I'll preface this by saying before reborn even came out I was looking in to the series after seeing the title on a page of saturn releases and was thinking about emulating - yeah, I had no idea there was a psp version of this game either lol. I was actually playing March of the Black Queen a bit beforehand, but the mechanics were too dated/confusing for me - it didn't feel like it aged well with the limited hardware of the time.

I became surprisingly addicted to this game, I love tactics based gameplay (I have more of an RTS background but I've been delving in to more JRPG/JTRPG content lately, usually some of the older stuff).

Everything was totally blind, and in doing so played the chaos route and got the princess ending. I didn't look up the ramifications of my decisions and just went with my gut every time - with one exception.

The only time where I didn't make a blind decision and stick to it was after the Lanselot fight where I said the wrong thing. (I was so torn on if I should stick with it or not - don't get me wrong, I love a good tragedy and adore how gritty and dark this game's themes are, and on one end I really wanted to just for the authenticity... But the real trigger was how Denam started saying shit that was so far off from what I was expecting like the 'i need you to end this war' shit, and after thinking about the diction of the choice that was presented, the backhanded implications became clear that weren't immediately obvious to my all-nighter pulling self) So, I reloaded a save there.

With that said I have nothing but love for the story, the themes, the presentation of pretty much everything. The character designs are great - more grounded than what I'm used to but it absolutely does it's service to complement the setting and atmosphere. This is the first game in a while I've played that really doesn't pull any punches with it's narrative, but it isn't something like a survival/horror where that's the point of the game - and that's the beauty of it.

The only glaring critique I have of the game is that it plays so slow sometimes - yes, as a tactics game it comes with the territory, and I'm probably still just sore from the length of PotD but damn, I'd set the speed to doubletime at the beginning of chapt 2 and it still felt too slow sometimes just waiting on the animations for my units to pick up cards to get to their action menu. I also have a mixed love/hate relationship with the cards system but I can see that discussion's been had so many times before so I'll be brief - mechanically, it's not terrible but it's garish and feels shoved in; This game is beyond doubt the most positioning-focused strategy game I've played through and when you're split between taking a good position and putting your units in to formation or picking up cards while the enemies are hogging them, something about that just conflicts with what I like out of a strategy game - but it's not unforgivable, it's just a minor gripe in the grand scheme of things. I actually feel them being visually offensive and littering the battlefield is much worse and immersion breaking than any mechanical aspects.

I'm aware of the world tarot and coda and stuff that I'll proceed to play on later, but I'm putting this game down for now. This was definitely an experience that rekindled some of my faith in rpgs in terms of having a very genuine plotline that doesn't really feel generic, contrived, or easy to replicate or pick apart. I don't mean to say that as if I have no faith in rpgs but when every other one ends with you battling the personification of evil with your best friends where the presented morality is always binary, it makes it hard to really empathize with any of the characters... or anything in the game at all - but like I said I'm getting back in to rpgs so if you have any recommendations of anything up the same alley as this, I'm all ears :)

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PS: Just for fun, my usual party was something like... Denam Catiua (staff sword), Hawkman Cleric, Gildas(2h sword), Hoplite(cursed spear), Berserker with flying boots and axe, debuff summon based matriarch, lich, canopus, a swordmaster with teleport boots and siege, and a shaman if I felt I needed the extra damage. I didn't bother with swordmasters for a good chunk of the game because they were hard to manage until I started getting necromancers and liches as mp batteries, similar experience with terror knights, both of which i leveled back up during PotD and started using them more. Beastmasters I had leveled but only used to recruit, and ninjas I didn't touch basically at all. (I feel like they're meant to be back line infiltrators and mage slayers but my flying barbarian and canopus usually handled that - or arycelle)