So, I was a little late on this, but I finally got my hands on a copy of Soul Nomad and the World Eaters. Oddly enough, I thought I had ordered it a while ago, but I forgot to finish the checkout. I finally found out when I went to preorder Mana Khemia. I’m one of the ones who get to get the figure ^^. I noticed that Soul Nomad was still in my cart.

Let me start out by saying that this is one of the better SRPGs that has come from N1, of course, in my opinion that doesn’t sound like much. Disgaea, even with its lovable story, was not a very good SRPG in my book. It just seemed like a big grindfest. The battle system wasn’t all that great either. It had almost no interesting quirks at all, unless you count geo-panel manipulation as interesting.

Phantom Brave improved the formula quite a bit. It did away with the grid (kind of) in favor of a circular area of movement which could seem a little clunky sometimes but was a welcomed change. There was also the added idea that you could only have characters remain on the field for a certain amount of time. This made you not only think about what units to bring to the field, but also when to bring certain units on the field. Some amount of grinding still exists in the game, though, but most likely isn’t required from what I can remember.

Soul Nomad almost totally changes the N1 formula. There are still grids in this game, but now each person on a grid doesn’t just represent one person. It actually represents a whole squad, called a room in this game, of characters of your choosing. Those of you familiar with Ogre Battle will find this sounding familiar. Each room can have a max of 9 characters occupying it (in a 3x3 fashion) although most rooms will have some squares missing which prevents you from placing that many characters. In addition, rooms can also be equipped with decor can provide the room with certain effects (not all of them good, in my opinion.) These decor only last for one battle, though, before they are gone for good.

Each room has a designated leader who represents the room on the map. The choice of of a leader affects special skill and tactics the room can use. It also affects its movement type and its attack matches with other rooms. When a room attacks another room on the strategic map, the screen focuses on the two units fighting Ogre Battle style. You don’ get to directly control the characters in each squad, so it is not rare that you’ll be cursing when certain units don’t target the units you want them to target.

Melee targets always target the front row (or whatever rare was before the battle started.) Unfortunately, units only disappear after hitting 0 HP once they are no longer being targeted by units. Meaning, if projectile attacks wipe out the entire front row of a room, the melee units will still attack that same front row, even if all of them are already dead. It’s quite annoying sometimes, I would have rather they made units only target units with more than 0 HP.

Another nice little addition I like that a lot of other SRPGs seem to lack is the idea of stamina. In Soul Nomad, the stats of a room drops as the stamina drops. Fortunately, this only starts to happen after the stamina drops below 50%, but the difference is pretty noticeable. There is a decor that makes your party stronger as stamina increases. Trust me, it’s a very, very good decor to have equipped in your protagonist’s room.

The story of the game starts out normally enough. You’re given a sword by the wise woman of the village that houses the soul of Gig, the person that come to the world 200 years prior in attempt to kill every last living thing on the planet. Upon touching this sword, Gig soul transfers to your body. Hence, you become soul mates as Gig puts it. Then, Layla, the old woman, sends you out on a quest to kill the three World Eaters, Gig’s pets during his attacks.

The story gets a little bit more complicated, though. Complicated enough so that I don’t 100% understand everything. Maybe I missed a cutscene or something by no selecting a particular dialogue option. Or, maybe it’s the fact that I played too much of the game whilst not getting enough sleep (ie, none for two days straight.) It was all fine and coherent until the very end. I never understood everything that the main bad guy did in the past.

Since I forgot to mention it earlier, there is more than one path and 10 different epilogues (not counting the epilogues that differ based on your gender.) From what I can tell, the different paths are vastly different. That makes me happy and sad, in a way. I usually don’t play games more than once, so I know that I might only see the ending of one path, which is a shame. It’s good that the developers took extra care to make player choices actually count for something.

When it’s all done, the game clocks in about 30 or so hours. The difficulty changes a lot, especially the last six or so battles. The first 4 are really easy, while the fifth was reasonably hard, and the six which had moderate difficulty. This kind of thing seems to happen a lot once you get past the first 10 hours or so. At least it keeps you guessing or something.