The basics are orthodox: collect resources (in this instance mana from crystals littered around the castle's floors) create units and try to overwhelm and dominate the opponent on the other side of the board who is seeking to do the same. The core of the game though is undeniably the real-time strategy. The lush 2D character portraits (similar in cliché-dodging style and artistry to those seen in Odin Sphere) bristle with character and the witty, well-translated dialogue betters many a role-playing game in both set-up and pay-off. As you meet the various teachers and personalities of your school, and they challenge you to battles, you'll want to push on through these seemingly interminable tutorial levels (though they're never called that) just to find out where it's all heading. The structure and setting are important because they provide impetus to play through the slow-burning early levels. Odin Sphere and GrimGrimoire's alternative mechanics and rich art styles mark developer Vanilla Ware out as one of the most idea-rich Japanese creatives working at the moment. Throughout the game you relive the same five days over and over again, each journey revealing more of the odd magical melodrama that makes up GrimGrimoire's story. This is partly because the game's structure borrows from another Western entertainment reference point: Groundhog Day. In synopsis it sounds worthy of litigation but in practise the similarities are superficial. Your character, a young wizard, enrols at the start of the game at a school of witchcraft and wizardry, home to the philosopher's stone, where she studies under the beardy guidance of one professor Gammel Dore. This interesting gameplay premise is backed up by an equally interesting story- albeit it one that might be eerily familiar to fans of J. Viewed as a side-scrolling 2D game - albeit one with delicately drawn characters and exuberant animations - the game is an RTS flattened, one where your task to expand and grow your influence up and down the cross sectioned floors of a towering castle. Published by in the US by Nippon Ichi, KOEI in Europe, and developed by the hands behind Odin Sphere, Vanilla Ware, GrimGrimoire, as you might expect, approaches things with scant regard for tradition and convention. The heavy, nonsensical title combined with the overtly Japanese super-deformed fantasy characters that give face to the article on the front page bespeak one thing to knowledgeable gamers: Japanese RPG.īut they're wrong: GrimGrimoire is a Real Time Strategy game, more Command and Conquer than Final Fantasy and, thanks to its unique sideways-on perspective it's an especially intriguing take on the genre to boot. The sad fact of the matter is that there will have been many hundreds of Eurogamer readers who chose to bypass this review for no graver reason than its quirky name and art style.
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