So, aside from confused premature gushing about Riviera: the Promised the Land and Yggdra Union, which I later decided I loathed with a burning passion, then even more confused rambling about Knights in the Nightmare, a game that had me ‘on the fence’ so long that I never got around to actually reviewing it, I thought it’d be a good time to drop everything and ramble about the company Sting. Or at least the three currently-existing Dept. Heaven titles, since I passed on Hexyz Force.

Sting is the company behind all these games, placing them within the same universe, a.k.a. the “Dept. Heaven” universe. Dept. Heaven seems to be a universe of perpetual pre-teens in elaborate costumes, and the recurring themes are misplaced Norse mythology and a seeming fetish for breakable weapons. The universe includes a demon world/plane, a mortal world, and a holy world, with a couple others thrown in as needed.

The key thing to remember about Sting games, is they just can’t be ‘normal.’ On one hand, I really applaud that they don’t just churn out game after game using the same engine and assets, but on the other, that means each of their games has a pretty harsh learning curve. In fact, it seems like with each consecutive game, they’re actively trying to make shit harder on the player by overwhelming them with unfamiliar mechanics. Oh, and each game gets progressively more depressing, too. It’s an odd progression, but I guess if Knights in the Nightmare can make me forget to eat than it’s doing its job. Its horrible, prickish job. Oh yeah, they also have a disturbing passion for flooding the screen with text- borderline-sensical garbage text with attack names, random quotes and so on. Take a battle screen in Yggdra Union for example- lines of ten soldiers battle it out. The setup for the battle screen includes an ‘aggression’ meter marked PASSIVE/ AGRESSIVE on the ends, next to which is the Tactic Card you played that turn (with its name below it), large numbers showing the number of surviving squad members, a row of stars, an icon of what weapon is being used, and occasionally the warring characters shout at each other in comic book style word bubbles. When you’re charged for a special attack, you get someone yelling BREAK OUT! while the entire screen is domininated by a big, spinning card, the name of the card, the attack the card performs, an italic subtitle about the card, the character portrait at the bottom repeats the italicized incantation above, and finally, in fine print below the attack name, it says “…will give us the ______!” It’s kind of a weird style choice, though I think I might prefer the screen flooding with text to the Knights in the Nightmare approach which includes about ten voice overs at once. “THE LANCE ACTIVATI HOPE THIS WORKS!”

Actually even Riviera at least had them shout attack names. Why so redundant?

Riviera, which kicked off the series, though apparently not chronologically, you see, is the closest to a standard RPG as they’ve gotten, excluding Hexyz Force, which isn’t part of the series proper and was made by a different team anyway. In it, we get a plucky hero, a stoic but largely absent mentor who bites it (tragically), and a cast of girls rejected from dating-sim land and forced to learn useful weapon based skills. There’s a lot of signature dark, elaborate imagery, and a few twists in there toward the end, but ultimately Ein/Ecthel gets a happy ending, and presumably laid by one of several color coded females, or possibly his cat.

(Not a joke.)

Riviera contributed to the JRPG format mostly by tearing massive chunks off of it. Random encounters are replaced by fixed encounters, free roaming is done away with as you select one of four directions to move to the next screen, and you press A to toggle between LOOK and MOVE modes to see what parts of your surroundings are interactive. It’s sort of a mix between a classic adventure game and a console (well, portable) RPG, and while it feels bizarre and stiff to begin with, after a couple hours it switches to merely stiff. That said, considering you have no control over where you walk, watching your sprite walk offscreen leisurely is pretty annoying while backtracking or proceeding across segments with nothing of interest in them. Still, it was a nice change of pace at the time from the countless Playstation RPG’s where I kept running around bumping into pre-rendered doors, waiting for one to open, or navigating HORRIBLE switch puzzles. There are also lots of unique encounters and scenes that help flesh out the characters (slash) contribute ‘points’ to what girl likes you best.

The battle system is very strategic, combining limited-use items with a super gauge system straight out of Street Fighter Alpha. You can store up to three ‘levels’ on the gauge, and each weapon has a masterable Skill that consumes one to three levels, then there are Execution Skills that are ungodly powerful but shatter the gauge for the rest of the fight. Each turn carries a sense of weight to it, since your resources are constantly changing- do you use your good weapon this turn to kill off an enemy? Do you expend a healing potion to bolster yourself, let the enemy’s Rage meter decrease, and build your own gauge so you can use a stronger Skill next turn? It works out pretty nicely. The only hitch is that to learn new skills, the game LITERALLY makes you stop in your tracks and fight practice fights until you master everything. Basically, you have to use a weapon so many times to learn a skill off it.

Next came Yggdra Union, the story of a fugitive princess on a quest to reclaim her kingdom from the EVIL EMPIRE. It really does not make the best first impression, since the map sprites- even on PSP look like 8 bit graphics, clashing with the detailed portrait and sprite art that appear in battle. Basically, the whole point of the game is positioning your units for ultimate combo-ability, since you only get one attack per turn. There’s also a rock paper scissors mechanic going on which is a little thrown off by the addition of ‘Gun’ and ‘Folding Chair,’ essentially. In spite of its limitations, the game is pretty addicting, even though after a while the GBA version pissed me off bad enough to make me sell it off. I gave it another shot on PSP, after hearing that the play had been rebalanced, and it is a bit more forgiving in that if you run out of cards/die you restart the map with the levels you gained during the battle, which is extra helpful considering things get a lot easier when you know where the next wave of enemies is gonna come from (Being under a turn limit and all, you can lose pretty damn easily if you have to get someone all the way across a map.)

Yggdra begins the trend of making the proceedings relentlessly depressing, though. Once you’re on Empire territory fighting weak local militias with your overleveled band of warriors, and all the towns are full of people begging you not to slaughter them, all the missions begin adding a question mark to your typical JUSTICE TRIUMPHED victory screen, and in the end the whole Holy Sword thing turns out to be pretty sinister. But that’s child’s play compared to:

Knights in the Nightmare.

I spent a looooong time just figuring out how the hell to play this game, and I probably would have skipped it entirely if not for a friend’s hands-on recommendation. Damned if this isn’t the Stingiest of Sting games out so far. Basically, you’re playing a sort of real time Tactics style game, where you have a ‘timer’ representing your energy, and you move the cursor over the ghosts of fallen knights to make them attack for you, holding the button down for so long to make them power up and let loose with an attack. Now, while you do all this, you have to make sure that the enemy projectiles don’t hit the cursor (which is the ghost of the dead king, a.k.a. The Wisp) which will take away more of your Time. Note that the fights aren’t actually timed, for all this time talk. It’s more like a pool of charging time, kind of like a pre-paid cell phone. OF THE DEAD.

The thing about Knights, other than a learning curve that made when I finally ‘got it’ feel like I’d been at last freed from the constraints of sane thought, is that it’s also their darkest game, in spite of being delivered with the same cutesy art as their other games. The plot involves a ransacked kingdom, a backstabbing witch, and the melodramatic slaying of anyone with a dialogue portrait. Whereas Yggdra Union had some ‘ambiguous morality moments’ toward the end, Knights makes a point of guilt tripping you after nearly every battle, and oh, by the way, you killed your son way back in an early chapter, and the next battle is going to be against the daughter of the seemingly evil cardinal who was actually kind of sympathetic. You can’t really change anything, you have to murder her to advance. Just thought I’d let you know.

But for all the weird choices and overall moodiness of the game, it’s oddly addictive. In spite of all the RPG trappings, it’s action-packed and feels a little like what would happen if they tried to make an arcade edition of Final Fantasy Tactics or something. You can play quickie battles for experience and items you can cash in back in the main game, which offsets that breakable weapons problem a bit and lets you get a better feel for the game. It was with KitN’s utter… INSANITY that I had kind of an epiphany about video games… sometimes it’s the same kind of crap as you deal with in chess or other non video games. You just gotta play by their rules. So it might be a bit annoying that KitN forces you to play without using your hands, metaphorically, and Fencers can only move up or left, but that’s just part of the challenge.