Tactical RPG: Soul Nomad and the World Eaters

This game by Nippon Ichi Software (NISA) is a fairly obscure Tactical RPG that just drips with awesomeness. Even among fans of NISA games it seems like this one RPG seemed to have just slipped by. It even slipped by me at first! The truth about this game, though, is that it is a really cool Ogre Battle clone. If ever you've played Ogre Battle, you know how cool it is... or how frustratingly complicated it is (the SNES one, at least), unless you devote some serious efforts and time into understanding what's going on in it.

First let me give some background info about Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, and a bit about its system, then I'll explain what Nippon Ichi did to swap things up for Soul Nomad. Ogre Battle was a game developed by the now defunct Quest, and was published in America by Atlus as a somewhat limited edition game. Its combat system involved setting your units in row formations which would alter what attacks they could do, as well as how many times they could attack per battle. The movement system was a real-time system with small chess-piece like characters moving around on the map, meeting up with enemy units and engaging in combat. The game was essentially a drawn out campaign to defeat an evil empire and save the world. The story was very compelling, but I won't tell you much about it just in case you happen to play and don't like spoilers.

Fast forward to the N64 era. The N64 version of Ogre Battle was a watered down version of the game, which was much easier to manage and handle. The reason it was so easy to handle was because the alignment system got dumbed down a lot. The system in the original Ogre Battle on the SNES was incredible fickle and a single mistake or mismanagement of a unit could spell doom for your alignment rating for a very long time. You needed to manage this fickle system very closely, and make sure you didn't make any mistakes, lest you face the consequences. Ogre Battle 64 made the alignment requirements for class upgrades a lot easier to keep in check, causing the game to go more closely to the way YOU wanted it to go, as opposed to going how you allowed it to go through poor unit management and bad Tactical planning.

Fast forward this time to Soul Nomad. The Ogre Battle main series has not had any other incarnations since OB64, sadly, and I thought its battle system would disappear from gaming forever. Of course, NIS had something to say about that... Because they're so awesome. NIS brought out Soul Nomad, which is a game whose battle system, anybody could tell you, is very much like that of Ogre Battle : March of the Black Queen. If anybody disagreed with you on that point they were either wrong, lying, or never played Ogre Battle. The game basically uses a standard Tactical RPG movement system, and implements the row based combat from Ogre Battle.

I will be going into more detail about Soul Nomad and the World Eaters when I have time to make a bigger post about the system and how to break it. I will push it up in my schedule if requested, so leave a comment or email me at alsburyt at gmail dot com if you have a request for me to push up my article on Soul Nomad.

The Purpose of the Beyond RPGs Blog

Hi there,

My name is Tyler and this is my new RPG blog! I'm a huge fan of tactical RPGs and console style RPGs. I'm also a huge fan of video games in general, but I decided to make this blog a very focused effort. And so I present to you the purpose of the Beyond RPGs Blog. The reason I called it "Beyond RPGs" is that I wanted to exaggerate the fact that I deal with topics far outside the scope of what some RPG bloggers may deal with. I will write articles about far more than what they may deal with, and I hope to inform people of games they may not know about due to certain companies' lack of distribution and marketing abilities.

For example, the company Nippon Ichi Software America has recently become somewhat known, they are still quite obscure, however, when compared to a company like the mega-known Square-Enix. I'm going to touch upon subjects that pertain to lesser known companies like Nippon Ichi. Atlus is another company that used to be in the same bag as Nippon Ichi but is now a very popular RPG company. Back in the SNES days and a bit past then they were very underground - and this is back before the Internet and informative blogging existed in the first place!

I'm digressing somewhat, but the point remains, I hope to not only inform people about the lesser known RPG companies like Nippon Ichi and Atlus (the Atlus of the past, at least...) but also give tips on playing RPGs and write reviews about RPGs. I'm going to do my best to keep you guys up to date with what I'm playing and the ways I've discovered to break the systems of the games! Also, just because the focus of the blog is on newer games that are somewhat obscure (namely: not by Squeenix), doesn't mean I won't touch upon the ultra-popular and incredibly fun (but easy) Final Fantasy series.

I'm not sure what the topic of my next post will be, but check back to see, I will post when I can. I have a few ideas cooking up in my head... I'll see which one I pursue!