Growlanser (グローランサー), released 11/25/1999, developed by Career Soft, published by Atlus

After Langrisser V, the developer Career Soft moved on to a new series, Growlanser. I’m not sure exactly what was going on behind the scenes. The Growlanser series eventually had 6 games (plus some remakes). I’ve seen it described as a spiritual successor to Langrisser, but it’s pretty different — the art is done by the same person and the developers are the same, but the gameplay is very different.

This time rather than a straight SRPG, the game is much closer to a regular RPG with strategy like battles. The battles are done in real time, with an action system that is similar to the Bounty Sword games. There are fixed encounters (both boss and “story” battles), but you can also encounter monsters on the map that you can fight. You can sometimes avoid these encounters by walking around the enemies.

The game is heavy on story, with a lot of voiced dialogue scenes. You will spend most of your time (if you know Japanese) reading/listening to the dialogue, at least in the early part of the game. Fortunately the game didn’t try to use the bad-looking 3D/polygon graphics that too many games relied on.

The main character is “Player” — you can choose the name but as all the dialogue is voiced it never gets spoken. He has been brought up in the house of Sandra, imperial magician, along with her daughter Ruise. He’s never been outside his whole life but now he sets out along with a homonculous created by Sandra. This homonculous (Tippi) seems to mostly be a way to have a silent protagonist but still reactions from the protagonist side.

In the first part you wander around town, ostensibly to shop for equipment but this is actually a way to decide your character’s growth rates. To get the best rates you have to be very quick and do a lot of subquests in the right way. This is a strange system for deciding your character growth — you can repeat the sequence as many times as you want but I’m still not sure I like it. I used a walkthrough to figure out where the events were, and ended up with a good growth rate:

I don’t know how hard the game is as a whole, maybe it’s not necessary to do this really well.

The main character repeatedly has dreams where he seems to inhabit the bodies of other people — some of them show a thing that is currently happening or has recently happened, but I think other ones are much further back in the past. I’m still early on in the game so I’m not sure why this is.

The two other support characters for this early stage of the game are Ruise, the main character’s sister. She was born under a full solar eclipse which gives her strong magic power. The main character also can use magic but this is not explained (yet). Ruise is studying at the nearby magic academy.

We go nearby to a place that Kurisu saw in his dream; it’s a promontory where we can see the floating city of the Featharians. Along the way there are small slimes and such to beat, but on the way back, the first event battle appears.

The battle system is like Bounty Sword — you issue commands to the characters and then when their turn comes up, they execute them. Everyone moves in real time. I got very frustrated with this system in BS (and I think there were at least one or two other games I played that had a similar method). This game is much better for three reasons:

• Like in the other games you can hit a button during the battle to bring up the orders screen and change orders. Unlike the other games, if you press the button during a dialogue or animation, it will register the input and bring up the screen afterwards. This means you don’t have to furiously mash the button to try to bring up the screen.
• When someone’s order becomes finished (because their target is dead or their spell is finished), the orders menu automatically comes up. Again, this removes the need to mash the orders button to try to get things done as fast as possible.
• Finally, although you can set your companions to Auto fight, you have the option of issuing specific commands to everyone. So there’s no frustration that your characters are doing dumb things.

It may be that eventually some flaws of the system will reveal themselves, but at this point, I am enjoying it.

Anyway, the first battle is you against 3 thieves. Your goal is to stop the head thief from taking Karen off the screen. The two subthieves try to block you; I killed one and then went for the main one. Afterwards there are reinforcements, but you quickly get a helper of your own so it’s not too bad.

The next goal is to recover a stolen book from Sandra’s library. The second event battle has you fighting several thieves, who try to run off the screen.

Wallace and Ruise are with the party now. Wallace is a fighter and Ruise is a mage. I had both the main character and Ruise cast magic missiles while Wallace went for a third thief and Julian (NPC) blocked the exit. The first time I lost because I tried to send everyone at the same person.

The third battle is against bandits in a town. Your goal is to not let too many of the villagers be killed by them.

I found that with repeated magic missile castings by the hero and Ruise it was pretty easy, despite the reinforcements that repeatedly arrive.

The fourth battle has us protecting Sandra from enemies. Once again, double magic missile casting makes quick work of the enemies (and Sandra isn’t that weak).

Unfortunately Sandra gets poisoned from her injuries here, and the only ones who know the cure for her are the Featherians, who are hard to reach and don’t like humans.

This seems to be a fairly long section and I’m still not finished with it yet — we have to get a researcher Ariost to help us reach the Featherian land (with a flying machine), but this involves going through the first larger dungeon.

The Will o Wisps that appear here are tricky; they only have 1 HP but they block most physical attacks, absorb thunder, and can sometimes reflect magic missile. The boss fight here isn’t too bad because Ariost himself is helpful (and not that weak), and if you can quickly take out the WoW’s with magic missiles (and not get too many reflected back on you) the rest of the enemies can be easily cleaned up.

This is basically as far as I have gotten; I’m in a section now where we have to learn more about the Featherians (because they refuse to give us the cure unless we can tell them a way that humans are better) but it’s involving some nested fetch quests.

So far the game is good; hopefully my good impression will hold up for the whole game.