This is brought to you by the people who brought us Disgaea, that crazy little RPG that jumpstarted the grid-based-battle system that we remember from Ogre Tactics and Final Fantasy Tactics. In this game, you play as a little girl who had the misfortune of losing her parents at a very young age. She follows in their footsteps in that she performs the same tasks that they did, taking on jobs involving solving problems such as dealing with monsters and demons. The only problem is that, like her parents, she has special powers that let her see, communicate with, and control spirits. This would be a good thing if not for the fact that this earns her the hatred of those she tries to protect, everyone seeing her as a demon girl who steals souls and causes bad luck. Still, this little girl continues to have an extremely optimistic view on life and help those in need, even if her rewards are often taken by those who take advantage of her. She only has her friend, a man who also died with her parents but who remains on earth as a guardian spirit, to help her along.
The game is a little different from Disgaea. You start with just your main character, who is relatively weak, and infuse your characters into objects. This means you can only summon allies if there are items on the map near by to summon them into. Doing so alters their stats, so fighters do best in rocks which ups their attack and defense, and spell casters do better in plants which up their intelligence and spell points. Once summoned, you characters can only stay on the map for a few turns before they lose their grasp on the mortal world and return to spirit form. This means you have to act quickly and cannot wait for your opponents to come to you. Your characters can pick up almost any item and use it to attack an opponent, from using weapons like swords and spell books, to whacking your opponent with a tree or a rock, or even learning special attacks from said items. Some characters provide special bonuses, like shop keepers increase the money you gain at the end of a fight if they are present by the end. You also move around in a free system, no more grids, so you can move in a radius from your starting point. But this also means you can be tossed out of bounds if you get to close to the edge of the map. Finishing the fight means keeping the items you possessed and returning to your island where you can buy items, spells, combine items and characters, change their names, go to practice dungeons, and so forth, depending on your characters as each function requires you have a character that can perform it, such as a shop keeper to run a shop.
There are a few problems with this game. The free system and lack of grid makes it easy to get bunched up together and end up standing on each other's heads. It also makes it hard to make use of skills as some have a set radius, a blast radius, a cone of effect, or so forth. This does add a special form of strategy into the mix but can sometimes be a pain to do something like heal two allies that are standing just enough apart that you can heal one but not both. Also the enemy will sometimes avoid fighting until your units have run out of time and return to objects, then charge your main character. They also have a very annoying habit of grabbing your items and weapons and tossing them out of bounds where you loose them for good. They also toss your character out of bounds when they cannot win a fair fight.
Still, this game has a fun little story, very good sprite designs (Not so good in the battle field graphic department), a very large array of items, spells, characters, and combinations to use, and can be very time consuming if you need a game to keep you from getting bored. It's worth a try for any good RPG lover with time on their hands and a good knack for strategy.
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