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Great game, but know what you are getting into.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 16 / 18
Date: October 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is fantastic, just know that it is a hardcore strategy RPG. If you've ever played Disgaea, Phantom Brave, or the like, then you have a pretty good idea of what you're getting in to. However, this game is significantly more complex than either of those titles. You can easily select something on the menu and end up winning that particular battle, but ending up with a "Bad Ending" screen right after that...

What sets this game apart is the story and the characters. They are extremely unique, and quite different than any other game you will play. I don't know how this game got away with only a T (Teen) rating as there is quite a bit of adult language and references... to say the least.

This game is definitely not for beginners, but if you love strategy, and can't get enough of strategy RPGs (like myself...) then you'll love this game.

Hate the Combat System, Love the Story

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 14 / 16
Date: October 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

An attempt to take the combat system of Ogre Battle (a game I hated) and combine it with the Disgaea (a game I loved). It ends at mediocre with highlights of brilliance. The fact you DO NOT control your characters in combat is a huge negative, especially when your entire group of level 1000 characters decide to super useless overkill by focusing attacks on one guy who isn't even the enemy leader.

The story is funny and good.

The game combat is simplistic and tedious.

Sounds effects like the crying baby in the storyline and wolf's howl make you wonder if the developers gave each other bonuses for being annoying.

The game AI leaves much to be desired. It is possible to play the first 20 story maps without ever changing rooms, using items, summoning, or moving. All you do is hit R1 and X, and the enemy comes over, attacks you, and dies to your counter-attack. I read a novel while doing this.

Rooms. Almost good. You cannot move the hero between rooms. You have to re-roll the hero's room to change. That means if you are lucky and generate a cool room, you can't move your hero into it. This soured me on the entire system.

Why does this game get three stars? Story. If you play rpg's for combat, give this one a pass. This game needed another 2 months of development time for the combat and room system, and it shows.

A welcome surprise

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: October 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I didn't really expect much from Soul Nomad, but upon playing it, I was pleasently surprised. Taking strategy role playing to a more fun level, Soul Nomad changes things up from the Disgaea formula by shifting playing perspectives and the battle system. This time around, you battle in a 2-D side scrolling/isometric plane that features some well drawn sprites and effects. The battle system itself is a change of pace, but definitely for the better, and it actually winds up being pretty fun. The only real downsides to Soul Nomad are some slight graphical glitches and the annoying quality of the randomly generated rooms, which end up causing more difficulty than they're worth. That aside, everything else about Soul Nomad makes it a winner: an engaging and more than entertaining story with some downright hilarious dialogue, more than solid voice acting and music, and a lengthy enough quest that helps you get the most out of the game. All in all, Soul Nomad is more than worth checking out for strategy RPG fans and Disgaea fans alike; both of which will definitely find something to enjoy here.

Ogre Battle On Steroids

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: October 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Remember Ogre Battle? Well if you do then you can expect very similar gameplay in Soul Nomad only with a few more bells and whistles to note. If you're not familiar with the series then read on.

Unlike other NIS strategy RPGS you don't control single characters in this game exactly. You build up squadrons of troops and place them in to "rooms". These rooms can contain up to 9 soldiers of your choosing. Depending on where you place a character in the room (front, middle, back) will determine what attack they will use in battle. So a single unit is actually made up of several soldiers that execute predetermined attacks based on their location within the room. You move these units around a map which is comprised of many smaller tiles each of which has a terrain type. Some terrain is harder to fight on while others give you a special bonus.

As you progress through the game you unlock new troop types and rooms. By combining different soldier types or having multiple troops of a single type in a room you unlock special attacks and combos. Different rooms also come with different layouts of available slots and come equipped with decorations that give you various bonuses. All of the rooms except one come with a standard bonus but there is also a chance when it's created that additional effects will spawn on the room.

The game is fun, initially I thought it was a little hard to bring up new troops but if you have enough money you can buy them leveled up. Like in other NIS games there's a randomly generated dungeon which is where you do most of your leveling by entering in to a room to "inspect" it which will increase the power of the room and yield bonus points for honing your troops.

Unfortunately this game does fail me in many ways...

-It's too simple to unlock all of the characters and rooms (with a couple of exceptions) since all that is required is moving through the game. There are some greatly challenging optional fights, but I don't really feel compelled to go for them since by the time you have beaten the game everything begins to become ridiculously repetetive.

-There's less than 30 skills in the game many of which only your Hero's room has access to. Another thing that sucks about the skills is you don't earn them in any way, you simply have to have the proper combination of characters and there you have it, you are then free to spam 3-4 skills for the REST OF THE GAME.

-Unlike the other reviewer I find this game to be far more simplistic than other NIS games. It's basically a straight up level grind. There's no need to plan reincarnations or hunt down rare items you simply go through inspection after inspection leveling up and spending points on your characters.

-The sound effects are also highly repetitive and some of them are down right annoying. You will grow to loath fighting or using wolves since for them to attack they have to howl what seems to be no less than 6 times. Not even different howls, the same howl over and over again.

It's a pretty decent game but it will probably be a let down for most NIS fans. If I could go back in time I would either have played this game before all of NIS's other games (minus La Pucelle) or not at all.

A Gem Trapped in a Pit of Garbage

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 17, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I feel sorry for Soul Nomad as a game that has one of the better stories of any JRPGs to come out in the past couple years; but in the end comes off feeling very lazily designed. Unfortunately the bad outweighs the good.

It has an excellent story as far as JRPGs are concerned, the characters are quite likable and will grow on you. My major qualm being is that they spent no time developing cut scenes for the game... The vast vast majority of cut scenes will take place on a brown paper map of the world you are exploring with the characters cycling through the 4 or 5 motions they bothered to draw for them. This basically renders every cutscene completely uninteresting to watch as they didn't even bother to place the characters in different environments and the character sprites rarely interact with each other, opting to just stand there alternating between stances.

The combat system is similar to Advance Wars, which is basically strategy RPG except instead of moving around single characters you move around squads of people. You control who is in which squad by placing units that you are either given or create through the character creation screen.

Each squad is placed in a seperate "room" which you have a limited number of. There are many different types of rooms with different bonuses and different number of slots available to place squad members (max of 9 slots). Of course you're going to want to have the most slots you can have and the room with the best bonus, but unfortunately they decided to make room creation incredibly time consuming and completely uninteresting. Rooms are generated COMPLETELY AT RANDOM, you have NO CONTROL over what they generate. That means if you want a particular room with a particular number of spots you can spend literally HOURS, yes HOURS, mashing X while the game randomly generates rooms until the one you want pops up.

Once again though...the story is really involved and has so many plots twists and good characters that it really makes me sad the developer chose to do such a great injustice to the game by packaging it in what I can only describe as garbage. Please show love for your game and show love to your buyers by at least TRYING.

I clocked in at a little over 40 hours on my first play through and will being playing it again for the demon story line. Of those 40 hours I am sad to admit that about 5 of those hours was spent just mashing X trying to get a particular room to generate...

Ogre Battle with more balance issues

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: March 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Soul nomad at its heart is Ogre Tactics, each unit is made up of members with particular strengths and weaknesses. They each also have a preface for whom they target, archers, for example, prefer clerics. This means in your unit of 1-9 characters, the archer will mostly target the cleric. This creates a distinct disadvantage to trying to have a unit of archers and archers alone, as in one attack, they may all target the cleric, leaving the rest of the enemy unit unharmed.

Each unit must be placed on a grid, the grids each have their own random battles you can fight to power up the grid. These battles tend to be random in the strengths of the enemy and how easy they are to over come. Each grid also has their own unique abilities, which gives more strategy, but the end result is often choosing the strongest, or choosing the one that gives the most additional benefits outside of battle (money or gold).

All in all, its a fun game, but the lack of unit balance will eventually wear you down. Being able to only actually have 5 unit types lead gets very annoying very fast, and some units seem like weaker versions of other units, unless they're leading. The end result tends to be most leaders don't represent the troop, they just represent itself, and all other members of the unit are appendages.The game doesn't compliment itself to looking at units over all.

The different units in a team have different power moves that can be performed. While balance wise they're fine, the graphics typically took way to long, or were way to Naruto-ish.

Graphically Impaired, But Overall Great!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 08, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I want to start by saying that I am in no way a person who thinks great, shiny graphics are the most important part of a game, or of any gameplay experience. I must say, though, that Soul Nomad left me feeling like the creators just got a little lazy in the graphic department. Needless to say they make up for it everywhere else, but it is just hard to settle in to find the full goodness of the game; the graphics just kind of put you off. If you can make it passed that, you'll be treated to a very interesting system based around rooms, which can be equipped with various "decorations" to alter the bonuses given to your party in battles. The combat itself is a kind of combination of Ogre Battle and Disgaea that is at first glance confusing but will soon having you feeling like it is simple. That's not to say it's not deep, though. The story-telling style and scenarios will be very familiar to long-time fans of Nippon-Ichi games; the characters and style of humor are very similar. This is not a bad thing, as most of their other games are great. To sum it up, this is definitely worth playing, but I would wait until you can find it for a lower price (but don't wait too long; I have a feeling that once it disappears it will cost a fortune to buy a copy, if you can even track one down).

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