VenusBlood FRONTIER International – Finished the second chapter and a bit playing on the hardest difficulty. Story is obnoxious crap so I stopped reading shortly after the prologue. Gameplay is similar to Sengoku Rance. You need to conquer the map, which is divided into territories. You do it with a bunch of units you assign to team, and those teams fight enemy teams. The game is divided into chapters where you fight one or two armies.
- The tutorial is excellent. There’s a manual accessible from the main menu that covers the basics, with pictures from the game, annotated by red boxes and arrows. I prefer this to an integrated tutorial that drip feeds the mechanics over 20 hours of gameplay.
On the other hand it isn't accessible once inside the game, so maybe it’s not that good.
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Every unit has its own stats, it belongs to several types, counters a couple other, and has abilities. Abilities are all passive, and are extremely strong. Attack an entire row, poison an entire row, poison that does 15% hp as damage, hit several times per turn, counter males / females, usual debuffs, night/day time affinity, buff stats of entire party, and a lot more. 5 pages of those. They are excellent, and make every monster meaningfully different.
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Every unit costs a bunch of medallions to recruit, which you get mostly from winning fights. Nice system.
- You can also spend up to two extra medallions when recruiting monsters, which gives them extra abilities. This is nice in theory, but in practice every medallion has 6-9 different skills it can give, so you get too many options which makes the decisions too arbitrary.
There are 20 medallions, so for every monster you get 6*20 + 6*19 = 234 options.
It’s too much. I would have made it so that each medallion had a few abilities, so you would get a bunch of clearly strong and useful abilities to chose from. It’s better to have few meaningful choices than a million choices that don’t seem to matter.
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You can also equip your units with weapons that give them more skills. You don’t run into the same problem as the medallions because you get new weapons slowly, and units can only equip specific weapon (e.g. swordsman can only equip swords and armor). The equipment system is better than 99% of RPGs.
- The game has six seasons that rotate in a cycle. Recruiting creature in their favorite season increases their stats. Waiting six turns in this game isn’t a lot of time, which means that you might as well wait it out before you recruit. This is simple enough, but it doesn’t add anything to the game. Seasons also impact stats in combat.
- Commanders are special units that can cast spells which drastically impact the fights. Mana is carried from fight to fight so you’re encouraged to store it on easy fights. Healing costs gold, which is very limited, so you have to be careful not to take too much damage. Both of these make every fight matter. Very nice.
- Regular fights are mostly automated. You get to decide what spell to use and what unit everyone will attack. You can’t split attacks, so even if half of your monster counters one enemy, and the other half counter another, you can only tell them to attack one enemy. If the enemy dies, your monsters will attack at random. Offensive spells are always used on the unit you attack. All in all, you don’t have a lot of decisions to make.
Fights are extremely hard to follow, with tons of factors that decide the outcome. Stats, skills, counter by type (“this unit counters reptiles”), counters by category (blade counters spear), crits, defenses, abilities, buffs and debuffs, land type, night / day time, morale. it all piles up to create a rather opaque system that you have little control over. Most of the fight is automatic, which makes it hard to pinpoint who did what, and the UI lacks basic features that lets you check what was the impact of each factor. On the other hand, the settings allow you to make fights resolve with a blobber-like speed where 6 units attack 6 other units in 5 seconds.
- The game would be way way easier to learn if you could see information on skills, abilities, counters, etc’ when you put your mouse over them.
- You might get attacked more than once per turn, and you can only defend one territory, with the outcome of the other fights being decided by Encounters Fights. These are completely automated fights between the attackers and your other teams. You have zero control over them, beside making sure that the teams you don’t control are strong. Moreover,
you only see the outcome of the fight, without any details. I don't really know how they're resolved.
Encounter fights can also be done while attacking when there’s more than one enemy team defending, with you controlling one attacking team while the rest of your teams attack in Encounter Fights. If you want to play optimally and save as many turns as possible this is what you need to do.
- The encounter fights are a complete mystery to me. What do they add to the game? Why not let the player resolve them? What the fuck? I don’t have anything meaningful to say about them, they are just a very weird way to fuck with the player.
- Each conquered territory has a building. You can destroy that building and build something else, but most buildings are boring resource generators. Either make buildings interesting, or cut off the option to build them, so you have to rely on what you conquer.
- To get loot after fights you need a unit with Treasure Hunt / Bounty Hunter to survive the fight, and the higher those skills the better the loot. Loot includes medallions and materials to craft weapons, so it’s really important. I really like this aspect of the game. It forces you to balance whether you want loot or a strong team.
I enjoyed playing because the game tries a lot of stuff, and even when it doesn’t work it’s still interesting to mess around. But it feels like the outcome of battles are often out of your control. Both in regular fights and in encounter fights you lack control over what your units do, so most of the victory lies on composing proper teams ahead of time, only that in order to know what teams are good you need to understand how combat works, which is really hard because it’s all automated. It’s like a blobber party that runs into a boss fight, and all the player is shown in the result of the fight, rather than the actual combat. It’s hard to understand what goes on went under the hood. Even when I did get it, it still wasn't satisfying to have automated fights decide everything, and throw all feeling of strategy out of the window. That’s why I ended up dropping the game. Half of the fights are 100% automated, and those you control are 70% automated. If they changed this part the game would be worth playing.
Apparently there’s 11 games in the series, so maybe one of them gets it right. I just don’t know which one, and this is the only translated one as far as I know.
