La Pucelle: Tactics

"An Endearing and Addictive SRPG"

Thanks to the commercial success of Nippon Ichi's Disgaea, which sold far better in the states than anticipated, Mastiff has revived Nippon Ichi's previous game. Released in Japan two years prior to Disgaea, La Pucelle has a very similar feel to Disgaea, despite a different tone and slightly less-polished game play.

Graphics
Anyone purchasing a strategy RPG who is expecting incredible 3-D graphics with millions of super smooth polys and extraordinary FMV cutscenes obviously knows nothing about the SRPG genre. La Pucelle's graphics are not state of the art, but they are appropriate. Basically the graphics do everything they should, and then a little more.

La Pucelle plays out with three main elements. Firstly are the characters, who are all portrayed with small sprites. Despite their minuscule size, the sprites are very well detailed, and have actions for virtually every emotion imaginable. Next are the backgrounds. La Pucelle has two main types of backgrounds, battle and story. During battle, characters are placed on 3D maps that are quite frankly the worst aspect of the graphics. Jaggies run amok and art is meager. On the other hand, there are the backgrounds during story sequences and when your characters are attacking. These are all illustrated extremely well with a very nice anime style. Finally are La Pucelle's battle animations. Put simply, they are perfect. The animations are flashy, with explosions and flashes of light that fit into the game seamlessly. Even after playing for twenty five hours, none of the attack animations had gotten stale.

Rundown
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Character Sprites: Detailed and suitable for the game.
Backgrounds: Beautiful and well drawn with great style
Maps: Jaggie littered and minimalistic detail
Attacks: Perfect for the game
Overall: 9/10

Sound
Despite La Pucelle's seeming technical simplicity, its sound was surprisingly well done, particularly as far as music is concerned. La Pucelle has one of the best soundtracks for a game I've heard in quite a well. With the exception of one or two tunes (background music on the world map for example), the music is very good and anything but stale. Many themes convey a fantastic sense of majesty, which actually enhances the game. When the truly epic themes begin playing, the player will actually feel even closer to the game's characters and their adventure. Also, much like Disgaea, the music seems to go into overdrive for the final chapter, delivering some of the best music I have ever heard in a game. Also, for those who have played Disgaea through, you'll find that Baal's theme is throughout La Pucelle, with the added bonus that the memorable tune sounds much better.

Music isn't the only excellent point to La Pucelle's sounds, as the voice acting was superb. I'll be quite honest, I played the entire game with Japanese voices, afraid of the English dub, but I can assure you that the Japanese voice track is fantastic. The characters successfully convey plenty of emotion while never being remotely annoying. This is particularly important on the battle animations, where repeated voices could easily bore a player. However, the voice actors deliver in spades, because the battle voices sounded good and weren't distracting. Also, several of the characters' actors are simply so bizarre and over-the-top you'll find yourself laughing at anything and everything they say.

Unfortunately, sound isn't perfect, because the main sound effects are, quite simply, bad. Explosions and smashes in battle. Bloops as you go through menus. You've heard it all before, and it really is a nasty downfall. Hearing the battle noises often got on my nerves, if only because they sounded unconvincing and generic.

Rundown
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Background Music: Excellent, epic, and often catchy
Voices (Japanese Track only): Fantastic, emotional, and often amusing
Sound Effects: Generic, dull, and they get very annoying after a while
Overall: 8/10

Story
The story is somewhat typical anime-fare, but done very well. You play the role of Prier, a girl training to become the Maiden of Light at a church. She belongs to La Pucelle, the church's demon-hunting squad. Initially you simply vanquish demons, but as the game progresses, a dark plot by a different church comes into view. Prier and company need to set out to stop the church's evil plans, but they are thrown into tragedy as the story progresses. La Pucelle is surprisingly touching and also surprisingly tragic.

Game Play
La Pucelle has plenty of redeeming features, but game play is what counts, and if certainly delivers.

Game play consists of two parts: In battle and out of battle. Outside of battle you simply equip items on your characters, buy items, move from place to place, etc. However, it is in battle where the game shines. Each time you engage enemies in combat, you are placed on an isometric grid. Each turn, you move your characters out, assign moves, attack, etc. The real genius of La Pucelle is how all of this happens. Your various characters have their own specialized moves, along with moves you can teach them. By giving a character items with magical alignments, your characters can begin learning new magic skills. This means that each character can, potentially, learning all the elemental magic spells.

Another large part of La Pucelle's combat are the dark portals. On each map there are several small portals. Eventually, enemies will start to come out of these portals, so in each battle you must either kill the enemies quickly, or seal the portals. To seal them, you use the purify command. When a portal is purified enough, it will break. Whenever a character does this to a portal, their items will gain experience. This means that characters can improve their weaponry to allow even further growth. Also, the dark portals release energy, which can be redirected about the map. If you can close a box of energy and then purify it, a miracle will occur, which will cause high damage to everything inside the box of energy.

Also, the purify command can be used to make enemies see the good of your cause. Purify them enough, and when you kill them they may join forces with you. Almost every enemy can be recruited this way, and there are even ways to recruit every enemy in the game. (Or close to every)

Another highlight of the battle system are the team attacks. Whenever players are next to each other, they join together when one of them attacks. By having each one attack separately, a play can potentially hit an enemy an incredible number of times. If you were able to fully surround a single enemy, it would be possible to attack him 24 times, and he could only attack 8 times, targeting different characters each time. It is difficult to describe, but several minutes of toying with the battle system will show this, and it is a life saver whenever the odds are stacked against you.

Rundown
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Plenty of customability
Potential to recruit enemies
A complex dark portal and purification system
Unique team attack system
Overall: 10/10

Length/Replay
Playing the bare bones minimum La Pucelle has to offer will result in over 20 hours of game play over the course of twelve chapters. However, the game has many other things to do which drastically increase it's length.

-A super boss, who requires many extra hours of levelling to beat
-A Dark world, which allows for better items and harder battles
-The extra titles, both are hard to attain, but result in more game options
-Multiple endings to most chapters, including the difficult to gain "Special" endings

If someone tried to accomplish everything La Pucelle has to offer, they might find themselves spending well over 100 hours.

Overall Length: Long

Difficulty
Quite frankly, La Pucelle is easy. The AI isn't very smart, and battles are rarely challenging. If they are, you can always level up to even the odds.

Overall: Easy

Final Rundown
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Graphics: 9/10
Sound: 8/10
Game Play: 10/10
Length: Long
Difficulty: Easy

Overall Rating: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/24/04