I play nearly every type of game there is but one popular genre I have never played is the JRPG. That is probably because I do all my gaming on PC and have never owned a console. I thought I ought to play one of them someday and since I don’t want to go back to one of the old classics, I thought I’d try this one that is one Steam. The first game was a full on collaboration between the developer Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. This one isn’t but still features Yoshiyuki Momose formerly of Studio Ghibli as character designer and music by Joe Hisaishi so I thought it would make for a decently modern introduction to the genre.

Immediately the game surprises the player by putting you into the role of Roland, the president of the USA, being suddenly transported to a fantasy world. He meets a young boy named Evan who claims to be the king of a country called Ding Dong Dell just as a coup is mounted by the chancellor. So Roland helps Evan escape and gets to safety. Evan decides to found a new country and oddly as it sounds this is achieved by making contact with a type of large monster called a Kingmaker and forging a bond with it. Roland goes along to help and along the way they gather other allies. Evan’s new Kingmaker turns out to be a tiny creature named Lofty but he manages to found a new kingdom anyway which he calls Evermore. After that Evan decides he wants world peace and that means going to each of the other four major kingdoms, including Ding Dong Dell, to get them to sign what he calls the Treaty of Interdependence. Perhaps not surprisingly there is also a mysterious evil force working behind the scenes to subvert all of the kingdoms.

It’s a blatantly silly story and you might be tempted to eye-roll at every plot development but if you make allowances for this being cartoon logic and sappily idealistic, it does sort of work. After a while, it’s even endearing how insistently the game goes for wholesomeness as everyone can be friends and even the worst of villains can be redeemed. You might question why a king is running around doing trivial errands like fetch cooking ingredients for his citizens but that’s just because he’s so darn nice. There is some funny world building such as in the casino kingdom of Goldpaw where getting into debt means you get an annoying bird that follows you everyone everywhere and increases in size as your debt grows and screams to remind you that you owe money. There is even some subtlety as Evan wonders if his deceased father was a good king and wears a disguise to walk among the citizens of Ding Dong Dell. I can’t say that this actually makes for a moving story but it’s solid work and rather a lot better than that of many other games.

The graphics are unfortunately a bit of a mixed bad for me. The character designs are great of course but their outfits are fixed so whatever armor sets you put on them don’t change their look. Some environments look amazing, with Goldpaw in particular being jaw-dropping, but so many other places just look drab and boring, such as the beginning palace areas of Ding Dong Dell. I don’t care much for the graphics of the overworld either that you travel through in chibi form or the very similar look of the skirmish mode. I was also surprised that there are very few voice-acted dialogue lines even for the main quest. Overall it feels to me that they rely on having this cartoonish cell-shaded too to save on needing to add so much visual detail to the models and I don’t like that. I think it ought to feature a cartoon look as a stylistic choice but the world and the inhabitants in it still need to visually rich.

There are two distinct combat modes in this game, the usual personal combat and a skirmish mode that involves Evan commanding troops on a battlefield. Personal combat is action-based and involves the usual mix of normal and heavy attacks, blocking, dodging and special powers. It’s okay but not anything special because the controls aren’t responsive enough and most of the time just spamming attacks works out okay. It’s very easy early on but gets harder towards the end as enemies can one-hit kill you and they ramp up the size of the bosses dramatically. This not only means that their attacks hit a huge area but they bound around the battlefield so much it can be difficult to follow them fast enough. I’m also annoyed in that it’s essential to keep your eyes on what the boss is doing at all times but that can be difficult as the massive pyrotechnics effects, invoked by your own powers or that of the higgledy pets that follow you around can block your sight.

The mechanics of the skirmish mode aren’t well-explained but once you understand how it works, it’s possible to win fights against enemies far higher level than that of your own troops. I still don’t think it’s much fun and I believe that some grinding both for your characters and for your troops is necessary to win the endgame fights. Big numbers are particularly important for personal combat as the companions controlled by the AI do well at first but are kind of useless against the huge, powerful attacks of endgame bosses. In the way same, building up your kingdom is a bit of a grind as well as you need to recruit enough citizens to build it up and you need your kingdom at a high enough level to complete the game. You don’t have to complete all of the side quests but I think you do have to complete a decent number of them to get citizens and build your characters up to a high enough level.

All in all, I enjoyed the story more than I thought I would, especially visiting each of the different countries. I also rather liked the child-like perspective and utter lack of grimdark in this game. Unfortunately I don’t much care for any of the game’s mechanics and the gameplay seems to lack any real depth. For example you can choose which special powers or spells your characters are equipped but that’s it in terms of development path. Gaining levels just makes your numbers get bigger as there are no development trees or anything like. Getting new weapons and other gear similarly is all about bigger numbers and so feels unexciting. I do appreciate how the game keeps adding new gameplay elements even quite late, such as new overland travel options and it’s convenient that you can teleport around the map quite freely. But there is some grind in this game and getting hold of some of the items needed to complete some side-quests is positively cryptic.

Once again this is another case of I’m glad I checked this out and some of the art in here sure is nice. But I don’t see any reason why I should play more JRPGs as I vastly prefer RPGs of the Western tradition. I also feel that the game’s commitment to pacifism goes only so far as killing monsters is still perfectly okay and by the end of the game the kingdom’s unifying symbol is still a sword. I’m also fascinated in what this game reveals of what Japanese ideals of peace and prosperity are like. Evan speaks of achieving world peace by unifying all nations into one. Clearly the writers meant that to be a worthy dream but it should sound like a nightmare scenario for anyone who cares about individual rights and celebrating diversity. No, Evan, if you actually did unite the whole world under your one banner, you would be the bad guy.