The quality of 3DS games can become apparent the moment you highlight their icon on the console's dashoard: good games (or games that developers care about) have their logo and something spinning, with the spin getting faster if you blow on the microphone; bad games just have their logo going up and down if you blow on the mic.
I was delighted when Langrisser Re:Incarnation proudly announced "Now you will suffer!" when the game's logo and nothing more came in existence.
Being the first new Langrisser in a while (since the Dreamcast, IIRC), developers chose a new direction, at least in the art department, ditching Satoshi Urushiara for a new illustrator, Hiroshi Kaieda. I don't particualrly mind this swap, but the overall presentation is bad. Very bad. Cuts between dialogues (even between people in the same location) is a 1-second-long black screen, no transitions at all, and the game already goes for heavily dithered recoloured backgrounds within the first 15 minutes.
During the introduction several characters are shown but there's no context, nothing tells you where they are, the nations in this world, or anything else: here's a bunch of generic characters, stuff's happening, have fun.
Anyway, your character wakes up (in full armour, of course), he's greeted by his maid, you get to know the loli healer, city falls under attack by artillery fire. Your character runs up to a church (I think it is, because everything looks out of a PS1) and takes the magic sword Langrisser and you can get your first taste of the game. This mission is essentially a tutorial about the very basics (movement, attack, magic), with the following missions explaining more elements; these tutorials do the wrong move of explaining the unit triangle (who is strong or weak against who) during the third mission, when it could have been useful before. There are three unit types: infantry, lancers, and cavalry; infantry is strong against lancers, lancers against cavalry and so on; ranged units like archers don't get to be countered when attacking from afar, holy units are strong against demons...the usual stuff. No mention on where pegasus riders, gunners, and motorcycles sit in this whole hierarchy, but who cares? It's hard to undestand the unit type even when completely zoomed in: I failed to realise that my new cavalry unit was in fact a pegasus rider until I sent her into battle.
And yeah, the setting is now a techno-fantasy with gunpowder and motorcycles. Not that I mind, especially when the BGM is friggin' rock! I like well-done guitar solos, and here in langrisser they aren't just guitar masturbation thankfully, but they overpower everything and don't really fit with the overall tone. Despite being out of place, the music is possibly the best thing about the game, because everything else feels like the game was developed on a Saturn/PS1 and ported to the 3DS in a couple of days.
From the second mission onward you get to recruit troops like the old games, and the units' movement turns always comprise the leader and his/her troops. Active troops are animated differently from the rest, but there's no button to select your next unit, you have to move the cursor all over the battlefield to select it. Out of all the buttons (and touchscreen) on the 3DS, A and B confirm/cancel selection, L cycles through zoom levels, start pauses the game, the d-pad moves cursors around; every other button is left unused.
Graphics are bad, strikingly so. The battlefield is shown in the usual top-down perspective, with tiles clearly marked by tick black lines; it's difficult to discern terrain types or impassable tiles due to the map being represented with as little detail as possible; every map has some trees, buildings, or other objects to break the monotony, but they are so shallowly modeled that sprites would have been better.
Or maybe not, because sprites are used to represent units. Ive already written on how difficult is to discern unit types (cavalry from pegasus riders), but every unit has her health overimposed, and that magic number becomes unreadable when zoomed out, to the point that 9s look like 3s. The only way to reliably move and attack is to look at the numbers before battles, but this means moving the cursor around a lot and possiby losing sight of which unit you have to move.
When two units clash, the game cuts to a 3D representation of the two, and this is where you might want to quit the game. Backdrops are circular arenas with the terrain fading out over a heavily blurred static background; units are represented with only an handful of polygons, their head towering over everything, even weapons; detail is scarce, and there's just one animation, the unit gently lunging the equipped weapon forward; the rest is done by simply moving the whole 3D model around. Timing during these scenes is really, really bad, with sound effects and knockbacks due to attacks delayed by two-three seconds. Defeated units explode (?), every battle starts with a dragon roar (??), highlighting units on the map triggers a sound like coins are dropped in a money bank (???).
Units stats include a green bar below their names, to the right of the available HPs. I thought it was a health bar, but that bar just never moves. Why would I have though it was a health bar? How silly of me.
Between missions your army, represented by your character's sprite, moves around the world map; that sprite is static, and the bottom screen is barely used. Depth effect? It's there, only battle cutscenes, and it's so subtle that it's hard to notice.
So far I've fought three battles. During the first I thought: "this is bad". During the second: "oh please make it stop". During the third: "it's fun to point out all mistakes!". Only that it wasn't, really. Videogames can't be like movies that are good when they're terrible, they are just terrible.
Regarding the game mechanics, I can't point out much, everything has been a series of rather uneventful move-attack orders to units I couldn't figure out their tactical value (if any at all), as the main character and archer units were able to lay waste on pretty much every unit. Maybe, just maybe, there's an half-decent tactical game buried below so much crap, but the audiovisual presentation makes hard to play the game.
And if you want to hurt yourself, here's some footage.
I was delighted when Langrisser Re:Incarnation proudly announced "Now you will suffer!" when the game's logo and nothing more came in existence.
Being the first new Langrisser in a while (since the Dreamcast, IIRC), developers chose a new direction, at least in the art department, ditching Satoshi Urushiara for a new illustrator, Hiroshi Kaieda. I don't particualrly mind this swap, but the overall presentation is bad. Very bad. Cuts between dialogues (even between people in the same location) is a 1-second-long black screen, no transitions at all, and the game already goes for heavily dithered recoloured backgrounds within the first 15 minutes.
During the introduction several characters are shown but there's no context, nothing tells you where they are, the nations in this world, or anything else: here's a bunch of generic characters, stuff's happening, have fun.
Anyway, your character wakes up (in full armour, of course), he's greeted by his maid, you get to know the loli healer, city falls under attack by artillery fire. Your character runs up to a church (I think it is, because everything looks out of a PS1) and takes the magic sword Langrisser and you can get your first taste of the game. This mission is essentially a tutorial about the very basics (movement, attack, magic), with the following missions explaining more elements; these tutorials do the wrong move of explaining the unit triangle (who is strong or weak against who) during the third mission, when it could have been useful before. There are three unit types: infantry, lancers, and cavalry; infantry is strong against lancers, lancers against cavalry and so on; ranged units like archers don't get to be countered when attacking from afar, holy units are strong against demons...the usual stuff. No mention on where pegasus riders, gunners, and motorcycles sit in this whole hierarchy, but who cares? It's hard to undestand the unit type even when completely zoomed in: I failed to realise that my new cavalry unit was in fact a pegasus rider until I sent her into battle.
And yeah, the setting is now a techno-fantasy with gunpowder and motorcycles. Not that I mind, especially when the BGM is friggin' rock! I like well-done guitar solos, and here in langrisser they aren't just guitar masturbation thankfully, but they overpower everything and don't really fit with the overall tone. Despite being out of place, the music is possibly the best thing about the game, because everything else feels like the game was developed on a Saturn/PS1 and ported to the 3DS in a couple of days.
From the second mission onward you get to recruit troops like the old games, and the units' movement turns always comprise the leader and his/her troops. Active troops are animated differently from the rest, but there's no button to select your next unit, you have to move the cursor all over the battlefield to select it. Out of all the buttons (and touchscreen) on the 3DS, A and B confirm/cancel selection, L cycles through zoom levels, start pauses the game, the d-pad moves cursors around; every other button is left unused.
Graphics are bad, strikingly so. The battlefield is shown in the usual top-down perspective, with tiles clearly marked by tick black lines; it's difficult to discern terrain types or impassable tiles due to the map being represented with as little detail as possible; every map has some trees, buildings, or other objects to break the monotony, but they are so shallowly modeled that sprites would have been better.
Or maybe not, because sprites are used to represent units. Ive already written on how difficult is to discern unit types (cavalry from pegasus riders), but every unit has her health overimposed, and that magic number becomes unreadable when zoomed out, to the point that 9s look like 3s. The only way to reliably move and attack is to look at the numbers before battles, but this means moving the cursor around a lot and possiby losing sight of which unit you have to move.
When two units clash, the game cuts to a 3D representation of the two, and this is where you might want to quit the game. Backdrops are circular arenas with the terrain fading out over a heavily blurred static background; units are represented with only an handful of polygons, their head towering over everything, even weapons; detail is scarce, and there's just one animation, the unit gently lunging the equipped weapon forward; the rest is done by simply moving the whole 3D model around. Timing during these scenes is really, really bad, with sound effects and knockbacks due to attacks delayed by two-three seconds. Defeated units explode (?), every battle starts with a dragon roar (??), highlighting units on the map triggers a sound like coins are dropped in a money bank (???).
Units stats include a green bar below their names, to the right of the available HPs. I thought it was a health bar, but that bar just never moves. Why would I have though it was a health bar? How silly of me.
Between missions your army, represented by your character's sprite, moves around the world map; that sprite is static, and the bottom screen is barely used. Depth effect? It's there, only battle cutscenes, and it's so subtle that it's hard to notice.
So far I've fought three battles. During the first I thought: "this is bad". During the second: "oh please make it stop". During the third: "it's fun to point out all mistakes!". Only that it wasn't, really. Videogames can't be like movies that are good when they're terrible, they are just terrible.
Regarding the game mechanics, I can't point out much, everything has been a series of rather uneventful move-attack orders to units I couldn't figure out their tactical value (if any at all), as the main character and archer units were able to lay waste on pretty much every unit. Maybe, just maybe, there's an half-decent tactical game buried below so much crap, but the audiovisual presentation makes hard to play the game.
And if you want to hurt yourself, here's some footage.
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