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> Results: La Pucelle: Tactics
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La Pucelle: Tactics is the prequel to one of my favorite games of 2003, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. It's also a lot easier for people to pronounce in a "French is cool" kind of way. Apparently La Pucelle means The Virgin so here we've got The Virgin Tactics. This being a family site I'm going to stop right there before I get myself in hot water.
The game is one of a subgenre that's gained some popularity on consoles in the last five or so years. Tactics RPGs are those which feature a team of player controlled characters that you can outfit, level up and move around a grid-based playing field to knock the stuffing out of whatever enemy characters the designers choose for you to smash. In La Pucelle, this amounts to various forms of animals, demons and plenty more. One of the game's hooks is that your main human party is just a piece of what's needed to beat its many levels. During battle, you've got to recruit monsters by "purifying" them until when you defeat them they're so interested in you they join up! It's a nifty way to have you build a party of in-game characters and it works great. Right from the start you can recruit little bats with cute names like Bit.com to join your merry band. In another cool twist, between battles you can train these creatures to be better fighters and use certain abilities by either smacking them around or coddling them. You've got to be careful not to beat up on them too much or they'll leave you for good though. These are just some of the many gameplay mechanics that are applied to what developer Nippon Ichi has turned into a series of grab bags of tactics RPGs.  Combat takes place on grids that are at once pretty but sometimes not too functional. 2D graphics for the characters are overlaid on a 3D background that you can sometimes rotate for a better view. These maps are nicely rendered with a real sense of place. They often contain various inanimate objects that help flesh out the world but sometimes things like trees or poorly designed structures make it very difficult to see which grid space you're moving to. The game is thankfully very forgiving about combat movement and you can repeal a move at almost any time, but the amount of view flipping and move and re-move can get annoying. Just being able to make the objects transparent would've rectified this. The more of it you do, the more menu hopping you have to do too. Button pushing becomes maddening after a couple hours of play depending how much you're constantly hitting the menus. Positioning is a huge part of what makes the battle system so special though. By placing various characters next to or behind one another, you can add to the amount of available attacks against that creature. This makes positioning on each turn a vital part of seeing your way safely across the field. Facing has an effect on combat results too so you've got to be careful how you set everyone up at all times. That's one of the best things about La Pucelle. It definitely requires plenty of cerebral activity to maximize each encounter. Adding to this grab bag of stuff are Dark Portals, spots on the field that radiate energy and can also be purified in order to stop the flow of new monsters into a level. Only your main party can perform purification so their skills are always necessary to quickly beat a map. By changing the path of the energy flowing from the portals, you can even create "miracles" which are essentially area effect spells of large damage (or healing) value depending on the mixing portal colors. There's literally a book to be written on how to maximize all these disparate battlefield entities and if you're so inclined, you can spend hours playing the same map again and again to do just that. The game doesn't ever keep you from going back to fight again on a completed map. Since items can also be levelled up through the purification of portals, any time you feel the need to get stronger you could press forward or go back to do it. It's a superb way to let gamers play at their own pace through the game. One major problem with this approach is that the game does get to be a bit dull sometimes. It seems like a slog through way too much "stuff" that tends to pull you away from the eventual end game. By pressing forward mercilessly, you can finish maps reasonably fast, though it seems like every new Chapter is longer than the last. Doing that though means you're probably not optimizing your characters or items and you're certainly not entering the Dark World to obtain even stronger items if you go that route. This makes La Pucelle a little less when you sum its parts together. The story isn't quite as compelling as the one in Disgaea either. Nippon Ichi definitely learned a lot from La Pucelle and though it's definitely even more linear than Disgaea, it still suffers a little from its schizophrenic combination of piles of stuff to do. So much so the overwhelmingness of it turns you off. Then again, if you complain about having too much to do, there's probably something in there you're going to like. That's certainly true about La Pucelle. It's a game that reeks of being a labor of love rather than a "product" for sale. The character designs are almost all excellent. Monsters are as varied and weird as those found in Disgaea too. If it weren't for the sometimes wonky map and the sheer overwhelming amount of things this game throws at you, it'd definitely reside among the best of tactics role-playing. As it stands though, La Pucelle is an excellent way to pass the time until Nippon Ichi's true sequel to Disgaea, Phantom Brave, hits shelves this fall. The translation is great, the English voice acting is good to great and most importantly, the combat strategy, character development and story all combine to provide plenty of hours of fun play time. It's a real good game, just not quite great. 
Provided you've got a teenage son or daughter that enjoys strategy games, this one is a good one for them. It carries a Teen rating and since it deals with some rather adult issues (an early set of encounters is based around a man who sold his soul and now rips out people's hearts), you'll probably have to keep it for the thirteen and older group at least. The game is all about sending these demons back to the Dark World they came from so it's a dark-themed game that also contains more adult humor. That's part of what makes it unique though and it's definitely something to applaud while just being smart about how you handle it with junior.
Kid Factor by Dave Long
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