If you love turn-based strategy and tactical games the PSP so far hasn’t been exactly the handheld of choice. With several high profile yet unsuccessful knockoffs of games like Advanced Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics from Nintendo’s camp, owners of the black device were left craving for more. And while D&D: Tactics delivered all that tactical goodness for D&D fans, the rest of the player-base remained unmoved. Will the adventures of Joan of Arc be what the PSP needed to satisfy them?

100 years’ war with a hint of fantasy

One of the most well known medieval conflicts was the long series of battles between England and France. It was during this time that Joan of Arc raised up and let her country against the invading Englishmen. Sounds rather boring, does it not? The guys at Level 5 thought so too, so they decided to spice things up with a fair dose of orcs and magic. The story actually begins before the 100 years’ war, telling the tale of a huge war between mankind and evil. Thanks to 5 magical bracelets the evil is ultimately vanquished, but it doesn’t take long before one of the 5 bracelet wielders decides to call on it, hoping to control it via his nephew, the English King Henry the VI. As a result, France is not invaded just by the English, but also a legion of hell spawn such as orcs and lizardmen. As luck would have it, one of the first settlements to fall is Domremy, the hometown of Joan. At about this time Joan comes across one of the 5 bracelets and begins hearing the voice of god. Overall the whole thing is pretty far from factual history, but it is more than just another fantasy soap-opera as well.

Once you start up the game you will see that with the art style Level 5 chose, anything but the above setting would have been a miss. The first 5 or so minutes are spent watching a really well drawn anime cinematic, explaining the premise of the game. The characters are typically Japanese, with big eyes and ridiculously long legs and torsos, but unless you absolutely abhor this style, you will come to appreciate the little details. The best part is that these cinematics are seamlessly integrated into the gameplay, so you’ll be moving around the battlefield one moment and watching a FMV the next.

Final, erm… French Fantasy: Tactics

You’ll be spending most of the time on one of the many battlefields around France. They range from burning towns over foggy forests to citadels and gorges. What they all have in common is the huge amount of care that was put into their design. If you ever played Final Fantasy Tactics (either for the PSX or GBA) you will know that while most of the maps were good there were some which were simply too big or didn’t offer enough tactical spots such as bottlenecks or high spots. Issues like that are hard to avoid, but the authors somehow managed to do it all the same. At first the maps are rather small, giving you time to adjust to the interface and style of play. Later on they grow in size, but they never get too big to handle. The objectives in each map differ, from the generic “defeat all opponents” to more difficult ones such as “all party members must survive” or various iterations of escort tasks. The maps are usually perfectly tailored for the individual objectives, with long ravines where you must navigate past hordes of enemies in order to escape and bridges which offer plenty of tactical opportunities.

One of the pitfalls of turn based tactical games is that you can usually play very defensively, taking out enemies one at a time, never really fanning out your soldiers. To prevent that this game only gives you limited amount of turns to finish each confrontation. I never was a fan of games with time/turn limits, but I never ran out of turns here (as long as I didn’t try to turtle up). Surprisingly enough even though the game forces you to spread out your units, you’ll often want to keep them next to each other. Why? Because standing next to each other grants your units a defensive boost. It never makes them unbeatable mind you, but it can mean the difference between life and death when facing against multiple archers or semi-bosses.
Hurdling against each other will only work so far and you’ll have to go out and attack a foe sooner or later. As in most turn-based tactical games you’ll first get to move your units and then perform one of the possible actions. These range from attacking to casting spells and using items. Crucial to your strategy is the fact that you can move your units in any order you wish when it is your turn. This works really well with another feature the game presents – fiery auras. Each time you strike a foe a sparkly aura appears in the square behind him. Placing one of your units into it before striking will result in extra damage. You can make entire streaks of such auras, but keep in mind that the auras stay active during your opponents turn as well, so having too many active can backfire in a cataclysmic way.

Swords and spells

Tactical RPGs always go hand in hand with multiple classes. The main question is how each individual game incorporates them. Jeanne D’Arc takes a very unique approach, with the only character specific trait being his weapon of choice. Joan prefers to use a sword for example, while Jean (one of the 13 companions she meets during the game) is happier with a spear in his hand. Each weapon type has several unique abilities that other weapon wilders can’t use, as well as limitations that keep the game balanced. Spear wielders can attack from two squares away for example (preventing counter-attacks), but because of the two-handed nature of their weapon they can’t equip shields.

The customization comes into play with spirit stones. Each character can have up to three stones equipped and they can be swapped at any time (outside of battle). These stones fall into 4 different categories. The first (red) category are offensive abilities such as finishing moves and attacks that deal extra damage. The second (green) stones imbue the user with magical abilities such as throwing fireballs or healing allies while the third (yellow) stones unlock class specific abilities. The final (blue) type of stones gives various stat boosts. The system is incredibly flexible and allows you to mold every character according to your needs. Is your spear unit too weak? Equip him with a damage modifying stone and you’re set. Constantly having your healer killed? Drop a defensive stone into his inventory! Later on you get the ability to merge stones into more powerful ones, giving you even more freedom when deciding how to tackle the various challenges.

There is one final aspect to combat. Some of the characters (including Joan) can transform with the help of one of the bracelets. This ability can be used only once in every battle and it lasts only 2 to 3 turns, so you have to be careful when you use it. The result is a more powerful unit which deals tremendous damage and has one of the most powerful abilities of them all – every time the unit kills a foe his turn resets, letting you mow through several enemies in a single turn. Sometimes the ability is overpowered, but there will be times where that will be the only thing standing between victory and certain death.

I’ve mentioned the sleek FMV cinematics that are littered all over the game. After watching the intro I was expecting to be disappointed with mediocre graphics, but that didn’t happen. I was actually surprised by how good the game looks. The cel-shaded characters and hand drawn textures on the terrain look terrific, though they would probably look a lot worse on a computer with a higher resolution than the small PSP screen. As it is though you’ll often mistake the graphics for a 2D hand-drawn scene, which is more than you can say for 90% of the PSP games out there.  Unfortunately the sound is not quite up there, though the songs aren’t half bad and the voiceovers in the cinematics sound great. It’s just that the music become repetitive early on and talking is limited to squeaky sounds outside of the videos.

Conclusion

There aren’t many turn based games on the PSP and except for Joanne D’Arc not one of them is really great. You might think that on a different platform this game wouldn’t be as good, mainly because of harsher competition, but that’s as far away from the truth as possible. The very flexible class system, interesting story that draws a lot from actually history and excellent production values make the adventures of Joan of Arc stand out from a mile away. Fans of strategy games and those that can appreciate good gameplay alike should go out and buy Jeanne D’Arc this very instant. Who knows how long it will be before the next triple A title is released of the PSP?