I wanted to enjoy this game when I bought it at a Vintage Stock for like $20. It wasn't at my local GameStop and it was appealing to my hardcore weeb with its anime styling. It was a gift from my father for having good grades in college that semester. And my hope of it being good died when I saw the studios behind the game. I can't tell you how sad that made me.
Agarest War Zero is aI wanted to enjoy this game when I bought it at a Vintage Stock for like $20. It wasn't at my local GameStop and it was appealing to my hardcore weeb with its anime styling. It was a gift from my father for having good grades in college that semester. And my hope of it being good died when I saw the studios behind the game. I can't tell you how sad that made me.
Agarest War Zero is a prequel sequel (Takes place before the first game but was made after it) and is one of a DOZEN CARBON COPY "strategy" games by the same developer. Now, you read that and think, "That can't be right. Only Assassin's Creed and CoD repeat themselves, and even they have minor changes" but you'd be wrong. There's a strange series of games that use this strategy turn based thing with the same title shop, weapon forging, useless item shop, and excessive grinding to be mediocre, just with different characters. When I saw the developer my face dropped from excitement to worry, and finally into despair as I got into the first town.
The long made short is that this game boasts being strategical, battles take place on a grid and your job is to place all your units in formation to hit the enemy a whole bunch of times as hard as you can to kill them. Unfortunately, enemies will either be damage sponges or pushovers. The most common grinding technique in all of these games (including ones not called Agarest) is to use a turbo controller to mash X/A, with all the battle animations off, go to the hardest area you can fight in without dying, and let the game play itself on auto while you sleep. This is because the auto battle will most of the time pick decent attacks, heal itself, and turn 10-20 minute long fights against BASIC MOBS, into 10 minute auto battles you don't even have to look at.
At the core of this problem are two things. Everything has to be crafted. Want better healing items? Grind out the low drop rate materials to make them. Want a new sword? Grind out the materials to make them. All they had to do was put new weapons and armor in the shop every chapter or so, nothing overpowered, just some new standards for the player to benchmark themself. Instead you'll often find yourself stomping a hole through everything until a boss suddenly knocks you flat in one turn and you realize that leather jerkin was from chapter 1, you're in chapter 5, and nothing has dropped the materials you need to make the iron armor so it's back to farming bats in a cave for six hours. It's pointless tedium designed, LITERALLY DESIGNED, to sell you on downloadable content that costs as much, or more, than the game itself which makes grinding faster or completely unnecessary.
The second issue the game has is that 90% of the strategy is just setting your team up and leaving them where they are. The game has a link system where other units will join in attacking the same enemy as an ally if they're in a certain figure around that ally. This means you'll find a way to position most of everyone inside everyone else's union zone and fights become little more than animatics between cutscenes, until the previously mentioned difficulty hike boss shows up to make mince meat out of your party, and then a simple helping of three hours of grind to get materials and levels turns him into pudding.
The greatest let down here is that I played a game EXACTLY like this on the PSP with a different story. Same combat, same everything, and it was equally as boring in the long run. There's nothing technically broken here, everything works as intended, it's just that working as intended the game is repetitive, uninspired (it's a clone from the company, there's literally dozens of games with the same gameplay across several generations of consoles), and ultimately not worth anyone's time. Even the story, which starts off with a good premise, falls horribly to the wayside for B anime tropes like harems, beach trips, swimsuits in a fantasy game, and dating sim elements that block your path to the true end. If you're interested in that portion of the game, just download a save, buy the game on PC, and watch the cutscenes. It's not worth "playing" the game to see them.… Expand
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