Agarest: Generations of War Zero

First off, if anyone is wanting to choose between Agarest: Generations of War and Agarest Zero, I would recommend starting with Zero as it contains almost the entirety of Generations of War within it, on top of its own story. The content from the original game becomes available after beating Agarest Zero's main story on hard mode, leaving out only the random encounters you'd normally have to slog through (so you fight only story battles), as well as some characters from the original are either unavailable or only available through DLC. Many of the reviews mark the game down for its slow speed or dialogue scenes that you have to watch again and again, but both can be circumvented. I strongly recommended opening agarestzero.ini and changing the number on the line LockWindowFrameRate=30 to at least 120 (higher or lower depending on your preference; higher makes everything go faster, but too high makes the menu difficult to control), and in-game, going into options and disabling attack animations and movement, at least once you get sick of looking at the nice attack animations for the 500th time, otherwise fights and dialogue, particularly dialogue you've already seen, really will require you to have sufficient offspring to see the game through to completion. Once you've done these things, you can skip all dialogue almost instantly just by holding down E, as well as either auto battle or fight without any delays (making farming or clearing easy areas take minutes instead of hours). I was also initially turned off by the speed until I found out about these changes, they make a very big difference. Aside from that, there are a lot of things to unlock, a decent story, a massive amount of content (albeit much of it is repetitive, even some of the story as you go through generations), a deep crafting system, and a lot of things to do.

Better than the first one but adds a few more interesting mechanics but still an aweful lot of grinding involved. And Zero suffers from some of the same flaws unfortunately as the first one which is the repetition factor of enemies and the lack of variety in them. Still there are not too many JSRPG on PC platform So if you are a lover of SRPGs this might be worth getting especially at its introduction offer.

This game is all width without depth. You've got an enormous amount of different monsters, weapons, ingredients and armours. The game is also extremely linear. There's NO exploration. The tactical combat ignores cover and elevation and obstacles don't exist. You can't see the weaknesses of monsters so you can't adjust your attacks. (You MIGHT get a visual indiction if you leave on the attack animations - don't know) You have a quadrizillion possible "combination attacks". The ones you "know" are available under the "Esoterica" button. If your party members are all linked the game could let you SELECT those combination attacks but nope. If you change your weapon half of your spell layout changes so that "upgrade" you planned might not be one ... If you obtain a title from the Adventures Guild you get rewards but you don't know beforehand what those rewards will be so you can't plan for them. Might be that weapon you just had made! To get needed ingredients you might have to slay a monster, buy from the Adventures Guild or from the Item Shop. You can see what monsters drop in the "monster picture book". Scolling through 150 monsters, selecting one at a time: FUN! (use the wiki) The game COULD tell you in the smithing screen WHERE you can find or buy the ingredients but that would remove a lot of the busywork. What would REALLY be user-friendly: put a button "buy at the Item Shop" or "buy at the Adventurer's Guild" next to the ingredient! Also: you need A LOT of "experience points" to enhance everything or convert into an ingredient. I ended up putting the game in lo-res windowed mode and on automatic combat while I did something else. Got as far as the end of the first generation but lost interest. You can choose your bride there and that will select the stats of your offspring. But there's no way of knowing anything beforehand (nothing found in the wiki) Forgot to mention the dialogs: never use one sentence when you could provide the same information in three!

This is, again, an excellent port of a PS3 game. Much like the first this strategy JRPG is more story driven than gameplay driven, so if you enjoyed the first this is a no-brainer. It has fewer generations than the first, which is unfortunate, but is still a hefty amount of content.