![]() Plus you’ve got your league of wacky and unpredictable professors, ghosts wandering the halls, unlikely friendships struck between students - yeah, this is Harry Potter, but who gives a shit? You can skip through the cutscenes if it rubs you raw, after all. The game is thick with it - I mean, shit, the headmaster? Bloke what runs the school and took out the archmage years ago to claim the crown of Badassinest Wizard? Goes by Gammel Dore. You’ve probably already read about the myriad parallels drawn between the world and story of GrimGrimoire and that of Harry Potter, and I’ll concede that these comparisons are no mere exaggeration. GrimGrimoire puts you in the boots of one Lillet Blan, a new student at a magic academy for gifted youths - the Silver Star tower, former home of a mighty archmage, repurposed as a school. Before we get into that, though, let me introduce you to the world of GrimGrimoire proper. ![]() But the game most certainly takes the genre in some interesting and heretofore unexplored directions, working well not simply in spite of its console roots, but by extension of them. GrimGrimoire answered that question quick-like, and I’ll issue the same courtesy to all y’all: the game is most certainly a real-time strategy, and the conventions typical of the genre remain intact even in its gussied-up, vertically-oriented outfitting: establish a base, build a slew of units, and send those units to a swift and sticky death to achieve a goal. The big one: how much can you monkey with the RTS genre before it becomes something not quite RTS? I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice and expect StarCraft out of GrimGrimoire, but I did have some questions. After having my ass thoroughly handed to me by the game and my expectations chewed up and spat in my face, my thoughts lingered on Vanillaware’s second project, GrimGrimoire, a side-scrolling 2D real-time strategy.Ĭould that work? Doesn’t the very notion of such a creation take a figurative crap in the mouth of everything we know the RTS genre to be? Flash forward almost two months, and here we are.įor me, Odin Sphere was a success, but it was a success that took some time to understand enjoyment required careful reconfiguration of my expectations. ![]() Vanillaware’s first effort Odin Sphere was a flawed but beautiful game that really showed what these lads were all about, mashing up unparalleled beauty - even among its next-gen brethren - with an unusual take on the beat-’em-up genre that got me thinking what a beat-’em-up ought to look and feel like. It’s not as though they haven’t earned the affection, either. Ah, Vanillaware - two games within two months of each other and already they’ve managed to capture the hearts and minds of 2D enthusiasts everywhere.
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