VGRC

Eat me, stupid cow.

What developer first comes to mind when you think “obscure strategy-RPGs?” For most people who love the genre, no developer is more synonymous with it than Nippon Ichi, whose American division releases a steady stream of localized strat-RPGs developed by their parent company and its cohorts. Soul Nomad & the World Eaters is the latest of these releases.

At the surface, Soul Nomad looks like just about every other JRPG NIS has brought over: Simple sprite graphics, a “world in peril” storyline and humorous dialogue and character interaction layered on top of your standard strat-RPG gameplay. Luckily, it goes a bit deeper than that this time.

The basic premise of Soul Nomad is simple. Long ago, there was a very powerful god-like figure known as “Gig,” who lived to ravage the world to sate his thirst for death and destruction. One of his tools was the monstrous “World Eaters,” gigantic monsters whom he could control. Gig was eventually defeated, however; his soul sealed within a sword and his World Eaters falling silent. Many years later, the World Eaters are poised to reawaken, and the only one with enough power to face them is Gig. To combat them, you are selected to have his soul fused into your body, giving you his strength. Of course, things get exponentially more wacky, as you get locked into a battle to keep Gig from taking over your body so he may continue his path of destruction. His survival depends on yours, though, so while he may help you out, it's really only to ensure you're able to leave him a usable body.

Gig himself is quite the character. He is brash, rude, cocky, abusive, and just an all-around total badass. He's the kind of guy who would tip a prostitute, then rip off her arms and laugh at her. Naturally, his personality will clash with the other characters in the game, often to humorous effect. Though the drawback of having an evil god in your body means having to keep your wits about you. There are multiple branches in the games progression, and you can either stay good or join the dark side, and Gig's influence on you isn't exactly going to be a positive one, if you catch my drift.

Battle is pretty simple... at first. The battlefield is set on a vast map, with the typical grid overlayed on it to denote where you can move. However, rather than controlling individual units, you move entire squads, which are represented on the map by the sprite of the squad leader. When you go to attack, the screen changes to a side-view battle screen, which shows the two opposing squads on each end of the screen as they automatically attack and counterattack, before going back to the map. Simple, right? Good.

These squads can all be customized, which adds a practically limitless amount of possibilities to how you can go into battle. Each squad is given a 3x3 grid called a "room" to play with, which typically has a handful of spots to place a fighter on and a built-in bonus called a "decor," which is essentially an item that will enhance your squad by upping stats or onto more unusual things. Furthermore, where on the grid you place your fighters matters: The 3 rows (front, middle and rear) will affect what the character does in battle. Your spellcasters and healers, for example, aren't of much use in the front rows, and have less hit-points to boot so they won't be very effective in holding off the brunt of an enemy attack. Likewise, your melee fighters can't really do shit from the back lines. Once you get used to positioning your units to form an effective squad, there's more than 25 types of units to unlock, whom all have their own attacks, spells, and weaknesses to other units.

There's also a variety of rooms to choose from, but its a time-consuming mess. As you progress, you can unlock rooms that have different decor, as well as more spaces to position your units. The drawback is all these rooms are randomly generated. It's not much trouble at first, but once you've progressed further into the game and want a specific room, you get to spend a ton of time trying to draw it out. Even further, you can't change rooms individually, but have to edit them all at once. You can "lock" existing rooms into place so they're left out of the madness, but you only have a limited number of locks at your disposal.

Thanks to the power of Gig, he will grant you "Gig Edicts" as the game goes on, which are essentially items that let you do some more wacky things, like split squads into two, merge squads, kidnap other squads, and more. These Gig Edicts can also be used outside of the battlefield, and you'll find yourself with the ability to steal from shopkeepers and assault random townspeople. Fun stuff.

While many of the early points of Soul Nomad are easy to grasp, some of the later points take a lot of experimentation and trial-and-error to fully master. There's a built-in tutorial system that explains a lot, but things like room configuration, Gig Edicts and "Bad Vibes" aren't explained very well in game or in the manual. Once you get past the learning curve, you'll be ready for anything. The sad thing is, the game is pretty forgiving in the battle department. Sure, it helps when you're trying to figure things out, but later on you'll just find yourself breezing on through.

Pretty much all of Soul Nomad's actual gameplay takes place on the battlefield or menus, however, which leaves things feeling a bit... lacking, to say the least. The actual story sequences are far from impressive, being some sprites slapped on a background image. Cities are navigated through menus and text. The only actual environments you can really move around in are the battle areas, and even then that's just reduced to the commands you give.

And that just goes right into the mediocre visual presentation. After titles like Odin Sphere and GrimGrimoire, we know the PS2 is capable of some really impressive 2D visuals. So, why does Soul Nomad have to look like it came out over a decade ago? I love my 2D sprite-based games, but Soul Nomad somehow manages to take a step backwards from previous NIS games. The background paintings are largely unimpressive, and the character sprites range from interesting to just ugly... usually falling in the latter end of that range. I mean, seriously. Click on any screenshot on this page and look at the faces of every character and the space between their eyes. They look like fish rather than people.

The sound on the other hand is good. The voice acting is (for the most part) pretty good, and NIS included the original Japanese voice track for good measure. (Sure to please any die-hard weeaboo JRPG devotees) The music is typical fare from what you've come to expect from an NIS release: Pretty damn sweet. Both the soundtrack and the voice acting can have their low cheesy spots, but it isn't very often... which is very nice for a game that relies on a lot of dialogue to carry it along thanks to the total lack of cutscenes.

Soul Nomad has plenty to do, though. There are multiple endings to unlock, and replaying gives you the option to start the game over with your existing army and the potential to unlock even more special rooms and items not available before. There's even an optional "demon path" story mode to discover, with its own alternate endings for those wishing to walk the evil path. The basic game itself will run at least 30-40 hours, and demon path 10-20 more. So yeah, plenty of replayability in this title.

While Soul Nomad doesn't really offer a whole lot to appeal to anybody who isn't a diehard fan of the genre, strat-JRPG fanatics will most certainly be pleased. Its humorous dialogue and character interaction give it some soul, but the sometimes confusing battle mechanics will turn off some of the more weak-willed. A solid buy for those into this niche genre, but not many others outside of it.