Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Soul Nomad & the World Eaters

1. Official Site
2. Platform: PS2
3. Publisher: NIS America
4. Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
5. Release Date: 09/25/07
6. Genre: Strategy

by Mitch Youngblood

The best thing Soul Nomad & the World Eaters has going for it is its title. Maybe its because I have a soft spot for 1950s B-movie titles somewhere in the darkened crevice my heart once occupied. But once you move past the title and into, you know, actually playing the game two things become immediately apparent.

The first is that the amount of fun one would expect from a game with that title stops the moment, and I honestly mean the very moment, that title disappears from the screen. The second thing is that one quickly gets the sense the genesis of the game sprang from an engineering team on a bender who thought it would be fun to apply an anime-themed skin to an Excel spreadsheet, throw in some wacky voices, and call it a game.

In a nutshell, Soul Nomad & the World Eaters is about as much fun as doing your taxes, so if you’re looking for a warm-up to April 15 then here you go. You can even have my copy if you manage to tackle me en route to EB.

Like the entirety of the game, the graphics are limited. The cut scenes, as well as the game play itself for that matter, look like they were designed for the original PlayStation which doesn’t cut it in this day and age. Whenever characters talk amongst themselves, the game looks exactly like the sort of cheap anime we saw on Saturday mornings as kids. When the game switches to real-time, things go from bland to blander.

Small characters appear on a map where you choose your battle formations, issue movement commands, and so forth. What we see then are little characters, whom you do not control in real time at all, performing a series of combat moves against their opponents. You can understand everything that’s happening, but it looks boring since the interactivity is limited to selecting move or attack options. It plays boring too since the only part of the game where customization was a focus was in how to build combat squads, but we’ll get to that in the Gameplay section.

You know something is wrong in the state of Denmark when a game causes you to lose interest the moment after you first hit the start button. The excessive and hyperbole-filled narration went beyond painful. Stick with it through a miserable prologue and you land in the shoes of a vacuous kid with an equally empty, though infinitely more annoying, sidekick. I did not want to play a game where the sidekick tried to blow sunshine up my ass. This reviewer considers himself a fairly happy person. Content with life even. Yet here is a character determined to make your life hell by being more chipper than a busload of cheerleaders on speed.

But ignoring the sidekick for a moment, one might ask about the rest of the characters. Well, there are technically two more main ones but the players’ avatar is strangely silent. Unfortunately, the silent treatment does not extend to Gig, yes his name is Gig, who is the over-the-top evil dude you see on the cover of the box at right. He tries hard, too hard in fact, to act like an omnipotent Sid Vicious with a better tailor. While he may land a funny here and there, for the most part he makes you want to shut down the studio he recorded at then nuke the sight from orbit just to be sure.

The good news though is the music which is simply wonderful. It manages to convey a broad range of emotions, as all the best scores do. It lifts you up with energy and passion before dropping into an aching sadness. The score is nimble, playful at times too, but always elegant. While I may hate every fiber of the beings who came up with and executed Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, the musical score is a sumptuous ode to the fantastical.

It’s tough to muck up a control scheme featuring the X button so prominently, and to its credit Soul Nomad & the World Eaters handles just fine. The gameplay relies on turn-based battles and movement thereby relieving gamers of the need to memorize endless combinations of buttons for combat. Instead, gamers hit the X button to pull up a menu screen, select which option they want, then hit X again to select that option.

Now repeat this button sequence for the entire game and you’ll understand why I consider it limited.

So why the not-quite-perfect score? How is it that a game featuring the directional pad, the X button, the Circle button (for going back while in a menu screen), the Triangle button (for skipping cutscenes or opening a menu), and the Square button (used only during conversations in a city after a certain point) could merit something less than perfect? Well, how about variety? Look at what the buttons do, then consider how many buttons are on the PS2 controller. While I’m all in favor of streamlining games, in this instance it serves only to reinforce just how little control gamers playing Soul Nomad & the World Eaters actually have.

This reviewer can honestly state that it is a rarity to encounter a game of such never ending bordom, so much so that Soul Nomad & the World Eaters has now replaced NyQuill as my gateway drug of choice to the land of sleep. Select where you want to move on a map, move there, recon it, attack enemies, move on to the next encounter or village. If it’s a village, then you’ll spend a long time scrolling through text as you speak with people too shy to appear on screen. Instead, you select the names of the people you want to talk with then text appears on screen indicating the conversation you have with them.

The combat sequences are laid out on a map, not a grid. At first blush, the game appears to take more than a few cues from Final Fantasy Tactics but minus the charm and quirky interface. When you bring up the menu to select movement, a small grid appears on screen. You then move the character to wherever you want on the grid, then when you are next to an opponent you have the chance to attack or defend.

That’s it. That’s the whole game right there.

While combat may sound exciting, I assure you it’s the same concept as saying it would be fun to watch a parade. Not so much really because all the flash and energy passes by in front of you while you sit still and watch. Were you able to interact with the game more then it might have been fun. As it stands, scrolling through one menu option after another customizing units only to sit back and watch is not what I call fun. While I understand several people out there do consider such games to be part of a healthy diet, allow me to dash away any hopes you may have by describing how vastly over-engineered this game is.

Combat and customization options are what the game was marketed by so let’s look at what hoops of flaming death gamers must jump through. After playing about five minutes, the lead character is joined with the evil white-haired punk on the front of the game box. He then walks you through combat options and introduces the ability to Design your own combat room. Here’s how it works: You open a menu, then buy a room for your characters to be in when in combat. Certain rooms come with Décor Items that give bonuses to characters, and you can add Décor as you find it. Once you’ve chosen your room, you select which characters appear in the front, the middle, and the rear of the combat formation.

This is what happens when an interior designer and an engineer get together and plan a video game, and it fails on virtually every level. Worrying whether you have the best room and Décor selected SHOULD NOT BE in your mind when fighting bad guys in a fantasy video game. It’d be like pummeling Dhalsim in Street Fighter 2 while in the back of your mind debating whether you should have brought a floral arrangement or vase to the fight.

Regarding the story, if you have played any game from Japan in the last quarter century then odds are you’ve seen it. I’m not saying they need to get some new material, but there are only so many times we can see the fate of the world resting on the shoulders of someone just working through fractions before disbelief sets in. Kid barely entering puberty is miraculously chosen to be the one who can control/contain evil, and is tasked with saving the world from "Insert Evil Monster Here." In this case, three giant beasties called World Eaters destroyed the world once and are back to finish the job. The evil punk used to control them and he gives you plenty of options to fight back. But those options come at a price since you can fight against him or give in to him which is a long way of saying the game presents you with the chance to either play good or bad.

Both result in boring gameplay but one has more of the narcissistic, unfunny tosser than the other so take that for what it’s worth.

If you value your sanity or your hard-earned money or both, do not play this game. Don’t even consider it a game. As noted, it plays like an anime-themed Excel spreadsheet and its over designed, over written nature lacks anything resembling fun. Its like the developers figured numbers geeks the world over would get wood from an overload of stats.

Stock market analysts would have a tough time finding fun in this game, as would math nerds, NASA engineers, and horse race fanatics. You love nothing but numbers, stats, and events comparing numbers and stats? Then this is the game for you. Both of you.

I’ve had experiences with games so horrifically inept they defied all laws of both humanity and science. I’ve played games where you could tell the fun was once there, yet someone was quashed from the final product, due most likely to an over reliance on focus groups. Then there are beasts like this one, where it feels like a couple of engineers came up with a good idea, then forgot to make it user friendly for people 1/10th as smart as they are. Sort of like stereo instructions.

There are simply no logical answers for how this passed quality assurance, let alone sailed through the development phase with everyone agreeing that it was a good idea. Someone should tell the developers of Soul Nomad & the World Eaters that in order for gamers to want to continue playing a game, it needs to be fun. Hitting the X button on a glorified Excel document is not fun. Now, repeat after me:

It is not fun to be heckled by a character utilizing dialogue from a mad lib generator.

It is not fun to play a game more interested in hurling numbers and stats at the screen than it is in providing entertainment.

This game is not fun, and should be played by no one on this planet. Period.

Gaming Trend Score

62

1. Graphics: 74
2. Audio: 85
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 50
5. Value/Replay: 30
6. OVERALL:62