I’ve really got to give it to Atlus USA. Whether they’re bringing over a slew of their in house Japanese lineup (Nocturne, Digital Devil Saga), or publishing games from myriad other developers (Stella Dues, Odin Sphere), they really know how to please their fan base. As of late they’ve gone above and beyond, giving us an expansion/remix of Persona 3(FES) and promising Persona 4 before the end of the year. Sure, they’re supporting last gen ad nauseum and their games share bunch of assets, but that didn’t stop any of their Shin Megami Tensei titles from becoming my favorite franchise on Playstation 2.
Still, for me, Yggdra Union: We’ll Never Fight Alone was a pretty tough sell. I rarely have the required amount of patience for tactical RPGs and I’ve always considered anything to do with card battling to be the antithesis of entertainment. I don’t really know how to describe my lack of interest, but I’ve always perceived these two genres to be relatively inaccessible. Yet, and I know this comes off as a fanboyish, Atlus has won me over with their lineup as of late, so I figured anything they’re willing to publish should be given a fair shake.
Yggdremix
Yggdra Union was originally released for the Gameboy Advance in 2006. Like Riviera (also developed by Sting) before it, it’s been given a facelift along with a bunch of new bells and whistles on its way over the Playstation Portable. While it’s more of a tactical/strategy RPG at heart, it uses a host of elements common to card battling games. Grid based conflict is still bound to turns and rationing your movement is still a major part of the battle system, but, rather than build individualized skills and equip weapons, your characters are bound to whichever card you’ve selected for that turn. The attributes of each card encompass not only movement, but skills, power, and weapons as well. All of these elements must be rejuggled every turn, as each card only lasts the duration of one battle.
When it comes to actually winning and losing a battle, Yggdra Union is a significant departure from the norm. There are still goals required for winning a match, such as the obvious ‘defeat everyone on the map’ or something as simple as moving a character to a specific point, but your turns for doing so are dictated by the number of cards you have in your collection. Consequently, if you use all your cards then the match is forfeit. Anyway, each card features the amount of space you can move all of your characters each turn, which requires careful planning consider each turn is limited to one direct attack.
The difficulty of each fight, based on your card selection setup, can be assessed on a level from one to five before engaging in combat. You won’t necessarily lose if the odds aren’t in your favor, but you better make sure you know what you’re doing before you try. Actual combat features your chosen character and their backing army versus your opponent and their army. A charge from the offense and a swift retaliation by the defense eventually level off as stastic-based blows are automatically traded back and forth. If the squads of some of the more centralized characters die in battle, you’re looking at a game over, but if you drop the enemy before they wipe out your squad, victory is yours. Well, sort of. Winning a match doesn’t defeat the enemy, but it drops their morale meter. One battle might be sufficient enough to wipe out their morale entirely, but often times it requires some advanced strategy or multiple battles with other characters. By the same token, you can usually survive a few losses until your morale meter is emptied, assuming you didn’t use any items to fill it back up before hand.
Please Stop My Head From Spinning
It was around this point, roughly two minutes into my first battle, that I started to think I was going to lose my grip on the mechanics. Genres one might not understand or typically play (RTS, SRPG’s) have a tendency to bombard newcomers with too much information in a considerably short amount of time. Such genres are tailored perfectly to their audience, of course, but those of us who aren’t quite as seasoned are often left alone in a void. Thankfully, Yggdra Union boasts a long, almost drawn out series of tutorials to slowly introduce the system one step at time. I wish they would have appeared after, and not before, I selected my card for the turn – but it’s a generous amount of hand-holding never the less.
Like most anything else in life, it’s all a little easier to understand if you begin with a simple game of paper, rock, scissors. It’s veiled here as Axe, Spear, Sword, but the spirit of the game is largely the same; your axe wielder should attack enemies with spears, spears should fight swords, et cetera. There are other weapons down the road, but for practical purposes (i.e. I shouldn’t dump a thousand words into mechanics) I’ll assume you like the game if you’ve played it for the five hours it takes to require new weapons dynamics.
Anyway from here the game slowly evolves and introduces the skill meter. Battles in sRPG’s are traditionally of the non interactive fare (the point of the game is to weigh all that in beforehand), but Sting did their best to add touches of interactivity to an otherwise watch-and-pray interface. Placing the battle in passive mode will slow the battle down considerably and reduce your attack frequency, but it allows your skill meter to increase at a much faster rate than normal. Likewise, tapping over to aggressive mode increases your attack speed, but consumes the skill meter. Once the skill meter is full, the skill attached to your chosen card is engaged. Skills aren’t always needed to win battles, but they certainly don’t hurt. There’s still quite a bit of watching going on, but the influences of the skill meter makes combat more than a sedentary affair.
As your party grows you can begin to take advantage of the unity system. This feature allows you to combat multiple units at the same time, provided you’ve aligned characters in the appropriate places. Male’s require allies to be diagonally aligned in an X formation, where as female attackers gain an advantage from having allies above and below in a cross formation. Like skills, unity doesn’t seem all the important at first, but slowly you’ll be trying to find ways to perfectly allocate your movement for maximum effect. Unity also helps to considerably speed up the battle process, which might can exceed thirty minutes on occasion.
Lengthy battle times are a casual affair to fans of the genre, but it also represents another blockade when trying to attract an unfamiliar audience. Few moments in Yggdra Union are as crushing as being wiped out midway through a battle, and I can certainly see less hardcore players getting frustrated with defeat. Despite all its complexity, Yggdra Union isn’t as punishing as one might expect. You’ll have to replay the entire battle again if you lose midway through, but everything you’ve leveled up on the way there is retained. Additionally, the overall difficulty can be adjusted should you play as poorly as I often did.
Despite the grace in difficulty, it seems like one of the battle mechanics is inherently flawed. The goals necessary to win an individual battle are revealed only when the previous set is completed. The difficulty of these goals spikes in odd places, easily annihilating your party without warning. It’s one thing to lose if you were ill prepared or didn’t setup properly, but getting decimated because you didn’t have the foresight to anticipate unknown objectives is disheartening and, honestly, unfair. Sure, it’ll be easy the second time through and a FAQ of some sort could ease these problems, but it definitely takes away from the control one feels they have over the game.
Heroes of the Second Dimension
Most everything regarding the presentation is done rather smoothly. The narrative is cliché but competent; Yggdra, the naive princess exposed to the harsh realities of life, meets Milanor, the thief with a heart of gold, and they assemble a band of other likeminded heroines to try and reclaim what’s lost. Along the way you’ll run into holy swords, questionable royalty, and other by the book plot points. The story received modest injections in mid battle, which is a nice change of pace, but it mostly bookends itself between major conflicts.
Sprite based visuals boast style over substance, but not at the sacrifice of technical prowess. Some of the menu’s and battlefields are of minimalist fair, but even for a 2D title, there’s an impressive amount of activity on screen during battles. The GBA game was fine for its time, but the animation has received a complete overall that rarely chokes upon execution. Voice acting, in both English and Japanese, is solid around the board – save a few brief moments of clear overacting from my buddy Milanor. Having never played the GBA original, I’m completely ignorant as to what’s new in the PSP incarnation. The press release, however, sheds some light on this matter for interested parties. The revamped audio and visual components are obvious, but new characters and more missions are of the more substantial variety.
