Review #230: Jeanne D'Arc

 Viva la France.

 Jeanne D'Arc is an Strategy RPG for the PSP developed by Level-5. It's a loose retelling of Joan of Arc's crusade against the English, Japanese style!

 The story might be based on Joan of Arc's story, but it's set in a widely different universe, one in which Elves, Dwarves, Beastmen and monsters coexist alongside humans. Yep, this isn't your average history lesson. That said, it does follow Jeanne's crusade against the English in order to protect France, except that in this version she gets to have super powers. Mainly the five Heroes, men chosen by the armlets, which are granted special powers and allowed to don a magic suit of armor, henshin a-go-go baby! As for how the story develops, I felt it starts a tad dull, but gets better and better as it goes along, and it can get pretty dark. The characters themselves don't get much development though, but they do get a couple of lines here and there to add some individuality to each of them.

 The game is a fairly standard Strategy-RPG, each battle has two bands, yours and the enemy, and in your turn you can move each of your units, after your turn, the CPU does the same with its units, fairly straightforward. Attacking a unit from the sides or behind confer the usual attack and accuracy bonuses, so positioning is important. In fact, the game's unique mechanics are based around position: Burning Aura and Unified Defense. Every time you attack an enemy, it'll drop a 'Burning Aura' in the opposite tile, and if you place a character in that tile(Or if he was standing over it when the Burning Aura fell), you'll get a damage buff on your next attack. As for Unified Defense, you might think that spreading your units is a good idea, but it might not always be the case here, as leaving your units close together will confer a defense bonus when taking damage, so it's up to you to decide how you want to deal with defense depending on the enemy units.

 This is one of those Strategy RPGs in which you get preset characters and can't create any units. While each unit can equip specific weapons(Jeanne, for instance, can only equip swords), as far as skills go, each character is a white canvas. You get about 8 slots that you can outfit with gems, found by slaying enemies, that confer anything from passive bonuses, to physical skills or spells. I thought it was a pretty neat idea, and you can create some very powerful combos to decimate the enemy. Speaking of decimation, the five armlet-wearing characters get a unique gauge, and they gain one point on this gauge every turn that passes. Using this gauge they can, temporarily, transform into a super powerful state, with exclusive skills and the incredibly useful 'Godspeed' skill, that grants you another turn if you kill an enemy. I swear, having one of your Heroes massacring the enemies in just one turn feels SO GOOD.

 The game lasts about 27 hours, and finishing it unlocks a couple of extra stages. While it is pretty cool, I did have a couple of gripes with it. For starters, the game is pretty slow, not only can the framerate get a bit low, but the way battles pan out is fairly slow. Everything from going through the menus, to the characters moving and executing their attacks feel as if comes with a slight delay, which slowly adds up for a quite a bit of waiting. I think the UMD is at fault as well, as sometimes you can tell that the game is taking a second or two to load the next action. Then there's the fact that you will need to grind. For over half of the game you are limited to only 5 characters on the battlefield, and after hitting the middle point, you'll be granted up to 7 characters. It means that at least two characters will be lagging behind, even though everyone gains a little experience after each fight. As a matter of fact, there's three characters that temporarily leave your ranks, so you might be forced to use even more underleveled characters. As a matter of fact, and this might be a minimal spoiler, Roger leaves the party at some point, and he returns at a set level 47... when most of your main party should be hitting 55. Even worse, I'm pretty sure Roger was 49 when he left.... Regardless, the point stands: You will need to grind the optional battles, and it will get boring when you couple it with how slowly the battles unfold.

 The graphics in the game are colorful and detailed. Character models employ a slightly deformed look, with big heads and smaller bodies, it's a bit off putting at first, but I got used to them pretty fast. Their little bodies hold all kinds of little details in the armors and faces, which I really liked. The game also employs some gorgeous anime cut-scenes every now and then, and they do feel like a treat. Music, as expected of an RPG, is really good, with a particularly memorable main theme. There's not a whole lot of voice acting, but what little there is is pretty good, everyone has fake french accents which I thought was endearingly amusing.

 Jeanne D'Arc is not the best Strategy RPG I've ever played, but it's pretty good. I loved being able to customize my units with the gems, and while it took me a while to get hooked on the story, once it gets good, it gets really good. The slow-pace of the battles did put me off a couple of times, the reason I took so long to finish it was that sometimes I'd get bored of grinding, either for experience or skills, so I took breaks from it. Still, when it's at its best, it's really good, and at its worst it ain't all that bad.
 7.5 out of 10