While I can't quite claim to be any great master at playing them, I rather like turn-based strategy/tactics games for the way they utilize the player's creativity and puzzle solving skills to mobilize a small army effectively. I also like their real-time counterparts, which add in the need for some manual dexterity as well as time and resource management skills to keep up with an enemy who is never waiting for their turn. It also helps to have a mouse and keyboard in this scenario, to make issuing commands to the right units at the right time as simple as possible. This is surely part of the reason why controller-bound console RTSs aren't especially common. GrimGrimoire (PS2, 2007) manages to overcome this restriction well enough, thanks to the way it compensates for the relatively simple input device.
The first and most useful of these is the ability to issue commands while the game is paused. It helps make the early game fabulously efficient as gathering resources and initial base building is done by issuing commands that only cost a few seconds of actual game time. At the first sign of enemy attack, just pause, check out what's coming, and give orders to the proper counter units. Without any keyboard shortcuts or the quick precision of a mouse, I see pausing like this as a perfectly serviceable way to support a fairly complex game without making it too stressful and cumbersome to actually play.
And GrimGrimoire is fairly complex. There are 20 different units in the game, each with their role to play. To help make sense of what units work best against which other units, the game uses four unit types (Alchemy, Necromancy, etc) that are each strong/weak/equivalent to certain others. These are almost like the races from a game like StarCraft, except all of the unit types are available to player and the AI simultaneously. Each type has only a handful of units: usually a resource gatherer/infantry, stronger infantry, status effect unit, immobile defensive unit, and a super-weapon. Despite the broadly defined overlap in these roles across the four types, every unit is very different from its closest counterpart, making it worthwhile to use a variety of types rather than focusing on just one.
Doing so, however, requires a variety of structures (summoning circles, actually) capable of producing those different units. There are twelve of these in all -- three for each type -- though it's unlikely they'll all be needed at the same time. Interestingly, all twelve are available immediately at the beginning of a match (in story mode, the ones that have been previously unlocked are available), which allows the player to go more or less directly to producing whichever unit they like. It is necessary to level up some structures before they can produce certain units, but it is nevertheless possible to field any unit within minutes of starting a match.
This keeps the game moving at a pleasantly quick pace, and is what I found most attractive about how GrimGrimoire plays. Everything builds and finishes so relatively quickly that there's rarely any need to wait for anything so long as the resources are there to produce it. Story mode matches are generally designed with enough starting resources to essentially cut out the often boring RTS opening minutes spent waiting for numbers to go up.
Because the structures are actually summoning circles ostensibly being drawn by the player, they can be placed anywhere not in the fog of war without requiring a worker to set them up. Again, given sufficient resources, it's possible to place every circle simultaneously without interrupting resource gathering at all. In longer matches across larger maps, this can be very useful for quickly setting up a secondary base for reinforcements without needing to bring any non-combat workers.
Unfortunately, longer matches also reveal one of the game's weaknesses. As much as I love George Kamitani's art, (and he shows unusual restraint with his designs for women in this game, skewing more towards Princess Crown or Grand Knight's History than virtually anything else he's done) giving him big, detailed, articulated sprites means that there's a rather hard limit on how many of them the system can handle without slowing down. This translates to an often restrictive unit cap that can require destroying units to make room for new ones, or even choosing not to expand to another resource point because it would cost over 10% of the unit cap to do so.
Granted, working within these constraints is a key part of an effective strategy, and not necessarily a block against it. There is another issue I had with the game, however, and it's one that I think does interfere with strategy: the fact that the enemy AI doesn't seem to follow the same resource gathering and production rules as the player. Enemy units just sort of appear at the beginning of a match and then are reinforced periodically, as far as I could tell. They didn't necessarily originate from any particular structures, and they certainly didn't seem to cost any of the resources I never saw the AI gather. There does appear to be some correlation between what structures remain and what enemy reinforcements are able to respawn, but I was never able to determine how best to interrupt an enemy plan with any more finesse than to simply destroy everything I could find.
Even so, I enjoyed the challenge of destroying all that stuff that I came away with an overall positive view of GrimGrimoire and the way it accomodates the needs of RTSs without becoming overly simplistic. Beyond that, I also enjoyed how relatively speedy the game is, neatly avoiding the lulls that can often make traditional RTSs a bit of a chore to play. There's also a story, which is a reasonably intriguing Groundhog Week in Anime Hogwarts in which a student has to figure out how to stop everyone from killing each other. It's a clever and charming story -- at least in the Japanese version I played, I make no claims to how NIS America handled it -- but for me, the actual strategising in (paused) real time was the real attraction of this game for me.
That's why I give GrimGrimoire ten Morning Stars out of a possible why did you make so many Morning Stars, now we can't afford to gather crystals.
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| Just remember RMRMR when you go to write it out later |
The first and most useful of these is the ability to issue commands while the game is paused. It helps make the early game fabulously efficient as gathering resources and initial base building is done by issuing commands that only cost a few seconds of actual game time. At the first sign of enemy attack, just pause, check out what's coming, and give orders to the proper counter units. Without any keyboard shortcuts or the quick precision of a mouse, I see pausing like this as a perfectly serviceable way to support a fairly complex game without making it too stressful and cumbersome to actually play.
And GrimGrimoire is fairly complex. There are 20 different units in the game, each with their role to play. To help make sense of what units work best against which other units, the game uses four unit types (Alchemy, Necromancy, etc) that are each strong/weak/equivalent to certain others. These are almost like the races from a game like StarCraft, except all of the unit types are available to player and the AI simultaneously. Each type has only a handful of units: usually a resource gatherer/infantry, stronger infantry, status effect unit, immobile defensive unit, and a super-weapon. Despite the broadly defined overlap in these roles across the four types, every unit is very different from its closest counterpart, making it worthwhile to use a variety of types rather than focusing on just one.
Doing so, however, requires a variety of structures (summoning circles, actually) capable of producing those different units. There are twelve of these in all -- three for each type -- though it's unlikely they'll all be needed at the same time. Interestingly, all twelve are available immediately at the beginning of a match (in story mode, the ones that have been previously unlocked are available), which allows the player to go more or less directly to producing whichever unit they like. It is necessary to level up some structures before they can produce certain units, but it is nevertheless possible to field any unit within minutes of starting a match.
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| Fairy rush is now the worst |
This keeps the game moving at a pleasantly quick pace, and is what I found most attractive about how GrimGrimoire plays. Everything builds and finishes so relatively quickly that there's rarely any need to wait for anything so long as the resources are there to produce it. Story mode matches are generally designed with enough starting resources to essentially cut out the often boring RTS opening minutes spent waiting for numbers to go up.
Because the structures are actually summoning circles ostensibly being drawn by the player, they can be placed anywhere not in the fog of war without requiring a worker to set them up. Again, given sufficient resources, it's possible to place every circle simultaneously without interrupting resource gathering at all. In longer matches across larger maps, this can be very useful for quickly setting up a secondary base for reinforcements without needing to bring any non-combat workers.
Unfortunately, longer matches also reveal one of the game's weaknesses. As much as I love George Kamitani's art, (and he shows unusual restraint with his designs for women in this game, skewing more towards Princess Crown or Grand Knight's History than virtually anything else he's done) giving him big, detailed, articulated sprites means that there's a rather hard limit on how many of them the system can handle without slowing down. This translates to an often restrictive unit cap that can require destroying units to make room for new ones, or even choosing not to expand to another resource point because it would cost over 10% of the unit cap to do so.
Granted, working within these constraints is a key part of an effective strategy, and not necessarily a block against it. There is another issue I had with the game, however, and it's one that I think does interfere with strategy: the fact that the enemy AI doesn't seem to follow the same resource gathering and production rules as the player. Enemy units just sort of appear at the beginning of a match and then are reinforced periodically, as far as I could tell. They didn't necessarily originate from any particular structures, and they certainly didn't seem to cost any of the resources I never saw the AI gather. There does appear to be some correlation between what structures remain and what enemy reinforcements are able to respawn, but I was never able to determine how best to interrupt an enemy plan with any more finesse than to simply destroy everything I could find.
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| Wars fought between teachers and students over belt supremacy |
That's why I give GrimGrimoire ten Morning Stars out of a possible why did you make so many Morning Stars, now we can't afford to gather crystals.
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