Grand Kingdom is an upcoming tactical RPG from Spike Chunsoft and Monochrome Corp. and published by NIS America due for release on June 21st for both the Playstation 4 and the PS Vita. Fans of the genre can get an early look at the game by signing up for the official beta which will run from May 3rd through the 9th. We were lucky enough to be able to get an early look at the beta, so let us dive right in.
Grand Kingdom moves like any other tactical RPG, such as the Fire Emblem series. For those that have never played one, you basically move across the map using a grid-based movement system. Each quest must be completed within a certain number of moves. The tutorial quest, for example, must be completed in 250 moves. Along the way you will encounter treasure chests, resources, and enemies. Resources come in the form of crystals, wood, and other items that you could take to a blacksmith in any of the capitals. By taking your resources to a blacksmith, you could create various new items, such as weapons and shields if combined with blueprints, or to upgrade your current ones.
As for enemies, they come in the three different kinds: normal, strong and hidden. The enemies move in a fixed pattern and move in tandem with your troops movement. Hidden enemies are designated by a small dust cloud that appears about every 3 steps. Boss battles can have multiple lines of enemy troops. Once in a battle, the game plays like any other turn-based tactical RPG. You have a set amount of movement you can make and from there you can make your move to either use an attack, heal a party member or drop a healing item. During battles, attacks and healing affect both your party and enemies, so you really need to be careful about when you use certain kinds of attacks or healing your comrades. After each battle, you gain your currency, experience, and recover a small portion of your health. After you gain a level, you gain stat points to level up some of your character’s traits. Each trait has a certain number of slots which, once filled, give you an additional stat point in that particular trait.
For the online portion, once you join the guild, you can take on war contracts for one of four different nations. Once you choose which of the nations you will fight for, you can choose how many wars you will fight for them. From there, you choose one of your troops and go to war. The online battles have two different play styles, the standard or troop detachment. Troop detachment lets you send a troop to war and an A.I. will automatically decide the battle for you. Once you select troop detachment, you can leave your troop and return at a later time to claim any experience and rewards our troop has gained. In the beta version you are limited to 3 battles per day.
The story, at least in the beta, seems almost non-existent. Granted, I did only play through a few story quests, and no doubt the story will pick up in the full retail game, anyone going into the beta looking for story might be a tad disappointed. You do get to see some story sections before and after you choose a quest. You are the leader of a mercenary group, who has gone to war for an unnamed group who ends up surrendering the battle. As your group is deciding to leave, one of the enemy troops invites you to go back with them to join their mercenary guild. From there you are tasked to prove your worth in battle before you are allowed to join. I only played a few story quests so I don’t know how much further the beta gets into it, but the underwhelming writing and voice acting, in my opinion, drags the game down a couple of notches but it is still interesting enough that I’ll check out the full version upon release.
During the cutscenes the character sprites aren’t drawn with the crispness that you would find in other RPGs like Fire Emblem or Persona. To me, they honestly look like they were drawn for a manga and not a video game. While this doesn’t bother me personally, there are graphics snobs that might turn their noses at it. What did kind of bug me though were the sprite animations. During the cutscenes, some of the character sprites move similar to an in game idle animation. The animations looked really sluggish, like the Playstation 4 couldn’t handle it. Small minor nitpick, yes, but when I notice it it does kind of bug me. The quest maps and battles looked amazing, however. Well, as amazing as a 2D anime styled RPG could look. Most of the voices I did find quite underwhelming, although I am pretty sure I heard at least one, maybe two, Danganronpa cast members (which was also by Spike Chunsoft and distributed by NISA and you should totally play them). The music by composer Mitsuhiro Kaneda is fantastic as well. Mitsuhiro Kaneda also previously composed music for Odin Sphere, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, Muramasa: The Demon Blade.
Once you get to the guild base, you can hire troops to command in battle. While there are about 13 or so total classes, the beta only gives you access to 4: Fighter, Hunter, Witch and Medic. Once you pick your class, you can then customize your character with a variety of options from clothing color to hair style to voice. Once you create four characters you can then place them in a troop to take on quests or to war. My only real complaint against this game was the movement system on the map. Being a tactical RPG it does move in on a grid-based plane. The only problem being that it is an isometric grid-based plane, so the directional presses don’t necessarily correspond to which direction you want to go. You have to really remember that up moves you up and right and down moves you down and left, other wise you just end up wasting moves. Aside from this and some of the acting and writing, I found little else to complain about this game.
So that was the Grand Kingdom beta for the Playstation 4. As is, I would give the game a 7/7.5 out of 10, but that could certainly change with the full release. If you would like to try the beta for yourself, you can sign up right here. The beta will run from May 3rd to May 9th with the full retail version being released on June 21st.
