For today's players, the closest analogue we have to the first-person RPGs of old are Etrian Odyssey, The Dark Spire and perhaps Shin Megami Tensei. Considering that the "maze game" is itself a Western innovation, you'd think that this subgenre of RPGs would have more popularity in the hemisphere of apple pie, stealth bombers, cricket and tea. Instead, Wizardry flourished in Japan, leaving behind Odyssey and Megaten as its distant descendants to make the leaps and bounds into the modern world of J-pop and spiky hair. We really don't have a proper vocabulary for this lost form of game. How wieldy does "first-person RPG" sound to your ears? It's not a particularly recognized term, so much as a visual aesthetic relegated to handhelds and console shooters. That's a telling point about this whole culture of role-playing, though; an RPG was once best defined through its attempt to approximate the adventures that J. R. R. Tolkien's writings brought us, to make an impossible journey possible through pen, paper and funny shaped dice. Over the years the tools have evolved, so that we never see the die rolls and we can type on a keyboard or develop CTS on a DualShock controller rather than mark up a character sheet, but fundamentally all of this is still going on behind the scenes. It's no wonder that the term gets thrown around on Zelda games and other properties you probably wouldn't call to mind right away as "role-playing games." Similar to the much-maligned genre of "Science Fiction," the RPG was a hastily-established branching off of an existing idea--the board game--and just as hastily labeled as it rapidly developed into an out-of-control market with technology that was growing faster than its audience. What is it today? Is it die rolls? Is it statistics? Is it the chill autumn breeze you imagine, or the sweeping hillside you can see sprawling out before you as you stalk giants across vast tracts of splintered land? Is it Tolkien?
(No, no, both and probably.)
We don't have the vocabulary to describe what one of these old RPGs is, let alone what our RPGs today are, because our predecessors never developed that vocabulary in the first place, because they were too busy having fun rolling twenty-sided die, playing orthanc1 or hunting Werdna, the Balrog and other rare game of the old world. To be perfectly honest, we aren't much better and this academic crisis is likely to go unanswered. As early as 1986 the idea of a divide was evident but not well defined (as it never would be.) The original debate between Koichi Nakamura and Yuji Horii for the design of Dragon Quest was whether to make a game like Wizardry or a game like Ultima. That's strictly in terms of whether you're considering a first-person RPG like Megaten above, or a third-person role-playing game like the more modern Final Fantasy XIII. And it's a pretty considerable divide, with either option completely turning around the player's perception of the in-game world.While the result of their debate at the time was a compromise between viewpoints, with battles becoming Wizardry and overworld travel taking the Ultima route, at the end of the path Horii's desires would win out and the future of JRPGs would be patterned from Ultima. Somewhere after IV and before or during VI, Dragon Quest finally shook off the old world vibe, much as Final Fantasy would do in its titles of the same numbering, but even today you can see the family resemblance between Quest, all of her JRPG brethren and the Dungeons & Dragons games that began this tangled history. So while we can try to make a separation of Wizardry-family and Ultima-family games, that alone won't accurately explain the very real design differences between the old world and the new. No matter how we cut up the pie, all of these games are drawing back to D&D, and if we try to dig deeper than that, then we're scratching our heads over wargame prehistoria trying to find clues in oracle bones.
My story with the old world begins with Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins, a 2008 JRPG made with an obsolete version of RPG Maker. Taking lessons from old dungeon crawlers and tabletop gameplay, Ruina was far from the same beast as Wizardry but was most definitely in that old world family, one that if not for the gorgeous storybook illustrations, would be right at home on the PC98 with a host of other indie games. Ruina is a game born in the wrong millennium. Combat is not a thrilling rush of adrenaline and bloodshed, but an artless and routine obstacle to progress, much as it was for the very first Final Fantasy. Experience points came not from slaying ancient beasts and deities, but from breaking into ruins, successfully interpreting dead languages and recovering valuable treasure. It's roleplaying at its basest form, where adventure takes priority over the fear of being overwhelmed by goblin hordes, and Ruina is an utterly unapologetic throwback to old world games. Lantern oil is a valuable commodity that you need a constant supply of to navigate dark areas, exploration skills weigh more heavily into your party lineup than combat ability, your character's class and status in the feudal system completely turn around how the cast reacts to you, and all of these is presented through the washed-out pages of a weathered storybook. Dungeons are not simple caverns to be explored, but strictly lined technical drawings for castle interiors that transition into sprawling paintings of nature scenes, one small patch of the illustration after another emerging as you explore. The variation in artwork, gameplay and music inspires awe.
I was in love with the game from the moment that I was introduced to it, but my Japanese comprehension was and is still not up to par with playing through Ruina unaided. While studying the language, I was looking for something to sate my budding love for these design aesthetics that had otherwise been lost to time. Dinosaur Resurrection was a start, but the language barrier again opposed me. And while Shin Megami Tensei has much of the same design theory behind it, Megaten is a franchise that is constantly reinventing itself and trying new things. I was looking for The Hobbit, not Harry Potter. So, several months after my search first began, I ran a very simple Google search.
The presentation is the literary work we've come to expect of Matsuno. A frame story within a frame story. Inside your 3DS, a tabletop roleplaying game unfolds, in which the quintessential knights templar Flint interrogates the wounded witch Frea for what she and her party were looking for in the game's key dungeon, the Sun-Gilt Palace of the Rahab. Frea's story becomes the frame for your own journey through the Palace, following the freemen Giauque, Lippi and Frea herself on a hunt for a missing monk, or more specifically his manuscript. One frame gives way to another, as through this journey you learn the history of the Rahab, the ancient drama of love and pride that played out with the palace as its stage, and as you're spun deeper and deeper into Frea's, Lippi's and Giauque's stories each told in turn, the very simple premise of a dungeon crawl quickly spirals out into a world of conspiracy and conflict between the knightly order, the nobility and the clergy classes. At the center of this is the self-damning knowledge that freemen are even moreso pawns to the conspiracy than the monks and nobles that themselves are uncertain of just who is pulling the strings.
The battle system is a unique fusion of old and new. Shroud relies on a combination of the Active Time Battle elements we've grown so used to, with each character receiving a bar that fills at a pace relative to their agility, allowing them to take a turn every time it fills. However, the element of turn micromanagement throws comparison to Final Fantasy out the window. Each character can act twice in their turn, but this is strictly segregated into Attack/Magic/Item and Skills, which leaves the player to determine whether to use a Skill first or last based on whether their lineup is more support-oriented or offense-oriented. Success is heavily reliant on the strategic use of accuracy, evasion and power-increasing spellcraft, but because identical spells cannot be stacked on top of one another, the player has to carefully plan out their turns in advance. By using magic and skills with elemental affinities of different types in sequence, the player can gradually build up a combo chain and be rewarded with dice in increasing increments, starting at 1d4 (a four-sided die) to 1d6 (a six-sided die) and rising all the way up to 1d12 (a twelve-sided die.) Using the same element twice both breaks the chain and starts it over from scratch, and the enemy's actions also affect the chain, causing them to unexpectedly reward you while they make an extremely punishing attack, or pull off a clever move that disrupts what you were building up toward. The dice you earn can later be poured into additional chances to hit or deal damage to enemies, attaching them to your attacks, magic and skills to increase your accuracy and offense.
The combat is not so routine as it was for Ruina, but instead strikes more of a balance. One of the game's favorite pastimes is to ease the player into a false sense of security, luring them in with easier and easier fights, then suddenly turn out brilliant moves that shift the balance around entirely and force the player to become defensive in fear of their first game over. I came away from a battle against a horde of undead the other day shaking, my heart practically freeing itself from my chest. I had been genuinely afraid that I would lose that fight, and the parallax effects only enhanced the terror. It had been years--probably eight or nine--since I had felt that kind of emotive reaction from a video game. Shroud puts the life and exploration back into the RPG, and returns the element of surprise to combat.
There is no such thing as character level, nor level-ups. Giauque, Lippi and Frea will exit the Sun-Gilt Palace of the Rahab with exactly the same base stats as when they entered. That is not to
say that the game is without character development; instead, you improve
your characters by tutoring magic and skills to them after fights, and
by equipping better equipment to them, which will also endow them with
abilities. This is another key point to the system. There are only a
very few abilities that your characters begin with innately. Other
abilities instead come from wearing equipment, and taking that equipment
off will cause you to lose the ability. This puts emphasis on exploration and adventure, and as based on your performance you're allotted a limited number of Barter Points after each battle with which to buy off the enemy's equipment (Points which you can't save for later!), careful procurement and crafting of equipment is an important element of survival. Another old world holdover in Shroud is that, rather than brashly charging in ready to mash the triangle button with your keyblade in hand to save the world, you will spend a good portion of your time surviving on the brink of death, struggling to avoid unnecessary encounters. Even though HP is restored between encounters, that only gives more license to the monsters hounding the Palace to tear you limb from limb in every fight. Random encounters that would take a minute on a bad day in a regular RPG can take fifteen to thirty minutes in Shroud.
Part of this is owed to the unique setup of monsters. In contrast to standard game design, boss monsters are just about the only enemy you can't see coming. Encounters only appear in set areas of the map, which is explored much as it was in Ruina. Helpfully, many monsters will manifest on the map as large footprints tracking back and forth through a given section of the Rahab, giving you ample forewarning and opportunity to plan. There are also only a limited number of formations on each floor; I think it will be many years before I can forget that a Skeleton Archer A will always be replaced by either a Skeleton Magician or a Skeleton Archer C. Defeated monsters are always replaced by only one type of reinforcement for their party configuration, and those reinforcements will never step in to fill in the shoes of any other monster. In my example, if you have a party of Skeleton Archer A, Skeleton Archer B and a normal Skeleton, defeating the Skeleton will cause it to be replaced by a second Skeleton. Even if you defeat that second Skeleton, the Magician will never replace it, because the Magician only comes in to replace Skeleton Archer A. This type of setup allows you to plan ahead considerably, and as you can save anywhere on the map so long as you're not in an event, the difficult and unforgiving gameplay is actually quite open to reward you for good strategy.
Screenshots can never really do the visuals justice. The 3D is used cleverly and it gives the impression of looking through a portrait frame, into a vast and dark world, as if you could stretch your hand into the picture and pull yourself into the tree branches. The characters' features are carefully mapped to give great impression of depth, and the 3DS' visuals are pushed to their limits to present a starkly realistic fantasy, far from what you would associate with the Nintendo brand. I was amazed the first time that I engaged the 3D after the opening scrawl, and could make out the individual depth levels of Flint's hair. After some experimenting, I've found that it works best not quite adjusted to maximum, as turning the 3D up only most of the way tends to give you the most pleasant view of the game world. This may be a subjective experience, and you may have better results on maximum or minimum settings.
I call Shroud a Crusades Fantasy first because the story makes an effort to insert itself into a forgotten corner of our world with all the trappings and conspiracy of the nobility, clergy and warrior classes. What on the surface seems to be a simple dungeon crawl for a magic shroud, gradually spirals out into a network of intersecting motivations. Relationships are reversed. A holy man, who should be dictating commands and guidance to the knights and nobility, becomes the pawn to a noble's plot to overthrow an interior faction of his own church. A knight, who should be subservient to the will of the church, turns his eyes against it out of personal hunger that should only belong to the nobles.
Shroud is of this Crusades Fantasy second because the myths from which its legends draw are the same Greco-Roman fantasies that, coming out of late antiquity, embedded themselves in the collective memory of medieval Western culture. Kobaloi composite figures, minotaurs and revenant undead feature prominently in the Shroud mythos, with magic primarily observed as a black art practiced by witches and heretics. The ongoing large-scale conflict throughout is a theological one, of whether magic is a heavensent gift of god or the devil's temptation intended to turn mankind away from paradise. This unique mix of a real world historical background and the sudden introduction of magical artifacts is an interesting return to form. One of the earliest predecessors to D&D was a historical fantasy setting, Chainmail, and Shroud's adaption of reality as the stage for fantasy shows that this concept has not been entirely played out. Specifically, the world is presented as one "without magic" until the titular gift, the Crimson Shroud, brought it to mankind and set the events of our story into motion.
Whether Shroud will capture the modern audience with its old world charm isn't wholly clear as of yet, but at $7.99 it's certainly a work worth the investment. Stay tuned, as the first areas of our walkthrough should be going up in the morning.
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