![]() ![]() Each has a class, and can graduate to a wide variety of better ones (or even be downgraded if for some reason the new job's not working out). The next squad along could have an entirely different setup, especially since the limits of how much a squad can actually fit in depends on who's leading it, and any but the most entry level recruits can be a squad leader. But it could also be a lancer, an assassin, two priestesses, a rifleman, and a sorceress. Sure, your squad could just be five archers, or three spearmen. Instead, you recruit dozens of named individuals, assign them to a "squad", and then command that squad as a singular unit. ![]() You're not leading discrete single-soldier units around, nor platoons of uniform stabmen a lá Advance Wars or, say, Master Of Magic. I say "squad" because although the details I'll elaborate on later enhance the design a lot, the fundamental element that marks it out is the way your forces are organised. You lead an army through a linear campaign of turn-based battles where the goal is generally to capture an enemy stronghold or deliver a specific squad to a given square. Or Ogre Battle 64, but come on, you'd never heard of that before this week either. That I say "cumbersome" and not "fatally terrible" is a credit to the work Dancing Dragon Games put into beating the z-list JRPG framework into a top drawer strategy/tactical RPG that compares perhaps most recognisably to Advance Wars. Symphony Of War sidesteps or heavily mitigates most of those common flaws, leaving its biggest issue a cumbersome user interface. I've played some great RPG Maker games, and some of them weren't even fetish games, but it does lead a great many of its users down the same awful design paths. Going in, and even after a few hours, I'd expected to come out of this writing something like "great game hamstrung by its engine". That's a pretty big statement, and I'm as surprised as anyone. The third unusual thing is one I didn't even appreciate until I was a fair bit in: it's not only a good strategy game "for an RPG Maker game", but one of the best games I've played this year. That's not particularly unusual, but it leads into the second unusual thing: that it's also a good strategy game. The first unusual thing about Symphony Of War Colon The Nephilim Saga is that it's a strategy game made in RPG Maker. ![]() This is The Rally Point, a regular column where the inimitable Sin Vega delves deep into strategy gaming. ![]()
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