Magna Carta: Tears of Blood

The Good
Had to get this game since there weren't many RPG's selling at my local playstation retailer. Obviously RPG sales weren't doing very well, and after play this game for several agonizing hours, I can tell why.

Not much very good about the game, but I do identify the vision they were trying to create, though in practice, it was somewhat of a disaster.

The few good "visions" about the game refer to a concept in the game that regulates the dominance of certain magic types in a certain area. There are many fields of magic in the game: fire, water, earth, etc. Each area has a governing magic type, which you can change so that your character, if focusing on a certain element, gets an additional bonus or otherwise receive a negative bonus if the element is opposite of his/her speciality. Nice concept, but the gloomy graphics, mediocre interface and not-so-friendly gameplay made the positives in this game somewhat unbearable.

The Bad
Yet another Final Fantasy copycat the simulates everything but the good stuff about the game. There's been a lot of that going around lately.

Yikes, this game has possibly the WORST combat system ever compared to RPG's in this day an age. Just to think I recently changed loyalties from the PC to the PS2 and have to deal with this kind of junk. The combat system though "as a concept interesting" in practice is yet another disaster. Combat is real-time, but you have to hit the enemy 3 times at the right time-length or else you will miss. What's irritating about this, is that it's somewhat fast so there's a good possibility you will miss unless you totally focus. There's also a "recharge rate" for your next attack, so if you either miss or attack, you have to wait sometime before your next available action. The fact that the enemy never misses is also irritating, plus the fact that even though you have more than one ally in combat, doesn't mean you have more actions to carryout.

That combat sequence itself ultimately killed any fun out of the game, in addition to many other devastating features about the game. The graphics are somewhat gloomy and unfriendly. The hero, who I thought was kinda cute, turned out to be a man, now that really killed something in me...especially that this dude wears sexy women's clothing, the developer's who created this game, are either sick in the brain or have serious sexuality problems. The girls all have enormous breasts and minimal wear also means that the developers have yet to find adulthood and a miracle to actually get a girlfriend.

The Bottom Line
There bad games that are entertaining to a certain extent, there are games that are bad and good depending on the person. I believe this is a game that is bad in every possible element. Don't even breath near this one.

The Good
This sequel to Phantom of Avalanche has a few bright points, though they are drowning in its ocean of flaws. As bad as the combat system is, there are a few interesting elements in it. Each area has its own chi, i.e. element, so attacks based on this element will do more or less damage, respectively. Each party member can also master techniques of different elements ("styles"), and switch them in battles. Learning stronger techniques of the same style requires you to repeatedly achieve perfect results when pressing the three attack buttons. Also, as you get more and more perfect results, you accumulate special points which you can later "unleash" at any time, to significantly increase the damage of your next attack.

Other moderately fun stuff includes item-combination (making your own powerful items from those you can buy in stores) and "trust-building", which is a minigame in a "dating sim" style: you talk to your characters at save points and can make them happy, indifferent, or angry depending on what you choose to tell them.

Character graphics deserve a special mention. The characters in the game certainly look unique and very detailed. Many of them also look pretty ridiculous, if you ask me. But it is obvious the artist has found his own style, no matter how extravagant it is. Sometimes you'll want to continue playing the game just to see how your next party member will look like.

The Bad
Tears of Blood falls flat on its face with its cumbersome, awkwardly executed combat system. For a completely inexplicable reason, they decided to limit every turn to one character. That's right. Instead of assigning commands to your party members, you control only one. You can choose which one, and you can choose another character next turn, but only one character can act in one turn. The other two characters just stand there and do nothing. Strange? You bet, but it doesn't end there. Even though you master stronger moves the more you use a certain style, you always start with the weakest and must go through all four stages to reach the strongest attack in every battle. Why? I understand you should pay some price for the strong attack. So let it drain you in some way or whatever, but why not make it accessible right away? Imagine how terribly long-drawn and repetitive the battles become because of that.

To this, add the totally unnecessary, arcadish action element. You see, when your turn comes, you should press three buttons on your controller so that they fit into a spinning circle. If you fail to hit one of them correctly, you'll miss your attack. Sounds fair? Not really. First, why should you miss the entire attack if you failed to hit only one of the buttons?! But that's not all. If you miss, you also get a penalty to the time elapsed until your next turn, revert back to your weakest attacks, and lose all your trinity points, which are accumulated bonus damage to your next attack. This is utterly ridiculous.

There are many other gameplay-related flaws in the game. You cannot allow yourself to run at all, because if you do, you'll always be ambushed by enemies. The dungeons, however, tend to be fairly long, so you'll have to walk through them instead of running, which adds too many empty hours to an already long game. You'll also have to backtrack a lot and visit the same areas with different parties, which is really annoying and boring. And you'll have to fight all the enemies you meet because you need the experience. You'll be in control of several parties and will have to level up each party member, because you never know which party the game will force you to play. You cannot really choose and build up characters properly, because they come and go much too frequently.

The game is horribly, disastrously linear. More often than not you won't be able to access areas you'd like to explore, be confined to limited town or dungeon-like sections, unable to travel on the world map - even not jumping from dot to dot. Everything is done automatically by the game. There is no sense of exploration at all in Tears of Blood. What's worse is that even the areas you can explore are uninteresting. Dungeons tend to be bland and dull, they lack color and structure. Add to that the backtracking element and you'll get a good recipe for extremely tedious gameplay. In towns, you rarely can do something besides buying equipment or talking to some lonely NPCs. You are unable to enter most of the buildings, they are just standing there as a decoration.

One of the worst aspects of Tears of Blood is its camera. It is fixed, which is automatically a flaw in my book; but even that is not done properly. You are forced to look at the game world from horrendously weird angles. When you begin a battle, you often have no idea where some of your characters are, you also don't see the enemies until they draw near and attack.

The story is not all bad, but lack of warmth in the dialogue seriously hampers the enjoyment and prevents us from being attached to the characters. And, although there are proper cutscenes in the game, a lot of dramatic events and conversations are presented as weird dialogues boxes over totally still backgrounds.

The Bottom Line
Like its predecessor, Tears of Blood is a pompous, unpleasant, suffocatingly linear Eastern RPG made even worse by its pretentious, tedious combat system. It appears that Softmax's games become increasingly weaker as its popularity grows.