First Impressions: Yggdra Union

I received a download code for this game a few months ago as part of my online gift exchange. I was ass-deep in NaNoWriMo at the time, though, so I didn’t play it right away. And since it was sitting on my PSP’s memory stick and not staring at me from the games shelf, I sort of forgot about it until just last night.

The person who gifted this to me is a mysterious benefactor I know only as “Belmont”, and he apparently already knew about my aversion to tactical RPGs, because he said as much before giving me the code. I decided to go ahead and take the plunge anyway, though, because like, hey, look, free game.

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Ugh. Hold on. There are thirteen empty soda cans on my desk. Let me get rid of those real quick.

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Okay, that’s better. I can see my Start button now! And if you have to ask why I went through the trouble of typing that out, you have no idea what I’m even trying to do here.

So Yggdra Union, then.

The first few hours of this game involve tutorials as far as the eye can see. The game doesn’t even bother making up some contrivance as to why certain gameplay systems are locked off from the start; you’re simply told by one of the fourth-wall-breaking characters that “you can’t do that yet.” It works well enough in the course of learning things, I suppose — you have to crawl before you can walk — but most games with this sort of pacing prevent the unavailable options from appearing before you have a chance to use them. Like, if you haven’t learned to use Magic yet, the Magic option on the menu will be greyed out. Yeah? In Yggdra Union these options are plastered all over the screen, staring you right in the face. I’ve been looking at skill names, and indeed acquiring new skills, the entire time I’ve been playing. But I can’t use them because I haven’t crossed that invisible magic threshhold yet.

The other problem with this method is, of course, the player (me) is likely to be smarter than the designer (you) is expecting. There have been several fights where I’ve watched my unit get decimated, and have been left to nurse this sinking feeling that I would have won if only I’d been able to use the goddamn skill they went in equipped with.

The design of the game itself is much, much less SRPG than I was led to believe. Some of the trappings are certainly there: units moving around a grid, player and CPU taking turns, units must participate in battles to earn EXP. It’s not strictly an SRPG, though, and I haven’t really played enough of the game to feel like I can articulate why.

Well, I’ll take a shot. Remember in Final Fantasy Tactics how range and positioning were incredibly important? Optimally speaking, you had to try to predict where your enemies were likely to move, and position your troops in such a way that they were either outside the range of the incoming attacks, or that you could mitigate the damage from those attacks as much as possible. On the flip side, you wanted to try and use your own attacks from just inside their effective range, then use the unit’s move phase to back up outside the range of the opposition’s. You had to do all this while juggling an absolutely huge number of variables, not the least of which was the sheer number of abilities and attacks available to both teams.

Final Fantasy Tactics is not that hard of a game, really, if you can but wrap your head around the range of action. My first time through it, I couldn’t. And that was the genesis for what grew into my overreaching distaste for the SRPG genre as a whole.

Yggdra Union seems like it has streamlined that process as much as possible by having an incredibly compact range of action. Each turn you select one skill. That skill determines how much movement you can spend amongst all your troops. You can only launch one attack per turn, but multiple units can join that attack if their positioned in a particular way. These same rules govern your enemy’s unit, when it’s their turn.

The contrivances and shortcuts that make this system work cause the whole thing to play out much more like a board game than a war simulator. For example, the positioning of units in relation to one another is not as important as what shape those units make. And, because you can have a large amount of “leftover” move points, there is an incentive to move to certain spaces on the board that would otherwise offer you no tactical advantage.

All of this makes me happy, because wrapping my head around a small amount of board game rules is a lot easier and a lot more fun than trying to wrap my head around an entire war simulator. But again, I’m still in the tutorials. So that might change.

Moving away from gameplay, then. Characters are represented by tiny solid-color sprites on a map that is nothing more than a collection of squares. Good guys are blue, bad guys are red, guest units are green. Which makes examining the game state very simple — as it is in a board game — but is not exactly what I expect from my PSP. The in-battle sprites and animations, as well as the overall character design, is pretty lazy. So far every character is the same generic anime person I’ve come to expect from “these kinds of games”. And in fact, are one of the reasons I tend to stay away from “these kinds of games” to begin with.

The voice acting was really annoying, but there’s a button to turn it off. Hooray!

You can’t turn off the dialogue, though, which is a shame because I’m finding it to be very off-putting.  It’s every bit as generic-anime-style as the spritework is. You have medieval knights, soldiers and bandits using the same vernacular as the game’s target demographic. They call each other “punks”, apologize by saying “my bad”… the list just goes on. These battle-hardened warriors and trained court magicians talk to each other like they’re hanging out by their lockers in high school. It’s quite jarring.

I realize that part of this is just the stock fantasy-setting text that saturates the industry, and in truth I find it doesn’t bother me when the game is planted very firmly outside the bounds of what my ability to suspend belief might call “realism”. I’ve got nothing but love for the wacky accents in Etrian Odyssey, after all. Yggdra Union, at least the first few hours, isn’t a game about magic crystals and destined heroes. It’s about a displaced princess rallying the remnants of her scattered army. It’s about moving troops, seizing opportunities, and blocking off retreats. Every ambition in the plot so far has been military or political. I suppose I’ve just been spoiled by the fantastic localization of War of the Lions, but if a game wants to play with slightly more grown-up subject matter, I’d prefer the characters to talk like grown-ups. (And maybe not have huge dinner plate eyes.)

I have a lot more game to play, and I’ll probably be going back and forth between this and my replay of Risky’s Revenge. If the game’s not too terribly long it’s likely I’ll see it through to the end, but given the length of these tutorials I’m not holding my breath. In any case, super awesome thanks to Belmont for sending it my way!