Der Langrisser, for SNES

Rating: 8.0/10; Great

Highly recommended for strategy RPG fans

This game is a strategy RPG with turn based battles on a grid map. The maps are smaller in scale than most strategy games; being for example a single castle, town, bridge or ship, though it still includes a variety of terrain types with movement and defense effects (such as forest, water, indoors, mountain etc). The combat system is excellent because you have a cast of heroes (or villains if you choose to be bad) that level up and can follow a branching class tree, and these heroes can spend money to hire generic troops during each map.

Upon starting a map, you are able to buy/sell/equip your heroes, view the map and enemies, and then choose where to place each hero and what type and how many generic troops to hire. There is a tremendous amount of tactics here, as you try to plan ahead how the battle will go and decide what type of soldiers will best serve you, and in what location. There is also the consideration about whether to hire generic troops at all for a particular hero in order to save money, as it is entirely possible that no troops a hero can hire will play an important part in the battle. The troops that a hero can hire, and the stats and spells they know depend on how they follow the class tree. Previously learned spells and troop types are kept regardless of how they advance, so this is a flexible system that encourages experimentation. Most heroes have a single special class though, and it is possible to miss it by following a dead end branch, though you might end up not wanting (or even needing) their special class depending on how you set up the other characters.

So back to combat, leaders have a radius around them in which their generic soldiers will get a stat boost. It is very important to make proper use of this radius, because any soldier that lacks those boosts will be very weak and the AI will target them. This radius usually means the leaders must move and attack first, in order to move the radius to the enemy. If a leader dies, all troops under its command are also destroyed and the game tells you that you do not gain xp for those troops. Thus you are encouraged to kill enemy leaders last to maximize xp gain, and must protect your own leaders. Generally, maintaining formation to keep all troops inside the radius and limiting the number of open tiles a unit can be attacked from (especially the leader) takes precedence over wildly attacking the enemy, and this is good tactics. Especially in late game when leaders tend to be a bit weaker than their troops due to not getting the radius stat boost.

Taking action during battle is very user friendly. You can move and then attack, just attack, just move, cast a spell or rest to recover health and mana (also generic troops that are directly adjacent to their leader will heal at the beginning of the next turn). The game allows you to cancel moves, set AI behaviour for your generic troops (if you do not want to micromanage them, which is great for removing the tedium of moving large distances), and view the area effect of spells before casting. Unfortunately, it does not show enemy movement and attack range, so you will have to learn and memorize that.

There is a nice variety of troop types, which are set up in a kind of rock paper scissors balance. For example, swords beat pikes, which beat horse, which beat swords. Though there are also archers, artillery, flyers, water, mage, holy and a variety of monsters (which can be difficult to figure out how they fit in). Which types you get to use depend on which path you are following, which is one of the best features of the game. Not too many games allow you to go off and join the bad guys, giving an entirely different campaign. Decisions made throughout the game make a branching game that affects what levels you play, characters you have, who you fight and ultimately what ending you get. This gives great replayability, though it is a shame there is no form of newgame+ (though it seems there is a cheat code for scenario select, which amounts to the same thing; I never tried it).

The worst part of the game is the AI, and how predictable and exploitable it is. Enemy units will not attack at all unless they have a significant advantage, which allows you to easily defeat them by forming a line of high defense units that counter them. The enemy completely fails to flank, and often does not focus fire. They also will never attack if their health is lower than a certain number, even if they could end up killing something. This makes the game somewhat easy (as long as you properly protect your heroes). The battles can also be somewhat long and tedious, especially if you want to minimize losses and maximize xp gain.

Excellent combat mechanics, particularly relating to having a mix of special characters and expendable generic troops, and the widely branching story allow this game to shine. Though whether or not you want to experience more than one story path is a different story.

Pro

• Branching class paths for each hero. Stat changes, hireable troop types and spells are clearly shown before confirmation (though only for the current change, you cannot see further ahead)
• Branching story with levels, characters, enemies and endings changing
• Good story and characters
• Mix of heroes and generic soldiers, with no real penalty for death of generics
• Good tactical considerations for battle
• Financial and tactical considerations for type and number of generic soldiers to hire
• Optional AI settings for each hero, which can automate some of the tedium (I wish more games had this!)
• High variety of units
• In some levels, you can issue commands to AI controlled friendly units (mostly applies to units you need to protect, so they do not run off stupidly)
• Some interesting mechanics in levels

Con

• Land units do not get an attack or defense penalty for being in water
• New heroes/units can suddenly spawn on the map without using teleport magic or coming in from the edge
• Enemy characters frequently return for later battles, even when defeated and outright killed. The game distinguishes between teleporting away, fleeing (vanishing), and dying (exploding in a ball of fire), and it is ridiculous how often characters return to fight again after exploding
• Heroes can only hire 1 type of generic troop at a time (unlike the enemy)
• Cannot see movement, ranged attack and spell ranges for enemies
• Enemy AI is not great
• Status effect spells have low success rate. I hate gambling; should be 100% for low duration
• Not all stats of items are displayed