Grim Grimoire
Platform: PS2
In the end, Grimgrimoire is a fairly generic simplified RTS that fails to appeal to very many gamers.
Review by Sirus

Grimgrimoire is a real-time strategy game from the creators of Odin Sphere that moves the RTS genre into a 2D plane and manages to make the controls work pretty well on the PS2 controller. The game starts out with a girl named Lillet Blan who is arriving at the Magic Academy for the first time to study magic. She is making a good amount of progress for the time spent there but on the fifth day of her stay, the Archmage Calvaros is resurrected and kills everyone. Lillet mysteriously survives the attack and wakes up on the night of her arrival. Knowing the impending destruction that awaits her, Lillet sets out to solve the mysteries of the tower and prevent Calvaros’ resurrection. The story could have been great but it fails to avoid the pitfalls that plague stories of time travel.

The story is also poorly presented through extremely short story scenes that rarely give out much information. Even in the end, most of the characters’ motivations are a mystery. The characters felt like they would have been interesting to get to know but simply aren’t developed enough to make up for the problems with the overall story. It also feels like a good half of the story is simply used as an excuse to give you more stages to fight through in the story. The problem with this is that in a game that’s only 12 hours long, you should feel like there is a meaning to every encounter, not that the battles are just there to pad out the length.

The gameplay is a simplified RTS system in which you have to gather resources from resource points and use them to pay for the creation of units and spawn points. The basic resource in Grimgrimoire is mana and the spawn points come in the form of runes. You start each level out with a set number of creatures and runes already summoned but will quickly want to seek out the crystals within the stage to keep your mana from dwindling. There are four schools of magic: alchemy, glamour, necromancy, and sorcery, each with four creatures you can summon.

Thankfully the gameplay is simplified such that you can make the most powerful creature from any given school of magic without creating every one of the weaker creatures first. Runes can be leveled up at the cost of mana to unlock upgrades for your creatures and new abilities to aid them in battle. Each school of magic is strong against one other school and weak against another but there is rarely any reason to not send out your favorite strong unit against the enemy. Victory in the main story missions usually comes from destroying all the enemy’s runes or surviving a set amount of time. Thankfully you can end the timed missions early if you destroy the enemy’s runes early.

There are 25 extra missions that you unlock as you progress through the main story that can be played if you want a little variety or added length to your game. Every level can be played on sweet (very easy), easy, or normal. Beating every level on normal unlocks the hard difficulty mode but for players who don’t like a challenge, the Sweet difficulty mode is nice and easy.

The music in the game is simply beautiful and is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto who did the music for Odin Sphere as well. Sadly, there simply isn’t enough variety for music in the game and there is no vocal track played in the ending credits. American fans of Sakimoto’s work can buy the soundtrack from NIS America’s store at www.rosenqueen.com for 15$. The English voice acting in the game is quite good and complements the graphics nicely. The game also sports a Japanese voice track for purists. The battle voices, while nice at first, get annoying like any other RTS game and there is no option to turn them off, something that is badly needed.

The graphics in Grimgrimoire are a little lower resolution than Odin Sphere before it, (most likely to cut back on slowdown,) but still look great. The sprites in the game’s story sequences are beautiful and show a range of emotions nicely. In the end, Grimgrimoire is a fairly generic simplified RTS that fails to appeal to very many gamers. Hardcore fans of RTS games will likely be put off by the simplified gameplay while gamers who frequently play Japanese RPGs and are looking for a good story will find the story quite lacking. Still, the game doesn’t have any glitches that keep it from being enjoyable and there will likely be some who find themselves enchanted by the gameplay. Grimgrimoire simply is an average RTS that fails to do anything new.

Gameplay: 7/10
Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 7/10
Story: 6/10
Longevity: 7/10
Length: 12 hours for main story
Final Score: 7/10 (an average)