This is some really dope cover art
Jeanne D'Arc is a tactical RPG developed by Level-5 and released for the PSP. They are well known as a developer of some popular RPGs such as Ni No Kuni, Yo-Kai Watch as well as the Professor Layton series, but this is the first game of theirs that I have played, aside from a rental of Dark Cloud a very long time ago.
This also marks the 25th game completion of the year for me, meaning that I have now completed one of my gaming goals for the year! To review, here are the goals, and my progress thus far. This is entirely self-serving, although my faithful reader may find this instructive as I head into the home stretch for 2019.
1. Clear 25 unbeaten games-Done!
2. Clear out more unbeaten games than I buy new games for my collection-not including Humble Bundles-Gulp. I've bought 43 new physical games this year. I think I'm toast on this one thanks to a handful of incredible local pickups. I don't really regret failing at this one.
3. Spend more time revisiting some old favorites just because I'm feeling like it-I replayed Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Country 2, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, DuckTales and Super Mario RPG, which was kind of like a replay, given that I had only beaten it before with save states. I'll also play Super Mario World through again before the year is up, and probably will also run through Punch-Out!! just to keep up my Tyson beating skills. I'll call this one done with plenty to spare.
4. One of the 25 unbeaten games must include Bahamut Lagoon, and another must be Secret of Mana-I have high hopes for this one, but have to confess that it is unfinished at the moment.
5. Play more new (defined as being played on a system capable of outputting in HD without modifications) games-By my definition, I'm doing ok. I've finished 5 games that were not ports on an HD system, and also finished 5 games on the 3DS, which is close enough. Mission accomplished.
6. Spend some time playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn-whether I beat the main campaign or not-Complete! I played it for two stretches during free weekends, and even subscribed for a month!
7. Feel free to dump egregiously bad games and review them without finishing them if I feel like it-The only egregiously bad game I've completed and reviewed for this year has been Super Star Wars, but I genuinely wanted to finish that one. I did abandon a terrible game (TaleSpin, for the NES), but didn't review it. So I'll say mission accomplished?
Anyway, back to Jeanne D'Arc. The game loosely, and in some places very loosely, follows the story of Joan of Arc and her attempt to liberate her people from English conquerors. The basic beats of the Joan of Arc storyline are essentially followed, as far as I can tell, but there's a huge plot twist in the middle based on Joan of Arc urban legends, and there's plenty of fantasy elements liberally spread throughout the story. I don't remember hearing about La Hire, the half-man half-lion friend of Joan of Arc, in any history classes. Anyway, I digress. The story is quite delightful, as the mix of historical and fantastical elements is a new take I hadn't seen in an RPG before. It's creative, and it engaged me throughout.
The gameplay is more similar to, Final Fantasy Tactics than it is to Fire Emblem, in that you are able to use a broader mix of abilities and with more customization options than in Fire Emblem. All of the action also takes place on the board itself, rather than in cutaway shots like in Fire Emblem. There's plenty of original stuff here that separates it from its other tactical RPG cousins, and makes it well worth playing around with. The game adds in a similar element to Fire Emblem in that your characters will have a unified guard if they are standing next to fellow teammates, but iterates it by increasing this bonus for every nearby teammate. This creates an interesting set of choices for you, as you have to decide, given your opponents' skills, how to lay out your team. Facing a team with strong area of effect damage, for example, you might want to split your team up and face higher damage to a single team member to avoid spreading that damage across more targets.
There's also a wonderful new mechanic called "burning aura", which leaves an aura behind an enemy when you attack them. If you place a character within this aura and attack, their damage and accuracy will be boosted. This creates all kinds of strategic choices for your team, in which you will need to try to create and utilize the maximum number of auras each turn to put out the most damage, while also not breaking your unified guard position to mitigate damage from counter-attacks. I would have loved it if they had made it so that your enemies could use unused burning auras you had created, as well as your opponents being able to create burning auras for themselves, which would have made defending these zones a critical part of combat, but Level-5 didn't go to this level. Combat was really good, so it's hard to complain too much, but I do think that would have put this over the top for me as a combat system.
Magic is where the game is the weakest, as magic will always hit your foe. It also tends to underwhelm in terms of damage in comparison to physical attacks, which suggests to me that they found balancing various character types to be a challenge. The coolest thing about the magic system in the game was that the area of effect spells didn't affect the exact same area all the time, as in Final Fantasy Tactics, but each had their own individual area depending on the spell. So, a spell like Cyclone damages all foes in an "s" shape, while Blizzard damages all foes in an "x" shape. Depending on the setup of your foes, thus, you may be able to hit more enemies with a give spell than another. The time when this is the most interesting from a strategic standpoint is when you are facing large enemies that occupy multiple spaces on the board. In this scenario, a single spell could hit a single enemy multiple times, with damage being maximized for spells that are able to cover several tiles worth of the enemy.
The music was pretty good. There's nothing particularly special here, but there are plenty of good tracks to be had.
I usually don't like games that look like this, with a chibi style of presentation to the characters, but I have to admit that I found it charming in this case. It's probably overstating it to call these characters chibi, but that may be why I like it so much. They have a '90s anime feel to them that I definitely don't hate.
Speaking of anime, there are real animated cutscenes in this game! And no, it's not like other games with "animated cutscenes" that have one long cutscene in the beginning and almost none for the rest of the game *cough Xenogears cough*. This one actually has somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes worth of cutscenes, if my mental math is right. That's a significant undertaking for a company like this, although the cutscenes were probably average at best in terms of quality.
The voice acting in this game has me a bit conflicted. The actors and actresses do a good job with pronouncing the French names, but every character is speaking English in a French accent. We know full well that we are dealing with French characters, so it just seems weird to have people speaking English with French accents. Would any game localized to North America, for example, do the same with Chinese actors in China presumably speaking Chinese to each other? With that being said, the vocal performances are good, I just question the decision to have them use the French accents. Either have them speak French with subtitles, or just speak ordinary English, or have them speak French when they're speaking to the French characters and English with a French accent when speaking to the English characters. I think it would be reasonable to think that some of the characters, historically speaking, would have been able to speak some English. But again, this is a story featuring some pretty bizarre takes on history, so I might not have too much of a leg to stand on here.
The character building was ok, but a bit shallow. Each character was locked into their role, with little to change about them other than their equipment and their skills. I liked the leveling system, which gave huge bonuses to characters attacking higher level enemies. This made it so that you could easily catch-up with a character if you hadn't used them in a while and decided to add them back to your team.
Jeanne d'Arc is very good, and is an excellent addition to one of my favorite genres of games. There are some things here that aren't ideal, and it definitely doesn't reach up to the level of a Final Fantasy Tactics Advance or a Fire Emblem, but this has a lot of personality that separates it from the rest of the imitators, and I really enjoyed it. I'll give it a 8.9/10.
Up next on the handheld version of What I'm Playing is a little title I should be done with my the end of the week, if my calculations are right. I've included a little teaser below:
-TRO
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