I got this today and I've put in about 4 hours so far. Game is really intriguing, but may not be for everyone.
The overall mood of the game is very, very adult, dark, serious war title. The writing feels like the SMT guys doing their best Matsuno impression. Tons of 40-50 year old gritty generals, backstabbing kings/queens, religious sermons, assassins, spies, characters deaths, politics, world ending looming, and that's just in the prologue! The more realistic character portraits and Yoko Shimomura's wonderful dramatic and heavy soundtrack keep the tone very epic war drama in the best of ways. If you are a fan of these rare kind of rpgs, you'll be hooked.
The gameplay is kind of crazy. In a way it's a combination of budget and high concept ideas. From a story perspective it's unique to say the least. You are a guy who comes into possession of a time travel book that has special rules. At certain points you have to make hard decisions and these are "keypoints" in the game. Depending on your decision the story branches in very different ways like a good wrpg. Sometimes you're decision will even lead to a BAD END like old adventure games. The screen will go dark and tell you how your choice led everyone to doom. But this is ok! Because at anytime in the game you can warp to any of the keypoints and because your character is in control and aware of the time travel you keep all your stuff. It's just like going from one town to another but you're traveling through time. But these timelines aren't totally independent. This part is a little iffy according to official time travel rules, but what happens in one path branch can affect the others. So for instance in one branch you might get to a wall and you need to wait for the guy with the key. Unfortunately he's been brutally murdered by an assassin hours ago. But you can take a different branch at the last splitting point, meet this key holder and save him from his assassin and then warp back to the original pathline and he'll get there on time with the keys. Is there some messy time travel logic in there? Sure! But oh well, it makes the branching more interesting 🙂 Sometimes you won't be able to take a branch early on until you accomplish something way later in the game, so there's all these paths along the way you can come back to.
The combat is just as crazy as the plot progression. You fight enemies turn-based on a 3 x 3 grid so 9 spots for them to stand:
[][][] YOU
[][][] YOU
[][][] YOU
The closer the enemies are to you the more damage they do and more damage you do. What's more interesting is that the combat is about moving the enemies around. You have moves that push the enemies in certain directions like PUSH LEFT or PUSH FORWARD or PULL TOWARD. This is important because if you knock an enemy onto a spot where another enemy is, they share the spot and then when you attack one you do damage to both and it combos. So if you move 3 enemies onto the same spot you'll hit all 3 at the same time and get a 3x combo which will kill the enemies quick. The higher the combo multiplier the more damage you do, more exp you get, more money, better drops, etc...Also a lot of special attacks hit in a certain way like in a horizontal straight line. So moving the enemies into that line is a good idea.
And that's just the first part. You get combos for having characters attack in a row. So if all 3 characters attack a 3 enemy spot one after another you'll have a 9x combo. To accomplish this, RH has the most interesting queue system I've ever seen. One of your commands is CHANGE which lets you reposition yourself to any spot on the queue. This actually switches the person in that spot to the immediate turn where you are. This means now you can move not only allies around and immediately grab your healer and have them heal or keep switching to your best attacker, but you can also grab enemies and make them attack right away. So if you're fighting a boss and your DEF shield is up right now you might want to move him to the immediate turn so he wastes his attack now while your DEF is up and then goes back to the end of the queue. Or you might want to put your healer to the queue slot right after the boss attacks so you can heal. Or you may want to move the enemies around so you can lineup all 3 of your character turns in a row for maximum combo damage. The change option adds a ton of strategy. But I wouldn't have expected less from SMT guys doing a battle system.
So yeah, the plot is interesting & adult and the battles are fast & deep. So why isn't this for everyone? Well, in the 4 hours I played, I think there was about 30 mins of gameplay total. Maybe less. The game is extremely story-based. Possibly more than any rpg I've ever played. 10 min political conversations are the norm. You'll watch scene after scene of story. In a lot of ways it's more of an interactive novel with a kickass battle system for the gameplay that fills the gaps. Luckily there is a super speed text skipper button provided that instantly blows through those conversations since you're going to be going through the same scenes several times as you travel through time and have scenarios play out different. But it doesn't change the fact that the game focus is obviously on the storyline.
Also to give an idea of the size and amount of plotting in the game. After four hours my timeline has 11 events that have happened across the branches, 11 out of 236 :p If you want to fully explore all the branches and ways the story could have gone and probably if you want the best ending it looks like it'll be a long, loooong game. Though I wouldn't be surprised if you could stick to the "normal path" and straight shoot it without time traveling much and it'd probably be a normal rpg length.
Anyhow pretty good stuff so far. Definitely is living up to Atlus standards. Though it seems to have nothing in common with Radiata Stories at all ^^;
