Grand Soul Story

Grand Soul Story is an indie pixel-graphics party-based RPG that combines magic and tech and uses a turn-based combat system; in short, what I wrongly call a JRPG despite it's solo dev being a Westerner. Oh well, we all have our faults.

The story is good overall, although too epic for the length of the game. It's possible I skipped some content but I doubt it. The larger story is told through anecdotal quests and writings encountered as you travel. Many RPGs do something similar (an Elder Scrolls constant) but I felt like the plot glossed over some of the connections between the main conflicts. They clearly are connected. Still, I like where the story goes. It provides choices and those choices do end up having some impact on the story. The world feels real in a few ways, like how people from multiple cultures are thrown together in a world of war and chaos and not always in harmony.

The backdrop is a post-apocalyptic dictatorship where corruption is rampant. Some of the choices you make along the way offer allow you to imitate this corruption yourself.

The combat is pretty standard turn-based JRPG stuff with its own twist. Special abilities require points in two categories to use. Those get exhausted pretty quickly so you have to heal them at least as often as hit points, if not more often. So you have hit points, action points and spell points (the last two are guesses of abilities labeled as AP and SP) that need to be replenished. That leads to strategic use of healing items that heal/regenerate the three different abilities at different rates. I played the game on easy as I saw that it describes some of the combat as punishing. I'm glad I did because even then it had some close calls.

The dev is apparently just one guy. He's very responsive in the forums and fixed a bug that messed up my save the same day. If you want to support indie devs who care about their games, buy this game. It's worth the price for sure.