SRPGs own your soul.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions comes out next week. For the uninitiated, shame on you. This is, perhaps, the best Strategy RPG ever created. Definitely in the top two. The new psp port comes packed to the gills (!!!) with new job classes (Dark Knight and Onion Knight), new cutscenes with voices exclusive to English Localization, and, most importantly, a new translation. That's right, lines like "Surrender now or die in obscurity" are no more. Instead the game reads much like a George RR Martin book (go read, now.) Complete with calling people "ser".

In the interim, I've been playing Crisis Core and Jeanne D' Arc. I got to Nibleheim in Crisis Core, which was just all types of awesome. Although Tifa's skirt is a lot lower than I ever remember seeing it. At about 20 hours, I've completed 31% of the missions. I probably won't try to get all of them as I don't want to turn around and do it again when I play it in English. Sephiroth still wins you and seeing Cloud as a little noob SOLDIER is hilarious.

Jeanne D' Arc is a really solid title from developers level 5. It takes the historic figure in Ms. D' Arc and turns it into a fantasy SRPG. I'm not familiar with the actual history and honestly couldn't care less how accurate this game is to it. The gameplay is great. Unlike a lot of other SRPGS, and maybe it's just me here, the game really emphasizes movement and order thanks to too systems inherent to the game: The "Burning Strike" and some guard thing that I forget the name of at the moment, haha.

The Burning Strike (Screens from IGN and also, apparently, retranslated in the final version).











This little burning thing appears behind the enemy when you attack them. A person standing in the aura will receive a major attack bonus on his or her next strike. Planning out your attacks and the order in which you have your characters go becomes a little bit more important because of this. Maybe your little thief, Colet, could use the exp. boost from killing this enemy (being so damn weak and all), so have Jeanne attack, making the enemy turn around and have Colet sneak up inside the circle for the attack boost from behind. It's a very little thing, but it adds a lot to the overall gameplay.

UNIFIED GUARD! Ha, I just remembered, just now. This happens when you have your characters grouped together. It gives everybody a defense boost, which is really useful for keeping weaker characters alive.

And, as with most level 5 games, there is a really deep skill creating system. Your characters, instead of having set classes, get to equip Skill Stones. These include magic, special attacks, and stat augments. Later in the game you'll acquire the ability to combine these stones to create even more awesomer skills (complete with a cameo from the Frog that did much the same thing in Rogue Galaxy). It's fun to combine skills only to see that you won't be able to use the damn thing for 10 more levels.

And now to continue waiting for FFT. 8 days.