With so much potential, it’s a pity that “Makai Kingdom” has any flaws at all.
The latest in a series of tactical role-playing games produced by Nippon Ichi Software, “Makai” is a strong game despite a few key flaws.
Nippon Ichi has cornered the market for tactical RPGs in the vein of “Final Fantasy Tactics” and “Ogre Battle” during the last few years, releasing a series of well-designed games that usually add something new or inventive to the genre.
Past releases by Nippon Ichi include “Disgaea,” “La Pucelle” and “Phantom Brave.”
Fans of Ichi’s past games will be glad to know that the same style of humor present in their hit “Disgaea” is on board for “Makai”.
Instead of suffering under the story-heavy and nearly incomprehensible plots of most tactical RPGs, “Makai Kingdom” has a surprisingly well-scripted and funny story.
The main character, Zetta, the overlord of a netherworld, accidentally ends up in the form of a book after nearly destroying his own realm.
He can rebuild his kingdom if he can get other overlords to write their wishes in him, which is where much of the humor comes in.
Most of the other overlords, a motley crew of strange critters and offbeat characters, all enjoy adding little twists to their wishes that generally make things harder for the beleaguered hero.
This brings me to one of the problems with this game – in every chapter, you choose one of the overlords to ask to make the dungeons you play through.
Each one brings different traits to the randomly generated dungeon. With the exception of one or two maps, randomly generated traits dominate every dungeon.
Nippon Ichi has included randomly generated dungeons in many of their previous games; however, all of those generated dungeons were usually overshadowed by the exceptionally well-designed story maps.
“Makai Kingdom” uses its random dungeons to make every play unique, but it lacks the well-designed and created maps of Ichi’s other efforts.
The game also retains the fully gridless system “Phantom Brave” used for combat, making battles far more fluid than most tactical RPGs.
One last gripe: Nippon Ichi has wonderful artwork and character designs for everything appearing in the game – one look at the artwork in the story and cinema scenes, as well as the manual art reveals loads of character in every design.
They insist on retaining low resolution, 2-dimensional pixellated sprites for their characters, which makes the game look like a 16-bit era throwback. Sony’s PlayStation (PSOne) or Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) could probably handle “Makai’s” graphics.
Other recent tactical RPGS like “Stella Deus” use high-definition texture and sprites, why does NIS hold back?
I can understand their reluctance to move to polygonal models for the characters, but why the death grip on16-bit graphics?
Most gamers will be turned off by the old-looking graphics, but if you enjoy the old 16-bit RPGs and things like “Final Fantasy Tactics”, then “Makai Kingdom” is for you.