Agarest: Generations of War

The RPG Guru Hedges is back with another review

Graphics: This is by no means pushing the PS3 hell it could probably run on the PS2 with such low detail character sprites – however while the sprites are fairly low detail the character art used in cut scenes and for the gallery is some of the best anime artwork I have ever seen. The environments range from the generic cave to a lush forest – to be fair this game doesn’t push the boundaries but it uses the leftover memory for the rest of the game.

Sound: This game’s soundtrack is an incredible effort. I say effort because it reuses a lot of tracks over the game – however they are very good tracks. This game is voiced entirely in Japanese and for this I am glad because it means the player doesn’t have to put up with a horrible dub. Thankfully because all of the scenes are done with text windows as opposed to automatically advancing.

Gameplay: It’s hard to say whether the gameplay is good or bad in this game – the battle scenes are very simple turn based battles however the skills system in the game whilst deep is incredibly complicated with the player having to combine old skills with new ones. With this being the only way to gain new skills, it means that the player will be severely underpowered by the later stages of the game. The weapon system also suffers the same problem because stores do not periodically gain new stock as the game progresses but rather as the player synthesises new equipment. This game is one that forces the player to grind not due to difficulty but rather to give the opportunity to get new shit.

Story: This game’s story is as it stands a fairly generic story (boy meets girl, boy becomes warrior of destiny) – however the story leads into the most interesting feature of the game. As part of the story the main character – Leonhardt pledges not only his soul to defeat evil but those of his descendants. Now this means the story is split into generations and the main character in each generation is defined by which heroine the player chooses to marry in the previous generation and whilst the story stays the same the character has fundamentally different stats based on which heroine you choose.

Overall: If you can find it buy it – this is not an old game but it had a limited print. Props go to Ghostlight for bringing this game to PAL regions before the US.