Makai Kingdom: Chronicles Of The Sacred Tome Review

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.

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.

The combat system around which most of the game revolves allows as much flexibility as the character creation system. The tactics that are used, the weapons that are employed and the fighters that are brought into the fray on each map are entirely down to the player. As with previous titles, characters and items can be stacked and thrown around in order to access far-flung areas (although, irritatingly, it’s now necessary to manually deselect a character’s held weapon before picking anything up) and chucking items off the edge of the visible map can now reveal hidden areas and enemies. In Makai Kingdom, what you see initially is rarely the totality of what you can do. Buildings from the main hub world can be brought into battle, providing bonuses and a refuge for your fighters, and later maps provide vehicles with which to mix up the action a little. Characters gain weapons experience with use, opening up more impressive attacks and even more strategic options.

In isolation, then, each map or level in Makai Kingdom is an enjoyable and open-ended challenge. It’s perhaps a little overwhelming at first – the lack of predefined characters and the enormous amount of flexibility on offer make this a daunting game for a genre newcomer – but it soon opens up and it’s possible to get very attached to whatever ragtag army the player ends up creating. It’s the overall structure of the game that lets it down a little, though. The individual levels are, for the most part, unconnected to the story, with the inter-level cut-scenes merely providing a reason to attack yet another random group of enemies on yet another semi-random map. And the very nature of the game means that repetition plays a big part. Even early on, it’s often necessary to play and replay the same levels in order to power up individual characters, and as the game progresses it’s often necessary to go back, create new level 1 characters, and play through the opening sections yet again in order to maintain a strong and diverse fighting force.

Ultimately, Makai Kingdom is more a game about numbers than it is about pure strategy. There’s nothing here that compares to something like, say, Advance Wars, where set challenges have to be overcome with limited resources in a skilful manner. In Makai Kingdom, it’s always up to the player how each level is tackled, and the best way is usually to chuck as many high-level characters at the level as possible. The heart of the game revolves around how those characters act and the methods used to level them up, and that process can, at times, be something of a repetitive grind. Obsessive-compulsives will love this, and there’s real satisfaction to be gained in developing a powerful army entirely to your own specifications – but those looking for a more focussed challenge may find themselves floundering at times.

It was always like this, of course. Disgaea, Phantom Brave and La Pucelle: Tactics all had exactly the same premise, and it’s this that proves to be Makai Kingdom’s biggest problem. Although fun, deep and extremely open-ended, it is largely the same as its three predecessors – while at the same time not being quite as funny or as accessible as Disgaea and not quite as inventive as Phantom Brave. Character sprites, menus and even loading screens have been lifted wholesale from previous titles and the whole thing has the faint whiff of complacency. It’s a game aimed firmly at an existing fan base, which is fair enough – but whether someone who’s ploughed three hundred hours or more into Nippon Ichi’s previous titles will have the will or the mental stamina to do it all over again remains to be seen.

There’s no doubt that Makai Kingdom is a good game, maybe even a great one, although undeniably niche in its appeal. If you’re unable to find a copy of Disgaea, or have already wrung every last ounce of fun out of Nippon Ichi’s previous games, then there’s a lot of fun to be had here. However, Disgaea is still the best game in the series, and there’s surely a limit to how often the same basic concepts and character sprites can be recycled. Makai Kingdom is a fine game, but it’s also something of an exercise in treading water, and as the fourth largely-identical game in a row it’s far from an essential purchase.