So GRIMOIRE is out. It's a little late, since it was delayed from its original August 1 release date, which was delayed from its June release date, which was delayed from its original March 2013 release date, which was delayed from its 2005 release date, which was delayed from its 2000 release date, which was delayed from its 1997 release date. So it's been a long time coming! In the meantime, Cleve "Neanderthal" Blakemore has espoused his opinions on many things, like game design and black people and the fact that satanists designed television to make women to go crazy and eat Ben and Jerrys Ice Cream and this causes men to become stupid because they can't have sex with women who are eating ice cream so much. It's definitely a real problem, which is explained on his blog here
http://vault-co.blogspot.com/2007/06/television-is-designed-to-kill.html . Fortunately men playing videogames for 600 hours doesn't affect women or themselves in any way, so Cleve is definitely NOT a hypocrite for making an endless CRPG and that's not a big deal. Phew!
Anyway, I don't want to get sidetracked with discussing Cleve's opinions, like how he thinks Stephen Hawking secretly died and was replaced by a duplicate or that black people are intrinsically stupid. Let's discuss the game! If you are familiar with CRPGs from the late 90s, you know that Wizardry 7 was to many people the pinnacle of game design and dungeon crawling. It's a well-designed product, and stands out from the other games that came out at the time, most of which tried to improve on the formula by adding bad gimmicks or lots of meaningless stats or changing the combat in ways which were detrimental to the experience. For example, FATE "improved" on Wizardry by making everything enormous for no reason, which allowed them to claim 200 hours of gameplay even though most of the world was empty or contained repeats of other areas because they simply didn't have time to make a game that big and put interesting things in all of it. Grimoire fits right into this period of CRPG design, because it's clearly based on Wizardry -- and Wiz7 in particular -- but changes the formula in ways that make it worse.
Let's talk about party composition. Wizardry had six party members. Grimoire has eight! EIGHT IS MORE! IT'S BETTER BECAUSE MORE!!! Anyway eight characters attacking an enemy at once would be a bit much if they remained the same as in Wizardry or Bard's Tale or whatever so as a result Cleve has to weaken party members and buff enemies. The result is over a long term the same balance is maintained, but in the specific case random encounters can simply kill your party members with no recourse and with nothing you could have done to prevent it. This is mostly true early on, of course, before you get spells and skills to mitigate it, and before you grind out the levels to improve your characters. If you're a big Bard's Tale fan you won't mind having your party die for no real reason over and over again early on. Anyone who's used to newer RPG design, or early RPG design in actual good games, should stay away. This ain't Might & Magic; it's more of a Wizards & Warriors. I was originally going to call it Dungeon Lords but that's, frankly, too harsh for this game. Cleve Blakemore may believe that Europeans are genetically predisposed to avoid jaywalking and Americans jaywalk because of all the non-white people poisoning our genes but even he doesn't believe David W. Bradley's Dungeon Lords is good.
Anyway! If you like shoddy Wizardry ripoffs that overpromise on everything but more or less deliver some dungeons and places to explore and items to puzzle over, and you don't mind giving your money to an insane white supremacist, then you should buy Grimoire Heralds of the Winged Exemplar. I can't say you should buy it if you like Wizardry, because those games are too good to really serve as a measuring stick. This is a game for people who have exausted every CRPG series already, for people who struggled through every other game there is. This is a game for people who think insect noises that repeat every half a second, layered for every insect in a six-enemy stack so that they make you want to kill yourself, and which you can't turn off without also turning off the music because apparently coding SFX and BGM meters separately is too hard even for a Neanderthal Supergenius, are good and cool. This is a game for people who like Eye of the Beholder -- not the real one, the GBA one -- or I guess for people who really really hate Aboriginal people. If you fit both those descriptions, buy Grimoire immediately. You will never find another game as perfect for you as this one. Hell, maybe someday Cleve will add custom portraits and you can make everyone look like Pepe or something and then you'll never need to play another game as long as you live! Mazel tov!
