Despite the unconventional names, the systems aren’t as weird as they seem on the surface it’s really just your units’ formations and giving each squad some items that’ll boost their stats. Each room can also be decorated with items that are used up after a single skirmish. Some of the rooms get quite strange, with even stranger effects like a crime scene that makes it easy to evade attacks at the risk of being killed in one hit. When the game called the teams “rooms”, I wasn’t expecting them to actually be rooms, but they are in fact randomized layouts like nurse’s offices and casinos that give certain boosts to the residents. Exactly what each character does in battle is dependent on where they’re placed in their room, so there’s a lot of options in finding the right synergy for each team. Fights play out in overhead perspective that’s typical of tactical RPGs, but once each squad enters a skirmish against an enemy team, they switch viewpoints and start fighting automatically. The characters don’t fight on their own, but are instead arranged into squads or “rooms”, similar to something like Ogre Battle. These might be generic fighters, but they come with unconventional abilities, like flying around the map or turning invisible. These include story-relevant characters with unique abilities and mercenaries for hire that fit into several different classes like soldiers, archers and bards. This port doesn’t seem to touch the original script, but I would’ve at least changed the name of the Gypsy class.Īs they journey to slay the World Eaters, the protagonist and Gig enlist the help of a number of other characters, sometimes against their will. I personally don’t have a problem with it being like that Gig is the kind of character who would absolutely go on a tirade about being cancelled by SJWs or some such nonsense, so the unapologetically crude and insulting language still fits perfectly. Soul Nomad’s colourful script uses language that straight up wouldn’t be used in an RPG localisation these days. Yosuke, where did you learn all those ableist slurs? It doesn’t help that the English dub has Yuri Lowenthal playing Gig, so unfortunately I can only hear him as Yosuke from Persona 4. Since I’ve been playing a lot of Pokémon Unite lately, I can relate on some level, but over the years I’ve come to hate Gig’s particular brand of edgelord humour and intense nihilism. Gig’s all about uncontrollable bloodlust, viewing any “allies” as being completely worthless if they don’t obey his every command. But the constant snark becomes tiring over time. Gig’s presence starts off as an irreverent twist on a familiar plot, as he cracks jokes at the expense of the hero’s ditzy friend Danette. He’s constantly in your face, interjecting in every scene to insult someone or complain crudely about something. Or maybe it just seems that way because he’s paired with an effectively mute protagonist, an echo chamber for Gig’s sadistic thoughts. But none of them had the hero share a body with someone as truly repulsive as Gig. This whole odd couple dynamic where the protagonist shares their body with a monstrous being has become a common trope in anime and manga, showing up in series like Yu-Gi-Oh, Parasyte and, more recently, Jujutsu Kaisen. And so Gig’s soul is unsealed and fused with the protagonist as the pair set about taking down the World Eaters, potentially so they can wipe out humanity themselves. The only one who can stop them consuming the planet? The Master of Death, Gig, who almost destroyed the world himself 200 years ago. The story begins in a world where the population is rapidly decreasing, in part due to giant rampaging monsters known as World Eaters. Now playable on PC and Nintendo Switch, Soul Nomad still feels fresh almost 15 years after its original release. Though Soul Nomad may look like a typical strategy RPG on the surface, it’s anything but conventional, with a mix of odd tactical options and dark humour that was unlike anything out at the time. Nippon Ichi or NIS have long been known for their offbeat RPGs, like Disgaea and Phantom Brave, but 2007’s Soul Nomad & The World Eaters might be one of their most unique.
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