For the first handful of hours, I LOVED this game. Gorgeous art, great atmosphere, and challenging, tactics-style combat with highly satisfying animations and visceral "hits." The emphasis put on positioning created by some units taking up 4 squares and others taking up 1, combined with the Armor/HP mechanic, and the beautifully drawn battle maps, made this seem like a real winner. What completely killed it for me and put me off of buying the sequels is the non-existent save system. In an effort to prevent "save scumming" the devs went way overboard. This is a tough game, and if you're a little OCD like me, you'll definitely want to replay a lot of these battles in an effort to finish them more effectively. But not only can you not save *in* battle -- you can't save at all. The game auto-saves based on predetermined checkpoints. So every time you want to replay a battle, you have to begin from the previous "checkpoint" -- which oftentimes is at least a couple dialogues and cutscenes back. So you have to click through them again, re-equip and re-prepare your party again, and only then can you restart the fight to try again. It is beyond tedious and just an incredibly bad design decision. It literally ruined the game for me and I bailed halfway through. If you just want to plough through the game and don't think you'll want to retry battles very often, then have at it, there's a lot here to enjoy. But if what I've described sounds like it would be an issue for you, I would save your money. So much wasted potential with this one. Disappointing.
This is like a clunky, cheesier, more Eastern European feeling Oblivion/Skyrim, that makes a terrible first impression. But if you hang with it and feel it out, it's actually an awesome game. It got unfairly thrown under the bus when it came out. Definitely far from perfect, but for me its imperfections are actually (mostly) a big part of its strange charm. Let's get the bad out of the way: 1- Shallow, pointless character customization at the start. They should've left it out, it's meaningless. For all intensive purposes, you play a particular, pre-defined character, though you can build his skills as you like. 2- Incredibly stupid AI that is easily exploited. 3- Crusty combat in general, which grows tedious (though I still like it better than Oblivion's combat). 4- Cheesy (but very infrequent) cutscenes, and a very weird story. 5- Absurd voice-acting. But here's why the "bad" isn't so bad, for me personally: 1- Doesn't effect anything 2 + 3- Combat-wise, it's best to think of this more as a loot-based ARPG -- once you do that, the combat is fine for what it is. 4 + 5- At first these things are breathtakingly bad -- then, they become breathtakingly hilarious. The protagonist's bad voice-acting and his occasional sarcastic (yet oddly grandiose) mutterings to himself are genuinely funny, and become an enjoyable part of your journey. And the flat-out good? + HUGE, well-designed open world that is a real treat to explore and has a lot of very different areas -- I've played at least 200 hrs and haven't seen the whole map, or even most of it. + Gorgeous graphics for its time that still hold up pretty well. + ENDLESS loot, TONS of beautifully designed sets of armor, weapons, etc. + FUNNY (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not). + Deep skill trees -- traps, magic, alchemy, stealth, bombs, defense ... lots of options. + Awesome item-stacking -- redundant items combine with existing versions of themselves to power up slightly, so looting never entirely gets old.
Weird to me that so many GOG reviewers can give a five-star pass to borderline unplayable old-school RPGs based purely on their nostalgic value, and trash a quirky little gem like Records of Agarest War. GOOD: + Enjoyable roster of characters; cute sprites, graphics, & animations. + Unique take on tactics-style gameplay, with a lot of emphasis placed on chaining together the abilities of the different characters. Special techniques are unlocked or purchased as you move through the game, so your roster of potential tactical moves is ever-growing. + Combat: a great balance of depth and approachability/fun, once you get your head around it. + The casual, anime dating-sim like interludes. They're shallow and silly, but it breaks up the grindiness. Eventually your initial party of characters produces offspring to be the next "generation," etc. (you can play through multiple generations of characters). + Story unfolds in different ways based on choices -- think Banner Saga with cute anime characters & a better save system. NEUTRAL: ~ Someone mentioned that the battles and animations are way too slow. True, but easily fixed: you can go into the .INI file, make a simple change to the FPS cap, and viola -- game isn't slow anymore. Just Google it. ~ Wildly unbalanced DLC. Avoid it if you want maximum challenge, but it can be fun. BAD: ~ Definitely gets grindy after a while. The story/world are kind of shallow and there's not a lot of atmosphere per se. That's about it though. Maybe I'm in the minority on this game, but if you enjoy tactics-based combat with cute JRPG-style characters, I'd urge you not to write this one off.
