so the short order news is that US retailer HASTINGS is going out of business come October, so every local hastings joint has been slashing prices to absurd degrees. that’s what let me pick up about $80 worth of comics and books this last Thursday for about $20 dollars instead.
NATURAL DOCTRINE is a game by Kadokawa Games. I don’t know who they are and honestly I don’t even really care to research them! They probably publish a bunch of hentai or something. Gross.
NATURAL DOCTRINE is described as a Strategy-RPG based on Natural Selectionl. I don’t know what that means, because the only selecting going on in this game is all of the fucking menus I have to scroll through to do anything.
Screenshots make this game out to be similar to Valkyria Chronicles but it is nowhere near as polished or easy-to-access as that game is. It has origins as a PSVita title, which for some reason makes me think the large amounts of menus and stats and information being presented on the screen is specifically for the type of Neckbeard that bought one of those for Anime Games (its gonna be me)
NATURAL DOCTRINE sort of plays instead like…Yggdra Union, The battles from Valkyrie Profile 2 and uhh I dunno even. Basically, the game presents each of the maps (3D) as a series of squares of different sizes that are either empty, occupied by you, or occupied by the enemy. They come in BLUE and RED varieties. Blue are things your squad can occupy, red is ones the enemy occupies.
The other system at play is the “link” system. When multiple allies are occupying the same or distant squares and attacking enemies in the same formation, they get a “link” bonus based on how they’re positioned relative to the rest of the squad. You can set up a guy all the way at the back of your square, for instance, to attack an enemy soldier all the way at the back of yours. Put another dude or lady up front and they get a silver stream of light connecting them that increases their damage and hit %.
But wait also: The top of the screen lists character initiative, which makes no god damn sense as far as I can puzzle it out. All I know is when initiative comes up, it’s not a turn for the single character listed, but a turn + possible turns of all nearby soldiers. You can postpone soldiers turns too, to save them for later. If you do that and then kill the next enemy before it’s their turn, you get a bonus turn where you can do extra things.
(I have no idea what’s going on here)
IGN and a bunch of other review sites gave the game low marks for being frustratingly and also sometimes impossibly hard apparently: What I’ve read characterizes the game as being completely without worth for anyone who plays videogames that aren’t firmly in the Anime Strategy genre.
Most of this difficulty also apparently comes from needing to balance your characters to fill roles in your party without really knowing what’s coming up ahead in the next map. You can assign skill points between all of the Guys’ you get pretty much freely. If you cock things up at some point you can back out of any mission and re-equip and re-distribute all of yours skills. (pretty nice. A+ )
I’ve yet to put more than about five or six hours into the campaign of this. What’s waiting for me is apparently battles much larger in scale - one of the draws of the game is massive squads of Dudes’ and Guys’ pressing up against eachother in Beefcake Battles.
Really I’m wanting this game to get into the TRASH. There’s not that much story to speak of: there are goblins and grablins and they wanna get all up in your human settlements. You play KNIGHT MERCENARIES (landschnekt!) who’s job it is to get adventuring all up in other peoples grills.
There’s apparently the option to date (!) either a RED WOMAN or a BLUE WOMAN The red woman is really dumb and plays the air-headed little sister role. I will not date her. You can expect BLUE WOMAN GIRLFRIEND TIME to happen in this game at some point unless I get dissuaded by all of the anime bullshit.