The atmospheric sound effects do a lot of good here and make the unbelievable world of metallic figures going around what appear to be real-world fantasy environments seem far more realistic in execution than it seems in theory. The sound effects are even better – an early scene with flames crackling in the background suck you into things instantly, and later scenes outdoors involve birds chirping that sound so realistic, you may actually start looking outside your windows to see if there are any nearby. The soundtrack is full of classical fare but its varying intensity helps the battles really come alive. Other than the lack of voice-over for the large text areas, the sound design is absolutely incredible. It’s not a huge issue, just something that takes you out of the game until you get used to it. There’s clearly supposed to be text on them, but you can’t read it because of how smeared it appears. This problem affects the characters as well, but not as severely – the characters themselves look nicely detailed, but their bases look terrible. You can tell what everything is supposed to be, but textures are really muddy. The aesthetic of using the little metal figurines works really well and sets CS apart from anything else on another system. It’s definitely different, but I love the use of text to graphically describe things like deep tissue damage and clothes becoming slowly stained with blood – it adds a sense of gravity to what’s going on. Instead, attacks involve a character leaning slightly forward, and you using a combination of your imagination and the on-screen text to describe injuries to fill in the blanks. Since the 32-bit era, we’ve all come to expect elaborate spell and attack animations, but you won’t find that here. Similarly, it takes some time to grow accustomed to battles without much in the way of animation. Characters skills can be increased, so it isn’t like you’re always stuck with boring, stock characters, but there is an adjustment to be made given how shops have been a standard thing in all kinds of console RPGs for decades. Unlike a JRPG, leveling up or going to stores isn’t necessary - everything is obtained after combat and can’t all be kept since there’s a set amount of points to spend on items left by enemies. Like those, in Crimson Shroud, you’ll have a group (here, it’s always three) with a variety of skill sets and the last team to survive wins. If you’re fearing it due to not playing a tabletop RPG, you’ll be glad to know that the learning curve isn’t all that high as long as you’re used to turn-based JRPGs. The use of little metallic characters on bases to represent them is a perfect way to blend the JRPG gameplay style with tabletop RPG trappings and make the game a bit more accessible. Using the stylus to throw the variety of dice feels like the best way to replicate that act on the system and having dice throws alter conversation paths at times is a nice touch. The core tabletop RPG setup works fairly well, though. The pacing of the game can be fairly glacial as well since text can only be skipped during backtracking - a common occurrence that also causes things to slow to a crawl. It’s hard to recommend this on anything but the 3DS XL for that reason since eyes can easily become strained trying to read the walls of text. Trying to read paragraph after paragraph of text on the regular 3DS’s small screen, however, can be troublesome. The use of dice still involves being active as you can move them using the stylus (or just hit A if you’re feeling lazy), while the text-heavy narration and descriptions fit what would be set if rules were being said aloud. In some ways, the transition is a smooth one. Since something like that hasn’t really been done before, it’s easy to wonder just how well such a concept can be translated to a video game. Now, the creator of Ogre Battle has brought an homage to tabletop RPGs to the 3DS with Crimson Shroud. So far, its piece-meal approach has allowed players to partake in an excellent on-rails shooter with some of the best graphics on the system in Liberation Maiden and Aero Porter, which offered up a very unique luggage sorting puzzle game with iffy execution in places. The third part of the Guild 01 compilation has finally come to the 3DS eShop.
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