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Another strikingly good strategy game from Nippon Ichi.
Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea received very high scores, including a 9.4 overall from myself. Nippon Ichi has dropped Atlus as its publisher, choosing instead startup publisher Mastiff Games. Disgaeas’s great gameplay is present in La Pucelle, although the game still won’t win any “Best Graphics” awards.
La Pucelle features a rather typical story and instead chooses to develop the characters more strongly than one would expect. Here we control Prier, Culotte (Prier’s little brother), and Alouette, their babysitter. They are all part of a demon-hunting team, La Pucelle. It’s up to you to catch all of the demons in the world and make sure there is nothing going wrong inside the Church.
The battle system in La Pucelle is rather standard but there are enough twists to keep it fresh. As you travel around the game you will encounter portals that release dark energy, which mean you’ll have more enemies to fight. If you wish, you can “purify” these portals to have the energy poured at your enemies instead of your team, aiding your offensive. You can also purify enemies, which you can defeat and have join your side to build a larger clan. Purifying also spreads to the experience system which rewards you with equipment upgrades for purifying enemies.
La Pucelle is quite a large game. The box art boasts over 120 hours, but that is the absolute maximum if you complete all of the side quests, which are optional. Even if you don’t dig side-quests the game still has a lot of longevity with multiple endings, a monster training mode and a lengthy tutorial.
Although La Pucelle is being released after Disgaea here in the States, it was actually released a year before Disgaea in Japan. Because of this La Pucelle is much like Disgaea’s visuals. The characters are 2D sprites placed on top of basic 3D backgrounds. Nonetheless, the game’s art style is fitting and does distract from the technical limitations. As a whole, the presentation is improved from Disgaea thanks to the better, more detailed art.
The game’s audio is appropriate and fits with the demon-searching storyline, while the sound effects are just average. The English voices are done very well; Mastiff Games did an excellent job of localizing the game. If you’re really hardcore, you can play the game with the Japanese voices.
Fans of Nippon Ichi are surely having a great time. Disgaea was great, and La Pucelle Tactics is similarly an enjoyable experience. With Phantom Brave, also from them, being released later this year, who said the tactical RPG genre had no life left in it? -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- May 26, 2004
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