The season is here again, and I'm playing an excellent appetizer. This could just as well have gone in the JRPG thread, but for the sake of reviving this thread...
Koudelka is a PSX horror JRPG by former Square staff and a prequel to the Shadow Hearts series. It's decidedly less zany than those games which I like, opting for a more grounded Gothic style period piece.
The setting is a haunted monastery in Wales in the 1800s, which is just perfect. The team consists of three unlikely allies with wildly clashing personalities. The titular Koudelka is a sceptic gypsy mystic of sorts. Waifu material? ... up for debate. Edward is a (supposed) outlaw who's the 'straight player' of the team though he does come off as having something he's not letting on. James is a holy man who is quick to judge others while having wool over his eyes. They're all very flawed people in a way most JRPGs just don't do in favor of tired tropes.
The voice acting sets the game apart. They got actual threate actors and put them in the same space, giving in engine cutscenes a very stageplay kind of feel. The models obviously aren't the most expressive but they made great use of what they had. The prerendered cutscenes are much less interesting in comparison and the voice acting is way flatter.
Speaking of prerendered, the backgrounds are gorgeous. It's a dark game obviously and you will be combing rooms for anything valuable, but for the most part, things of importance are reasonably easy to pick out. Camera angles can get a bit funky but I'm not one to get easily confused by such things. The game easily rivals and likely beats Square games of the same era on this front.
Combat is a fairly standard turn based fare on a grid. You can't see enemy health or the turn order which I think works fine for this kind of game. It's mostly about positioning and looking for weaknesses. Spells and weapon types gain ranks when used. Spells become more expensive but hit larger areas, weapons gain potential extra attacks. Melee weapons break often, so you'll want to be constantly looting more of them, and they come with random elements when looted.
Where it gets pretty interesting is in the balancing and how stats tie into this. The game starts off too easy, I didn't need to use a healing spell in combat for the first four hours. Then there's a bump and this becomes a trend, where you'll notice enemies gaining large periodic damage boosts. Still very rarely deadly, but what you'll learn is that stats make a BIG difference. You get stats for both physical and magic damage, defense, and accuracy, agility for turn order/speed and luck for, well, luck. As an example, piety determines magic defense, including to beneficial effects, so a character with higher piety is also harder to heal. In the early game, guess the difference against enemy magic between a character with 10 piety, and another with 20 piety. Say, half? Try 1/20th of the damage for the latter. An aoe spell might hit one character for 10 damage and the other for 200. Considering I practically never have issues with landing attacks, it becomes optimal to focus attack stats while making sure your 'tank' (Edward, really) can take a beating. The back row will rarely take damage other than magical but you don't want to completely neglect their physical defense/health. Gear makes a huge difference here.
Fitting a 90's game, Koudelka has its share of obtuse stuff and silly secrets (saving your game under very specific circumstances) so having a guide handy is highly recommended. Puzzles are quite modest in difficulty.
So is it scary? Well, no, not really. Very atmospheric but there's only so much an old turn based game can do that would actually be scary. The enemy designs are very cool and pretty disturbing at times, definitely a highlight, but again, not exactly scary.
I'm currently just about midway through after 10-ish hours, it's a four disc game which is pretty wild. I have been making liberal use of emulator turbo because battles are pretty damn slow. So far though, it's a real gem. If there are glaring flaws I am engrossed enough to not care. So excuse the effort post, I do want more people to try this out.
(the shader likely comes across a bit silly in screenshots but playing in the dark on my OLED, it works wonderfully)
