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Never have I had a game make me go "the honeymoon is over" in quite the way this did. No, wait. Exactly one other has, and I'll reference it in this post.
Anyone who's known me any length knows I have a massive thirst for a solid, crunchy - but not too crunchy - turn-based strategy game. The trick is I'm also astoundingly picky about them. XCOM, even in its most softball of difficulties, drives me to hair-pulling frustration because I'm not fucking psychic. Fire Emblem and bores me because its characters are meant to be unique but are also as boring as any generic mooks in any tactics game ever. Disgaea focuses too much on the grind, Advance Wars puts too much emphasis on being able to churn out your units Starcraft style, and so on and so forth.
So I suppose it would really be easier to say "I have a massive thirst for the Genesis era Shining Force series". A few other franchises have scratched the itch almost as well - Atlus's Devil Survivor games, the Final Fantasy Tactics series, occasionally Tactics Ogre. Disgaea manages it if I don't fall into minmaxer hell. With that in mind, pretty much like everyone in my friends list recommended Chroma Squad to me, even though my sole experience with sentai stuff is explicitly being a pre-teen when Power Rangers came out originally.
When I first got it, I kind of rolled my eyes at the financial management aspect of it - great, I'd have to play Television Executive Simulator in order to get to the actual good game - and wandered off. On a lark, I went back to it.
And for a while, I was pleased with it. Being able to customize a team (right down to the transformation and mecha-summoning catchphrases) leads to that kind of immature glee you can only get with a twisted sort of imagination - the script was very much improved, I feel, by my teenagers with attitude screaming out "ORIGINAL CHARACTER, DO NOT STEAL" in order to turn into spandex crimefighters, and calling out "Punch it until it dies!" when they needed the giant robot to, well, punch something until it dies. The combat was a little fiddly but crunchy enough that things had a definite flow to them and it was easy to intuit when to press ahead and when to fall back. Even the "executive simulator" portions had charm, what with being able to answer fan emails and get replies about how you helped these fictional textboxes. It had the right amount of self-referential funy to have a charm to it, like, it really shows that the writers adore the genre they're homaging enough to poke fun at it every chance they get.
Then - I'm not sure when exactly, but somewhere in the last chapter or two - things started to drag. I was playing on the medium difficulty, but as I've been told that the easy difficulty is meant to be something you could fumble blindfolded through, I assume the difficulty spike is not equivalent in all difficulties.
Either way, the longer the stages took, the more I saw the flaws in the game.
Stages were either vastly too big (and filled with enemies that would plink at you from a distance in relative safety) or oppressively small (and you'd get ganged up on by 500 things).
The equipment crafting system is RNG from beginning to end - you have to use random drops, that you can also buy random booster-pack-esque boxes of, in order to get equipment with random bonuses that you may not be able to use anyway. Or you could pay five times the price for wholly mediocre storebought equipment.
The leaning on the fourth wall officially got tiresome when NPCs (named after Kickstarter backers) started declaring how glad they were to have backed a Kickstarter.
The hit chances in mecha battles are wildly weighted against you - a 95% hit chance is actually more like 70%, and heaven help you if you risk going down past 50%.
The whole thing is programmed in Unity, meaning that it would hang on my potato of a computer at exactly the worst times - generally when I needed to make an input on the mecha battles to avoid taking a Hefty Boatload of Damage.
Tokusatsu-themed jokes turned into fighting bootleg versions of Barney and the badger from that flash animation.
Literally every enemy that is brought into a battle has to walk in, one at a time, meaning almost every battle is preceded by five minutes of waiting by endgame.
The final mission violently swung back and forth between "cakewalk" and "frustratingly unfeasible" practically every other turn, culminating in a finale that was, in fact, literally unloseable. (Not that I minded that at that point.)
Suddenly, things stopped being fun by the end. I've only ever felt that quick of a turnaround before once, and that was when I tried LPing Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and finally got a good look at it, warts and all.
Just like FFTA2, Chroma Squad has a lot of work put into it, and is absolutely enjoyable if you're the kind of person who can accept that the game wants you to play it a certain way. Unlike FFTA2, Chroma Squad was made with definite love, and its flaws are more a product of slightly lopsided game balance than the game simply refusing to allow for experimentation. I appreciate that it tried, but I'm gonna be hesitant to go back to it.
I might like it better if I was the kind of person who was okay with XCOM. I'd probably like it better if every single one-shot NPC wasn't a Kickstarter backer who insisted on telling you their life story for the single mission they appeared in. I'd definitely like it better if I knew more than just Power Rangers.
Anyone who's known me any length knows I have a massive thirst for a solid, crunchy - but not too crunchy - turn-based strategy game. The trick is I'm also astoundingly picky about them. XCOM, even in its most softball of difficulties, drives me to hair-pulling frustration because I'm not fucking psychic. Fire Emblem and bores me because its characters are meant to be unique but are also as boring as any generic mooks in any tactics game ever. Disgaea focuses too much on the grind, Advance Wars puts too much emphasis on being able to churn out your units Starcraft style, and so on and so forth.
So I suppose it would really be easier to say "I have a massive thirst for the Genesis era Shining Force series". A few other franchises have scratched the itch almost as well - Atlus's Devil Survivor games, the Final Fantasy Tactics series, occasionally Tactics Ogre. Disgaea manages it if I don't fall into minmaxer hell. With that in mind, pretty much like everyone in my friends list recommended Chroma Squad to me, even though my sole experience with sentai stuff is explicitly being a pre-teen when Power Rangers came out originally.
When I first got it, I kind of rolled my eyes at the financial management aspect of it - great, I'd have to play Television Executive Simulator in order to get to the actual good game - and wandered off. On a lark, I went back to it.
And for a while, I was pleased with it. Being able to customize a team (right down to the transformation and mecha-summoning catchphrases) leads to that kind of immature glee you can only get with a twisted sort of imagination - the script was very much improved, I feel, by my teenagers with attitude screaming out "ORIGINAL CHARACTER, DO NOT STEAL" in order to turn into spandex crimefighters, and calling out "Punch it until it dies!" when they needed the giant robot to, well, punch something until it dies. The combat was a little fiddly but crunchy enough that things had a definite flow to them and it was easy to intuit when to press ahead and when to fall back. Even the "executive simulator" portions had charm, what with being able to answer fan emails and get replies about how you helped these fictional textboxes. It had the right amount of self-referential funy to have a charm to it, like, it really shows that the writers adore the genre they're homaging enough to poke fun at it every chance they get.
Then - I'm not sure when exactly, but somewhere in the last chapter or two - things started to drag. I was playing on the medium difficulty, but as I've been told that the easy difficulty is meant to be something you could fumble blindfolded through, I assume the difficulty spike is not equivalent in all difficulties.
Either way, the longer the stages took, the more I saw the flaws in the game.
Stages were either vastly too big (and filled with enemies that would plink at you from a distance in relative safety) or oppressively small (and you'd get ganged up on by 500 things).
The equipment crafting system is RNG from beginning to end - you have to use random drops, that you can also buy random booster-pack-esque boxes of, in order to get equipment with random bonuses that you may not be able to use anyway. Or you could pay five times the price for wholly mediocre storebought equipment.
The leaning on the fourth wall officially got tiresome when NPCs (named after Kickstarter backers) started declaring how glad they were to have backed a Kickstarter.
The hit chances in mecha battles are wildly weighted against you - a 95% hit chance is actually more like 70%, and heaven help you if you risk going down past 50%.
The whole thing is programmed in Unity, meaning that it would hang on my potato of a computer at exactly the worst times - generally when I needed to make an input on the mecha battles to avoid taking a Hefty Boatload of Damage.
Tokusatsu-themed jokes turned into fighting bootleg versions of Barney and the badger from that flash animation.
Literally every enemy that is brought into a battle has to walk in, one at a time, meaning almost every battle is preceded by five minutes of waiting by endgame.
The final mission violently swung back and forth between "cakewalk" and "frustratingly unfeasible" practically every other turn, culminating in a finale that was, in fact, literally unloseable. (Not that I minded that at that point.)
Suddenly, things stopped being fun by the end. I've only ever felt that quick of a turnaround before once, and that was when I tried LPing Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and finally got a good look at it, warts and all.
Just like FFTA2, Chroma Squad has a lot of work put into it, and is absolutely enjoyable if you're the kind of person who can accept that the game wants you to play it a certain way. Unlike FFTA2, Chroma Squad was made with definite love, and its flaws are more a product of slightly lopsided game balance than the game simply refusing to allow for experimentation. I appreciate that it tried, but I'm gonna be hesitant to go back to it.
I might like it better if I was the kind of person who was okay with XCOM. I'd probably like it better if every single one-shot NPC wasn't a Kickstarter backer who insisted on telling you their life story for the single mission they appeared in. I'd definitely like it better if I knew more than just Power Rangers.
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There are 10 backer slots for "get to be in as a guest NPC fighter", and 15 for "get to be in as a citizen in distress". Every one of these 25 people will gleefully tell you who they are, full name basis, and what they're doing here.
There's only about 35ish missions in the game, total, judging by how my steam cheevs look. You're getting backers thrown in your face a lot.
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The Kickstarter thing is becoming a Problem in a few games. Pillars of Eternity, for example, has kickstarter NPCs in every town with hilariously cruddy backstories that you can mindread from them. You quickly learn to avoid anyone with a gold banner around their name like the plague.
...I still like FFTA2 more than any of the other Tactics style games though.
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As long as you never try to do sassy things like single race runs.
And as long as you violently avoid the "challenging" content (read: brightmoon tor) like the plague.
And as long as you don't want to use Animists before the 90% point of the plot.
Like I said, FFTA2 very distinctly wants you to play it how it wants to be played.
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It's almost like the strategy RPG version of that glitch in Oblivion where console-hacking to gain levels doesn't actually give you the toward-next-level credit to go alongside it. (So, like, if you normally have to earn ten increases to gain a level, but you just give yourself another level, now you're stuck there until you earn twenty increases and catch up again.)
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The worst part is, I can see why they did it. You're probably not gonna unlock 90% of that high end shit on a normal playthrough anyway because the loot system is garbo. And the really depressing part is that the loot system is improved over what FFTA had, where it just flat up could decide "no, you're not getting this weapon during this run because we don't want to give it as a reward."
But no, amongst my short list of "things that actively drag down the game", having so many of the game's functions gated behind plot progression (in particular, job unlocks and character recruitment) is like half a step behind "Brightmoon Tor exists".
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But as someone who really loved and is used to the original FFT, yes, I shall always strongly loathe the system of "you can only learn Fire 2 by having this particular staff equipped, and also this staff doesn't exist in any obtainable way until chapter four."
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OKAY SO. BRIGHTMOON TOR.
It's your standard "scaling bonus dungeon" where you've got a first version that's at about normal endgame levels, and a second version that's at post-game levels and a third version that is at "you have mastered all your jobs" levels but that's not the bad part.
The bad part is the logical conclusion of Speed Being The God Stat In These Games.
See, monster speed is uncapped. (Player classes seem to have a soft cap as to how high their speed can go just based on level gains, but I can't prove that.) Monsters at Lv99 have A Lot Of Speed.
There are monsters on the very last stage of the second version and every single stage of the third version that know this beautiful little thing called "Light Curtain". What does Light Curtain do, you may ask?
It casts Protect, Regen, and Haste on every single unit on that side at once, for free, without fail.
Invariably, this is the first priority in those monsters' AI routines, and they will drop it any time any of those statuses fall off.
Also, it turns out that a hasted enemy with like 250 speed will take roughly four actions to every one of your party's.
Thus, Brightmoon Tor Third Ascent rapidly becomes an exercise in "take an action, put down the DS and go make a sandwich, repeat". You will quite frequently have to sit through twenty enemy turns before you can move a single unit. Naturally, it requires you exploiting the really broken shit (immortal summoners, Mirror Item, the kinds of stacking multipliers Gria can get) to get through, except it's not really challenging. It's just tedious because it takes twenty years to actually do anything even if the level is basically "solved".
It is the pinnacle of Badly Designed Difficulty and soured a sizeable portion of the game for me despite the fact it is 100% optional and not even recorded in terms of quest completion. It offends me on a visceral level few non-romhack games can manage. If the LP I tried to do wasn't banished to the depths of SomethingAwful's shadow realm, I'd try to pull up some of my rants - and other peoples' rants - about it.
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I should maybe try restarting Arc the Lad 2 one of these days. I remember I got kind a ways into it and really liked it so far, but then other games happened and it fell through the cracks. I am told this is because AtL2 is like nine thousand hours long, but then again I'm into Tactics Ogre.
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Also, Yasumi Matsuno's stories are... they've got this thing where they're good and interesting and Game of Thrones-esque and then SUDDENLY DEMONS HIJACK YOUR PLOT. It happens in, like, every single game he's done except FF12, which was more "demons try to hijack the plot but a princess in daisy dukes tells them to sit the fuck down and wait their turn".
Also as much as I love Matsuno's games, uhhh. Well. Let's just say that Unsung Story is 500% why I am super leery of Kickstarters for (former) AAA-game designers. They tend to delegate all the money to people who are actually gigantic assholes and may not actually deliver the promised product?
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Also, "Suddenly demons hijack your plot" is literally every Ogre Battle game including the ones Yasumi Matsuno didn't do, but at least in his strategy games they tend to wait until the Game of Thronesy stuff plays out anyway. Is the actual endboss of Tactics Ogre('s main story; I haven't yet done CODA) some seriously out of nowhere bullshit compared to the entire rest of the game? Absolutely. But I can't call it unsatisfying because you do tie up and take care of the actual plot you've been given at several points along the way (at Barnicia, at Heim, every Dark Knight battle even within the Hanging Gardens.) You're not really dealing with the demons instead of the Game of Thrones stuff you've been led to believe you were dealing with; the people you chased into the Hanging Gardens who are the entire reason you're there are still there (they're the penultimate battle.) Getting mad at the "oops you didn't quite get there in time to stop them from summoning the demon so I guess now you have to deal with him too" sequence is like getting mad at the "oops now you have to escape the lair as it collapses" sequence in any other game. It's just there. Definitely not saying it adds to the experience but it didn't detract, at least in my opinion.
Then again, maybe I'm just biased because I'm kind of proud of myself for how I outsmarted the clone party battle.