Reviews  |  DS

Itsuwari no Rondo

By Alex Kierkegaard / April 4, 2008

Note that Itsuwari no Rondo is not an RPG -- it is a turn-based strategy game. If this statement sounds weird to you, you need to read this and this asap.

Itsuwari no Rondo ("Rondo of Lies") is the first game by Osaka-based developer Fun Unit. It's also the best SRPG on the DS so far (and by a wide margin), and one of the best such games to come out in years. In many ways a Fire Emblem rip-off, Itsuwari adds so many new ideas to the formula that calling it a "rip-off" would simply be uncalled for. Clearly, the guys at Fun Unit were fans of Fire Emblem (and who isn't?), and clearly they were inspired by it to go out and make something special.

You know the game's going to be special from the very first moments of the first mission, which sees Prince Serdic and his two most trusted warriors attempting to escape from the midst of an invading army. What other SRPG has you outnumbered and outgunned ten to one from the very beginning? -- not to mention serves you up a plot that's at least mildly intriguing (the lead character is not in fact Prince Serdic, but his body double who assumed the prince's identity upon his death (or his apparent death), and in order to save the kingdom must deceive all of the prince's most trusted friends and allies -- hence, the game's title).

But Itsuwari's complete lack of handholding and refreshingly original plot (with two branching paths and four endings, no less), which in other SRPGs would be reasons enough for champagne-popping and celebrations, are not even its best aspects. What left me dumbstruck was the so-called Route Maneuver System, which takes your standard, overly-simplistic SRPG battle mechanics and turns them into an intricate puzzle game. In Itsuwari, moving and attacking are fused together as you pick carefully-considered routes for your warriors, who must pass right through enemy units in order to attack them. A mounted unit, for example, can cut through 6+ enemies in a single turn if they are close enough, while also passing over friendly units in order to gain temporary power boosts. This conceptually simple system makes a huge difference in the way battles are played out. It greatly increases your movement possibilities (since enemy-occupied squares are no longer off-limits, and since engagements are not limited to single fronts, but end up all over the place), and finally injects a dose of more serious tactical thinking to a genre that has always being begging for it.

Because you see the problem with SRPGs has always been that, due to the very small numbers of units engaged per battle, any kind of elaborate battle tactics are impossible. As long as you keep fighters at the front and spellcasters at the back you are more or less guaranteed to prevail, and moreover that's about all you can do. But following this tactic here will get you nowhere, because your enemies will pass right through your warriors and simply cut down your hapless spellcasters (perhaps even all of them in one go, if they are standing close enough). Keeping your units in a neat bunch is therefore suicidal -- the key to success is anticipating your enemy's moves and re-positioning your units on the fly, oftentimes in the weirdest, most unnatural configurations, so as to open up opportunities for big chains on your side, while limiting those of your opponent's. Slugging it out will just not work here; smartly dancing between your enemies is what this game is all about.

Moreover, much like in Chess, the more turns ahead you can plan for the more effective each of your moves will be, and the quicker you will clear each map, while minimizing your losses and at the end earning additional gold and items. When you add in the aforementioned power boosts that your units can gain by passing over friendly units right before attacking, and all the customization options for each unit (skills, spells, items and the like, which can be thoughtfully picked so as to underpin specific strategies), not to mention random counter-attacking and blocking from your enemies, which stop your units mid-way through a pass (and usually in the worst imaginable positions), you begin to see that the possibilities for different tactics in each map are really countless, despite the small size of the maps and the relatively small numbers of units taking part in each engagement.

Now I admit this "pass-through" system has no basis in reality (I mean YOU try "passing through" a line of fully decked-out armored knights and see what happens), but, hey, it's different, extremely fun, and above all challenging, so I am not complaining. It kinda reminds me of the unnatural, artificially complex scoring systems of some modern shooters such as Espgaluda. But there is good artificial complexity (as in Espgaluda), and there is bad artificial complexity (as in, say, Mushihime-sama -- or even ASH for that matter), and Itsuwari's is definitely in the good camp. I mean I wouldn't want all new strategy games suddenly begin employing bizarre, unnatural battle systems, but one or two of them on occasion are very much welcome.

But there's even more unnaturalness in Itsuwari's rules. The game has some sort of difficulty-adjusting system that's somehow balanced right in the middle of genius and mindless grinding. Basically, if at some point during a battle you suddenly realize there's no way you can win, you have the option to restart from the beginning while keeping all experience points so far acquired, and while all items you may have used up are returned to you. So every time you fail to clear a map and start over, the battle becomes a little bit easier. Even completely brain-dead players should then in theory be able to clear the most difficult maps, since they can keep replaying them until their characters are way ahead in terms of level compared to their enemies. In fact, the game's seemingly impossible opening battle can actually be won in this way, and I know people who have had the patience to do this, and in the process acquire some of the most powerful items in the game.

Now players are bound to call this system "grinding", but it is not quite, because it doesn't allow you to go back and replay cleared battles. Couple this with the fact that there's no quick-saving allowed, and you simply have a robust system in place which is only there to allow the less strategically-inclined players to advance further in the game than they otherwise would have. It can be exploited if you have the mule-like patience required (see: the players who managed to kill everyone in the opening battle), but there's no reward for it, because if you can see that you can already clear a battle, why waste your time restarting it? It's not as in, say, many JRPGs, where grinding is practically required to move forward. Just simply do your best in each battle, and when you fail just know that your next attempt will be a tiny wheeny bit easier -- and that's all. It's a straight-forward, honest attempt by the designers to accommodate the less intelligent player, and though I personally have no need for it, I can understand and respect the designers' intention, though I still have to subtract one star from my rating partly because of it (any kind of intentionally placed "grinding" in a videogame, however benign and well-intentioned, means that the game has not been properly balanced. Itsuwari is quite well balanced, but not as much as it would have been if the designers could not count on the "grinding" for the player to fall back on whenever he gets stuck. Selectable difficulty levels would have been the way to go here, but they, of course, would have required even more balancing, by virtue of there being more of them.)

Itsuwari's other flaw (and the other part of the reason for the missing star) is that, as in many similar games, dead characters do not die -- they are simply considered "injured" for the next battle, meaning there are some penalties, which is a compromise, I guess. Granted, the nature of the pass-through system is such that character deaths are very common (a single misstep can see half your party decimated), but then this could have been balanced out by strengthening the player's hand in a number of ways too elementary for me to go into. Bottom line is there's no excuse for immortal characters, and this, coupled with the -- admittedly optional -- difficulty-adjusting system (you COULD choose to restart battles without keeping the XP, but who are we kidding), are the two aspects that keep this game from instant-classic status.

There are other minor issues too, such as uneven difficulty throughout the campaign, and lack of an option to turn off battle animations (which really get on your nerves in the longer battles). But Itsuwari gets so many things right, and has so many fresh ideas, that these issues are easy enough to forget and to forgive. Another cool idea, for example, is that idle characters can be sent on a number of errands while you are fighting the next battle, ranging from training exercises, to adventuring quests, to even shopping trips (a realistic feature that adds to the difficulty and that was long overdue in this kind of game), all of which require some thought on your part in deciding which person to send so as to get the best results (gold, items, experience points, etc.) I mean, again, this is a compromise feature. Ideally, you should be able to bring along all your characters in a battle, but if some of them absolutely HAVE to stay behind, then at least it's better if they are doing something useful. The downside here is that you end up spending about as much time navigating menus in-between missions as on the actual missions, which makes the game feel a lot slower than a Fire Emblem, and therefore less enjoyable.

Or take the Leading Character system (called "Momentum Counter" in the English versions), another outrageously innovative system according to which characters which, among other things, defeat more enemies in a battle become more "prominent" on the battlefield, with most enemies actively seeking them out. This is another slightly unnatural system (I mean most sane people would flee from the most killerific warrior on the battlefield, not become attracted to him for christsake), but still an interesting one. And the higher your LC counter the more experience and OverBreak points you gain (OverBreaks are specials), which means it acts sort of as a personal rank control measure for each character, as you try to balance your desire for more exp. and OB meter, with your desire, well, to keep your most powerful characters alive. (Only the most hardcore STG fans will have any clue of what I am talking about here when I refer to "rank control". Oh well. I guess I should write a "rank" article and link it from this review. Watch this space!) And it goes the other way too: with appropriate item and skill-usage certain characters can have their LC lowered to such a degree that they effectively turn into stealth warriors.

On the downside, exploiting all these elaborate systems to the full is not necessary for completion. You dabble with them or whatnot, but as long as you master the pass-through mechanic and don't mind replaying a few missions a few times, you'll blaze through the game in a few days. But this last point is a criticism of all SRPGs, really. They are shallow games when it comes down to it, strategy "mini-games" I like to call them, which is why throwing so many elaborate systems in one of them as Fun Unit did is not a very good idea -- at least if you are not prepared to expand the scope to match.

Fun Unit's first videogame is still one of the most interesting SRPGs I've ever played. It's an overly complex Fire Emblem with a ton of ingenious ideas thrown in, not all of which work all the time, some of them even clashing, but all of them worth exploring and experiencing. It even makes great use of the DS, with sharp, lively 2D graphics (though admittedly sprite work and animation are not to the level of the SFC or GBA Fire Emblems... the super deformed look definitely does NOT fit this kind of setting), perfect screen content placement, and a combination of d-pad/stylus controls (d-pad scrolls the screen while stylus moves units) that almost makes the game play as smoothly as if you were using a mouse and decent-sized screen. Given that the small-scale strategy genre is the one the DS is most suitable for, it was a shame it had no such great game -- until now.

Itsuwari no Rondo will be released in North America on April 15 as Rondo of Swords, a title which completely misses the point of the original one. But whatever -- beggars can't be choosers. No word yet of an EU release.