I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 48 was Record of Agarest War. This is a tactical RPG where you utilize a party of heroes to fight off the darkness that is plaguing the world… and a waifu breeding simulator. I have to give full acknowledgement here and admit that I didn’t end up beating this game. The game is set up into 5 generations of the MC’s lineage and I only made it about an hour into the 3rd generation. I still spent 32 hours playing this game, so I think that’s enough to give a review on it… It was looking like my playthrough would have lasted 50 more hours and I just couldn’t submit myself to that.

Graphics/Sound: There are essentially two sets of graphics in this game. The first are the actual gameplay models and game arenas that the characters fight in. All of the characters in the fights are small, cute versions of the characters and I really do not like them. They look about as good as the character models in FF Tactics look and that game was made like 10 years before this. The other uncanny thing about these models is that they are all 2D assets in a 3D space and it looks a little weird/lazy. Outside of the fights, all dialogue is shown in anime slideshows. I don’t understand why they couldn’t have animated the characters… but we get slideshows and they are serviceable I guess. They just look lazy to me. The sound here is actually really good. I enjoy the battle music and the town music and think that it is genuinely a good addition to the game. Another nice thing is that all voice acting is in Japanese. I really appreciate this because I wouldn’t have wanted to have to listen to a person I actually understand saying some of the cringy lines in the script here. (5/10)

Story: Ugh… for a game that spends so much time in dialogue and building up a story, the story here is so bland and generic. I guess I can’t say what the story is like towards the end… and it might get great… but the first two generations have the most cookie cutter fantasy plot I have ever seen. Our MC is the good guy. The lord of his nation is a bad guy and MC needs to rebel in order to defeat him. MC gets many friends along the way. He meets 3 girls that all want to marry him and have his babies because he is sooooo cool and the perfect man that any woman would want. MC eventually beats the bad king but he was being controlled by a mysterious monster and gets a redemption arc in the end. MC beats the mysterious monster. Waifus line up like items in a store and MC chooses which one he wants to make babies with… then we do the whole thing a second time. I am not kidding here! That plot is the exact plotline for the first two generations. The plot is exactly the same except in the second generation you can replace the evil king with evil dukes that are working for the kingdom next door. There is no critical thought here and all the dialogue is just so weird and self serving. I’m not Japanese… but still, I have never met a girl that acts like any of the potential wives in this game… they exist only to marry the MC and I seriously wonder what the two waifus that don’t get chosen are going to do with themselves after the plot. I didn’t just hate this story… I thought it was extremely stupid and wanted me to be stupid in order to follow along with it happily. It was terrible. (2/10)

Gameplay: I am not super well established in the world of tactical RPGs, but I can confidently say that Record of Agarest War is both too simple and waaaay too complex at the same time. I guess I will start with the battles. All characters move at the start of a round of combat instead of each character moving on their turn. Each of the characters have special spaces around them where other characters can stand to synergize. This is actually really cool because all characters that are synergized with each other (which should ideally be your whole party) can act on any character’s turn. This lets you pump out almost all of your attacks at the speed of whoever your fastest character is. Unfortunately, combat is unbelievably slow and you are forced to fight hundreds of battles to get to the end. If you are going to play this game after reading this review (which I don’t know why you would do… I clearly hated it) please turn off the combat animations to at least save yourself some time. It’s so agonizingly slow and you have so, so many battles to fight. Another thing that kills me is that you choose to fight on specific stage layouts and there are very few to choose from… this leads every fight to feel the same. Other tactical RPGs create unique battlefields to keep things interesting, but you are stuck on the same 4 squares the entire time here. It's exhausting… but for however much time you spend in combat, you will be spending just as much in the town powering up your character.

Good god, the town system in this game is the most complex set of menus I have ever attempted to parse through. The first shop is the item shop. You can just spend gold on most items here and it's pretty easy. The second shop is the adventurer’s guild and here you gain titles and spend TP… idk what that stands for. You get some TP from every fight and can use it to buy rare crafting materials or extra skills/items to craft. The final thing you can do at the adventurer’s guild is craft skills for your characters to use in combat. The crafting in this game is mind bogglingly complex. You need to first find a recipe book, then go to the thing you want to make and it will tell you a list of items you need. Then you just press a and you get the skill you wanted. That doesn’t sound so complex… but why is it? The complexity comes from not knowing where the heck you get any of the items. Every time you want to craft something you need to check the item shop, the blacksmith shop, and the adventurer’s guild to see if you can get that item. Furthermore, there are items that you can only get from maxing out the level on other items at the blacksmith shop. You would never know where to get any items if you didn’t look up a guide… but the guides on this game are pretty crap because there isn’t a huge community around it… you are stuck with crappy guides trying to figure out how to make crappy items in a crappy game! (I’m getting worked up as I write this) The next shop is the blacksmith who crafts all the non-skill items in the game and can upgrade any items you have up to level 5 (their max level). This is okay… but suffers from the same crafting complications as above. Next shop is the monster guild. I don’t know what you do here because I never captured any monsters. Next is a fortune teller that essentially does nothing. Next is first aid which revives characters. Finally (at least from where I got to in the game) there is a place where you can resurrect characters from past generations to fight in your party in the current generation. This is pretty cool. I will end on one positive note about the crafting system. Once you have created an item once from crafting, it will forever be put into the item shop and you can thankfully just spend gold on it from here on out.

The gameplay in this game sucked and most of my time was spent just figuring out how to gear my characters up… seriously, I’m talking 6-7 hours of my 32 hour playtime. (2/10)

My experience: It was so annoying, bad, and boring that I couldn’t even beat the game. I suffered 32 hours (more than every other game I have played for this challenge except FF13) and I think that is enough. (1/10)

Overall: This game is a nightmare. The combat is unbelievably boring, the crafting system requires a PHD in order to utilize and the story was made by a 12 year old. I really cannot recommend this to anyone. Fans of TRPGs won’t enjoy this. Anime fans won’t find anything special here. Fans of crappy video games don’t even get anything so bad its good to laugh at here… its just boring. (2/10)

I spent 32 hours, 43 minutes, and 6 seconds playing Record of Agarest War… and didn’t even finish it.

I have spent a total of 494 hours and 40 minutes on the Road to 360 challenge so far.

Next Game: Portal (Actually rolled Orange Box and just choosing this as the game I play for it for now)