RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Long ago, a powerful warrior and grim reaper of sorts by the name of Gig appeared, along with three mighty beings known as World Eaters. Together, they wrought devastation upon the world thanks to their superior power and otherworldly abilities. At last, some hope came when Gig was sealed away within a sword. Of course, there was still the not-so-small problem of the remaining World Eaters. This is where the hero of Soul Nomad and the World Eaters comes in. He or she, depending on the player’s choice, takes up the sword that Gig was sealed in, gaining some of Gig’s powers. However, these borrowed powers come at a price. The more the hero takes advantage of them, the closer Gig will come to being able to take control of their body. Given that the hero’s mission is to hunt down and defeat the remaining World Eaters, all while getting caught up with the motives of various factions, the offer for more power is going to become awfully tempting at times.

Aside from enormous strength, one of Gig’s more useful abilities is the power to dominate others. Those that have been dominated can be linked to a room and summoned in battle. These rooms can hold several warriors each, spread out among the front, middle, and back rows. Since the player only controls the rooms rather than individual warriors, the row a warrior is placed in will determine their actions in battle. A good bit of strategy can go into this once several classes become available, many of which having extremely useful skills that will only become available in certain rows. Though individual warriors cannot be equipped, the rooms themselves can equip special Decors in order to bestow special effects, such as boosting the stats of all of the archers in the room or decreasing damage taken from higher level enemies. Another level of strategy comes when selecting a room’s leader. Not only does a leader receive a portion of the stats from every other warrior in the room, their class will also determine which tactics they can use on the battlefield.

The battlefields themselves vary in size and terrain, the latter of which will effect movement speed and statistical bonuses. Moving around and performing actions will use up a room leader’s stamina, typically making them weaker once the loss progresses beyond a certain point. However, some options will only become available once a certain amount is used up. Items known as Gig Edicts can be used to restore stamina and for a variety of other purposes. The difference between Soul Nomad and most other RPGs is that many of them have unique effects out of battle as well. This gives the hero a number of options when in towns, allowing him to pick fights with civilians, steal from them, or sap some of their power and combine with it.

Though Soul Nomad gives the player a lot of options and unconventional means for gaining money and power, and those systems can be quite fun to play with, the game is somewhat hurt by the lack of a serious need to take advantage of most of them. Enemies typically have very poor AI and are very predictable. As such, many parts of the game become more about overpowering an enemy than thinking up a creative way to outsmart them. Furthermore, most battles have very simple victory conditions, such as defeating all enemies or lasting a certain number of turns. The game’s still enjoyable despite these problems, it just isn’t likely to appeal as much to hardcore strategy fans.

On that note, Soul Nomad‘s difficulty isn’t particularly high. A few strong rooms with a good stock of Gig Edicts can blaze through the game without much effort. It is possible to raise the strength of enemies, but this doesn’t do much of anything for their AI, causing the difficulty to fall again once the hero’s exp levels start catching up.

With all the talk about overpowering enemies and whatnot, it is fortunate that there is a nifty display that shows a room’s overall level of power, or potential as it’s called in Soul Nomad. It’s thanks to displays such as this, alongside useful shortcut keys and the ability to view a map before playing it, that makes the battle interface quite good. The out-of-battle interface, on the other hand, has a much larger range in quality. On the one hand, a new feature that allows brand new characters to start at the same level as the hero, for a cost, is extremely useful at cutting down on senseless grinding. On the other hand, some of the menus seem a bit disorganized and the shop contains a bug that will cause the game to freeze under certain conditions. Perhaps the largest problem is that a room’s equipped Decors vanish after story battles. This can become quite frustrating if many are used since the game not only fails to simply decrease the count of that Decor by one, it also doesn’t remind the player which Decors were equipped. As a result, the player will have to keep track of every single Decor they use and manually go through their entire Decor collection, manually re-equipping each one, one at a time, after every single story battle, a task that can become extremely tedious by the end of the game.

While it gets off to a slow start, Soul Nomad‘s story is one of its strongpoints. The premise of using Gig’s power to hunt down the World Eaters is simple enough, but the cast of characters is interesting and there are several twists and turns in the latter half of the game. Most players should be able to finish the game in a mere twenty to thirty hours, with players who wish to take on some extra challenges likely clocking between thirty and forty, but there is a good bit of replay value to help make up for the short length.

Visually, Soul Nomad is slightly above average. The sprite artwork is nice, as are the backgrounds and the battlefield maps themselves, but they don’t stand out much when compared to other PS2 titles. Even so, the animation is fluid and several abilities, particularly the game’s special combos, look quite nice.

As far as music goes, Soul Nomad once again does a decent job. There’s a pretty good variety of tracks, and this is especially nice when going through numerous inspection battles in a row. The sound effects are also pretty good, and the player is free to select English or Japanese voice acting as well.

The simple AI and victory conditions aren’t likely to appeal much to hardcore strategy fans, but Soul Nomad is still a fairly solid game thanks to some interesting systems and a good storyline.