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dkirschner's Grim Grimoire (PS2)
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| [May 9, 2012 09:09:45 PM]
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Can't get into this one. I suppose I knew at some point, but just forgot that this game is an RTS. Console RTSes...not the best idea. But kudos for trying! It's not a bad game by any means. It's got cool looking 2D graphics. The game is presented as a story, with books 1, 2, 3, etc. Each book has several chapters. So far it's all been chapter 1 is a dialogue scene, chapter 2 is a battle, and chapter 3 is another dialogue scene. The characters in the dialogue scenes have these awesome living, breathing animations. If you watch them, their chests heave with breathing, their legs wobble a bit as they sway while speaking, their arms drift slightly like sea plants in a current as they gesture. It's really neat. The story is very Harry Potter-ish, or at least it seems that way from my limited knowledge of Harry Potter. You're a new student at a magic school and there's some intrigue and plot unfolding with the professors and other students and some magic seal and a demon in the basement. I wasn't real captivated by it.
The gameplay is neat, and I think it's well done, but I just don't like it. RTSes just work 100 times better on PC than console. Grim Grimoire did a good job with the control scheme, but it STILL doesn't come close to the ease of managing units with keyboard and mouse. You can't select more than one type of unit at a time, there's no way to pick a few select units, there's no minimap you can click on to move your cursor quickly across the field, there's no real zoom to speak of, there are no hotkeys for using abilities or giving commands...the list goes on. If you want to give commands to multiple groups of allies, you have to select one, highlight the rest, give the command, move the cursor all the way across the map to where you want them to move, move the cursor back, select the next group, give the command, move the cursor to the other side of the map, move the cursor back...oh and then you need to select their special abilities and monitor your groups and build your units. Basically this game is spent moving the cursor across the map. And every stage is the same map! Each one is a basic square room that has more or less stairs, pillars and gaps. But it's all the same background, the same stairs, the same everything basically.
As far as units and things go, there are four schools of magic you can learn and they are strong/weak against one another in a rock/paper/scissors relationship. Each school has 3 'grimoires' you can get. Each grimoire is essentially a building (like a barracks) that spawns one or two types of creatures for you to command. Each grimoire has 5 levels, which you must pay mana to upgrade. You make little workers that mine mana just like any RTS resource gatherer. Each level of a grimoire opens up another unit or some unit's ability. Pretty basic stuff. You can have as many grimoires in play as you want. Some of them complement each other, some of them you would build for specific units or skills. For example, the Chaos Nest grimoire builds Grimalkins and Dragons. Dragons are expensive hulking units that take up literally 1/4 of the screen and breath fire on everything, while Grimalkins can put enemies to sleep. I pretty much steamrolled levels until I quit the game once I got dragons because I figured you can build an army of dragons and grimalkin to terrorize and pacify everything and win pretty handily. I'm sure that isn't a viable long-term strategy but whatever.
That's Grim Grimoire. I was through about 2/5 chapters in just a few hours' playtime, and I was playing it on the hardest difficulty...which is normal. Apparently you unlock hard once you beat it, but there are even two easier modes before normal. So yeah. Glad I checked it out because it's interesting, but just not my thing.
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dkirschner's Grim Grimoire (PS2)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Monday 7 May, 2012
GameLog closed on: Wednesday 9 May, 2012 |
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