Brigandine

Quality. That is what you are getting with Brigandine. Does it have the most sparkling, wonderful, eye-poping production value? No, no it does not. However, when it comes to meat and potatoes strategy role-playing, nothing tops this - no matter the console. It's difficult enough to make you think about formations, tactics, and organization, but not so complex as to overwhelm a first-time player. Brigandine successfully straddles a line between intricacy and simplicity that few games ever achieve. There are a large number of knight classes, all of which can be leveled-up to other successive classes (mage-druid-sorcerer) which enable new spells to be unlocked, and few classes even approach the feeling of over-use. The battle sequences, as is, slow the gameplay down for one-on-one action shots that look horrid by the standards of today (blockly, ps1 polygons). They look thrown in for dazzle, and add nothing to the enjoyment of play. In contrast, the rest of the battle scenes feature sprites on pre-rendered backgrounds which look fantastic, and you have the option to turn these one-on-one scenes off (yay!). My advice is to turn these off immediately. Aside from this, the game plays amazingly, and there are 50+ hours of gameplay in having 5 different factions to beat the game with, and three difficulty settings. It's amazing that Atlus missed so many pitfalls a game like this could have. The battle system is so smooth and intuitive - concise but varied. Nothing feels over-used or wasted. There are a large number of monsters (controlled under each knight's party by you), and again, all of which can level up to higher classes (dragon-red dragon-salamander) earning them new abilities. There are quite a number of pricy ps1-era RPG's but only Brigandine (and Suikoden II) seem worth the money.Read full review