Makai Kingdom Review

This will look familiar to fans of previous Nippon Ichi titles

Conventional wisdom goes something like this. EA is bad, because it releases annual updates to mass-market games that introduce a bare minimum of new features for a full-price price tag. Real gamers don't like big, bad EA. Nippon Ichi, meanwhile, is good, because it makes quirky Japanese strategy RPGs that appeal to a small audience of hardcore stat-heads and sell about a hundred copies apiece. Real gamers love Nippon Ichi.

The tide, however, is turning. EA might well still be excreting cynical sports cash-ins at a prodigious rate but nowadays it's also publishing a range of popular and critically acclaimed games such as the Burnout series and Battlefield 2. Nippon Ichi, meanwhile, is treading water in a major way. The studio's latest release, Makai Kingdom: Chronicles of the Sacred Tome, may well be as quirky, unusual, compulsive and deep as its previous three titles, but there's one problem. It also happens to be near-identical.

What we have, then, will be very familiar to anyone who's played any of the company's previous games. The obligatory wacky plot revisits the zany Netherwold of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, telling a crazy story of half-baked overlords, mad demons and manipulative angels. Lord Zetta, a demonic ruler so power-crazed yet so dim-witted that he's managed to trap his own soul within an ancient book, is forced to fight his way through a series of diverse Netherworlds in order to regain his kingdom and, by extension, his original body. Unable to directly influence proceedings (being, after all, a talking book), Zetta must assemble a ragtag crowd of adventurers and assistants to do his bidding, while fighting off the attentions of a whole host of rivals and old enemies keen to take the opportunity to get one over on the humbled and relatively powerless overlord.

From then on we're back in isometric strategy land. For the most part, Makai Kingdom plays like a straight cross between Disgaea and Phantom Brave, taking the best elements of each while mixing in a few new surprises of its own. The game plays out on a series of maps and levels - some predefined, some randomly-generated - and continued success powers up your characters and advances the storyline.

The game's visuals are rather PS1 in nature

Inevitably, everything is customisable down to the last degree. Characters are created by fusing souls with random items scattered around the game world, with each item lending different traits to the resulting character. Although a variety of character classes are available from the off, defeating creatures in battle allows you to then create characters of the same type or species, and the more you defeat, the more proficient your creations will be. The precise makeup of the team with which the game is played - down to number of characters, classes, stats, items and skills - is entirely down to the player. If you want a traditional RPG mix of fighters, wizards and healers, then that's fair enough - but if you'd rather have a small army of killer carrots armed with pistols, then that's perfectly achievable too. It's a deep and satisfying system, and you'll find yourself returning to the character creation screen time and again throughout this very long game in order to play with new combinations or beef up your existing roster of misfits.

Battles themselves use Phantom Brave's gridless system rather than Disgaea's rigidly-defined checkerboard. Although this allows plenty of flexibility with regard to spell effects and area attacks, it can initially prove very confusing. It's possible to cram a lot of characters into a very small space and the resulting confusion often leads to the wrong character being selected either for action or as a target. Throw in Makai Kingdom's vertiginous walls and unmanoeuvrable camera and it often feels like the player is fighting against the game simply in order to perform basic tasks like moving around. Disgaea's grid, though comparatively limited, was undeniably more accessible. Ease of control is not helped by the graphics, which are, quite frankly, appalling: blocky, poorly-animated PS1-style sprites on a flat polygonal landscape blur all too easily into a pixelated mess that the camera is quite unable to penetrate. Cut-scenes, featuring the kind of giant low-res sprites last seen in early 90s beat 'em ups, aren't much easier on the eye but at least they don't actively hinder the gameplay. Makai Kingdom's characters have bags of charm and the story is generally witty at times, but these self-imposed technical limitations let the game down badly.