony; the game never mixes up combat in an interesting way. Hell, every stage is the same 7×10 grid even though the background changes. Some areas have a few panels that will raise or lower a stat, but even this has negligible effects on the tactics needed to succeed.

Winning battles earns gold, EXP, PP, TP, and EP – basically a ton of numbers. These points can be used in a few different ways. You can enhance your equipment with EP at the blacksmith, trade TP for items at the adventurer’s guild, spend PP on better stats for your party, combine items dropped from monsters into new weapons, etc etc. Simply put, there are a lot of numerical systems in this game, and if you’re the sort that enjoys navigating menus and seeing numbers go up, you’ll enjoy it.

Graphics

Agarest could easily run on a PlayStation 2, so there’re no visual treats here. Not only are the sprites and backgrounds in Agarest blurry and low-res, there aren’t that many of them. Animation is very choppy, and I only saw six different battlegrounds in over thirty hours of gameplay. Even more perplexing, the characters take several seconds to load in at the beginning of every battle. Installing to the hard drive helped a little, but it’s baffling how game sprites that take up less space than the texture on Master Chief’s hand take so long to pop on screen. Despite that, character art in conversations is nicely drawn and high-resolution, if rarely animated.

Sound

The game’s last-gen aesthetic continues with its sound, offering a synthesized soundtrack ranging from lilting chamber music during dialogue scenes to manic thrashing metal in battle. The former is innocuous enough, but the battle music becomes extremely grating before long. I’m generally a music fiend, but Agarest will boast the singular distinction of being the first game that comes with a soundtrack CD that I won’t listen to. The sound effects are repetitious enough to be amusing, as hearing the same overblown death rattle from the sixth generic soldier to fall in battle entertains in a way the developers probably didn’t intend.

Bottom Line

Record of Agarest War is boring, tedious, and thoroughly derivative. That said, there are gamers out there that will snap it up and enjoy every second of it. If you enjoy incremental number creep, if you enjoy (or at least tolerate) generic anime characters and stories, and especially if you’re starved for a tactical RPG, you should play Record of Agarest War simply because there’s no decent competition. However, if you’re looking for guilty pleasure, stick to the internet.

3.5/10

SHARE THIS POST WITH YOUR IDIOT FRIENDS:

READ SOMETHING ELSE WHY DON'T YOU:

1. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 Review

2. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Review

3. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Review