GrimGrimoire (PS2)

GrimGrimoire
Vanillaware/Nippon Ichi

Anthony: Man, Groundhog Day is pretty dark without Bill Murray in it. But at least this version has TV-enveloping dragons, right? Anyway, Vanillaware suddenly showed up on North American soil with GrimGrimoire and Odin Sphere. That’s all well and good for us, as GrimGrimoire is a unique and enjoyable title.

GrimGrimoire tells the story of Lillet Blan, a young mage pupil who comes to a renowned tower to learn magic through drawing runes. On her fifth day, tragedy strikes as most inhabitants of the school are murdered, while Lillet is sent back in time repeatedly and must find a way to quell the disaster. Battles are actually real-time-strategy, akin to a lighter version of older Blizzard Entertainment games. Aside from the story elements, nothing really makes this an RPG, despite Nippon Ichi’s distribution.

What’s good:
- The graphics... wow. Though everything in the game is 2-D, the artwork is done with exquisite detail, and even though told through mostly static 2-D scenes, there is extremely fluid animation that highlights subtleties in characters' breathing and gesturing. Backgrounds are also incredibly detailed, and clearly took a great deal of work to design. Battle sprites look very smooth and colorful, but the story scenes steal the show overall. Everything flows such that it looks like the characters and environments are teeming with life.
- The storyline, though 100% linear, is both unique and very interesting overall. The storyline starts out very lighthearted, takes a very dark turn, and then keeps a nice air of mystery throughout. The characters are interesting, and Lillet manages to be a pretty shrewd protagonist... eventually manipulating almost every character in order to save the tower and herself. Dashes of humor are thrown in and it flows together well overall.
- The tutorial battles early on are done well and help ease a player unfamiliar with an RTS into the system quite well. Restarting a battle also brings up a hint from the developers about how to clear the stage. While it may or may not be helpful, they certainly tried to help out.
- Also seemingly a nod to RPG players buying an RTS game, they included two separate easier difficulty levels aside from “Normal” to play through the game at no penalty. I found the game challenging but certainly beatable on Normal, but it was nice to see they didn’t just want to brutalize people needlessly.
- Especially as the game wore on, I found myself very impressed with the way they balanced the whole gameplay experience when it comes to the units you can use. Map capacity, mana, and which runes are drawn determine which units and what quantity can be brought onto the map simultaneously. Huge and expensive units like Chimeras and Dragons can be absolute world-destroyers... easily clearing out huge areas of enemies and structures alone. However, they can also be easily overwhelmed by sleep/slow spells or swarms of well-protected units. Any unit that seems too powerful has some exploitable downsides, and any unit that seems too weak can probably be used in a swarm alone or in conjunction with others to do devastating damage. Beyond that, each class tends to have good specialized roles, and coupled with four schools of runes with weaknesses and strengths to each other, this makes the problem-solving aspects and experimentation in the game very fun and intriguing.
- The wealth of bonus trial maps to play alongside the main game was a very nice inclusion to help increase the replay value of what’s otherwise a fairly short game. The New Game+, Scene Viewing and Skip Scenes features also helps keep things moving along smoothly if you feel like playing more after the conclusion.

What’s neutral:
- With every single stage covered in a “Fog of War” that you cannot penetrate without sending units out, as the difficulty increases, the game often ends up sending you situations where you’re better off playing a stage for a little while, learning what you’re up against, and then restarting so you can prepare for the situation better. There’s absolutely no scout/recon unit, and one can even cause serious troubles attempting to scout, as it can alert groups of enemies to attack that would otherwise remain dormant or not bother you for several minutes. The game even kind of misleads you, as early in the game, you typically fight professors who belong to a specific school of magic, and can thus attempt to build an army tailored to their weaknesses... only to find that later on, they’ll start dabbling in other schools just to screw with you. While there are plenty of stages that can be completed on the first attempt, several still take great benefit from, or practically require you to attempt and restart the battle at least once.
- Surprisingly, there’s a pretty notable lack of variety for battles in the game in regards to the areas and the music. Only slight differences in size, obstacles, and starting location ever truly differentiate the stage layouts... no noticeably different art, backgrounds or anything of the sort. Similarly, despite some good songs in the game, battle music is basically the same throughout the game. Even the somewhat epic final battle has the same music you’ve heard numerous times.
- Though the controls mostly work quite well, I found it odd that there is never an option to select different units simultaneously. If you want a set of faeries, demons and golems to attack a target, there’s no way to do that without grabbing each group individually and issuing the command. I know different groups have different commands, but given that most have at least “move” and/or “attack”, that functionality probably could have been included.
- While it does an admirable job of keeping track of numerous sprites on the field commencing their various actions, inevitably there is some slowdown from time to time. It doesn’t kill the game and it’s not overly frequent, but it does show up occasionally.
- Though the style lends it to multiple playthroughs and attempting the trial stages, if you intend to just play the story, this is not a particularly long game. Somewhere between 10-20 hours is all you should expect in that regard.

What’s bad:
- The lack of an in-battle save or suspend feature tends to hurt two potential aspects of the game. For one, it becomes unfriendly for pick-up-and-play gameplay, especially with story scenes that happen even before you have the option to save. Additionally, it exacerbates the problem of the “try, die, restart” mechanic of the tougher stages. This is abundantly clear in the case of some of the “stay alive for x minutes!” challenges, where almost no attack of coincidence may happen for the first 22 minutes, whereupon an unholy legion of doom comes charging towards your camp. It’s a lot of time to lose when things go wrong late in a stage.
- The tutorial battles went into great detail, but somehow missed out on describing what’s an absolutely necessary mechanic for the game. To beat most stages, you’ll need to draw your own runes and plan your strategy accordingly. For most of the game though, they supply you with multiple runes at the start of each stage, and never tell you when and how you can inscribe your own. Eventually I got to a level where I lost twice in depressing fashion, only to find out I could use different runes than were provided to me. Then I beat it first try without issue. Hum.

I’d say it’s pretty rare these days for an RPG developer to put out a RTS game, but putting my trust in them was not a mistake. GrimGrimoire is beautiful, tells a very intriguing tale, and has some pretty addictive gameplay. Though I’m done with the game now, I still remember some really cool moments in battles, and I enjoyed learning more techniques.

In the end, it’ll be the variety of units and the balance within that sticks in my mind as to what made the game so fun. Dragons have high HP, do huge damage to a large area, yet are painfully slow and vulnerable to sleep. Chimeras also do huge damage, are extremely fast, but can only hit physical beings and are much less durable than Dragons. Morning Stars are stronger than those one-on-one, but require mana as ammunition to attack, and are extremely vulnerable to units like Homunculi, Skullmages and Unicorns that prey on “astrals” like them. Grimalkins can immediately kill high-MP enemies and easily incapacitate large foes, but have no defense against multiple enemies. Faeries fly quickly and can protect themselves adequately, but are practically worthless if not in large groups. Much like Knights in the Nightmare made me feel, I almost want to just sit down and talk about the units, their nuances, and how I completed a specific level.

But I shan’t bore you any longer. GrimGrimoire is delightful... delightfully presented, delightfully challenging, and delightfully nuanced throughout. Recommended, if you can find a copy for a reasonable price.

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Lauren: Once again, I was the observer for this title, and I'd simply like to reiterate a few of Anthony's points. The "lighter fare RTS" style of GrimGrimoire helped to bridge the gap for newbies to the genre like us. I could definitely see the satisfaction of creating a complex setup and watching the carnage happen.

Example: Anthony said, "They gave me a lot of mana. So this is what I did." And then I looked up from my PSP to see that the battle area was 90% filled with several gigantic dragons overlapping each other. Awesome.

As expected, many famous voice actors brought their talents to GrimGrimoire, and they certainly did not disappoint. I also very much enjoyed the music, aside from the fact that the battle theme seemed to be the same throughout the whole game.

I was also very impressed with the graphics. The soft, colourful look of the characters and backgrounds were simply gorgeous. I was pleasantly surprised by the extremely subtle "breathing" animations of the characters during cutscenes. It was a genius idea to have only the character portraits do the talking in all scenes and battles, therefore bypassing the common RPG problem of "sometimes a character portrait / sometimes a tiny simple sprite that doesn't look much like its portrait". It made the whole experience seem smooth. And by the looks of their other games, Vanillaware has a very specific style of beautiful artwork. I certainly hope to see more of their work soon.