Rainbow Moon Review (PS3)

     When I played Front Mission on DS a few years back, I had a lot of fun, but my big complaint about that game is its lack of difficulty. Mission after mission, I steamrolled and dominated my opponents. I felt like I could have handled double the opponents or take on a whole squad with just one or two of my guys. That's why when I started up Rainbow Moon, another game with a turn-based tactical battle system, I opted for hard mode right off the bat. Even though Rainbow Moon is a tactical game, it's so different from Front Mission, it felt like a totally different genre. I might need to replay Front Mission sometime on a harder difficulty... This review is covering hard mode, as that's what I played, so your mileage may vary if you opt for normal mode.

     Rainbow Moon is different than a lot of tactical games in that it is also a full-fledged dungeon crawling RPG. It behaves very much like a classic JRPG in that you go to towns, get quests from NPC's then head into the wild and down into dungeons to complete them and move the game forward. It's just that when you get into a battle, instead of a classic turn-based system, you have a tactical battle where you can move around a grid to position yourself.

     Your main character is Baldren, a warrior who has an annual duel with his rival, Namoris. This year, they plan to fight it out in an area known for its unstable portals. Namoris surprise attacks Baldren and forces him through a portal. Several thousand monsters mysteriously appear and go through with him. He wakes up on another world, the titular Rainbow Moon. Unfortunately, there's no known way back, and the army of monsters he saw have spread far and wide. To make matters worse, the people of the world blame him for the army of monsters now running amok on their land since they came through the portal together. It's an interesting set up, but I hope you're not playing this game for the story. It's quite weak. It's just barely there to get you to go through myriad dungeons and fight thousands of monsters. The game would be much better if it had a great story to go along with it. It's a shame too, as there is a lot you could do with this concept. I do have to say that the side quest called “Love and Hate” is very compelling and well written. It's basically the only bright spot in the whole story though.

     Since the story is so weak, this game would really suffer if its gameplay had any major flaws. Luckily, it doesn't. As you make your way through the colorful world, you'll always have an objective for your main quest, as well as multiple sidequests you can complete for optional rewards. Quests usually involve going somewhere, like a wilderness area or a dungeon, and finding or killing something. There are two types of battles you can get yourself into. Random battles pop up in the corner of your screen. An information bar tells you exactly what would be in the battle if you choose to join it. These are totally optional; you only engage in them if you press cross while the information bar is displayed. I should note that you can also instantly escape from any battle as long as it is one of your characters' turns, so unwanted battles are minimized quite nicely. There are also enemies visible onscreen that walk around or guard certain areas, and touching them will automatically engage you in battle with them.

     On the battle screen, you and your enemies are on a grid. You take turns moving and taking actions, such as moving a square, attacking, or using an item. You can perform a number of actions based on how many sub-turns your character has. You start with one, and I got up to six by the time I finished the game. You can have up to three of your six main party members fighting in any given battle. In hard mode, the defend command (which I find useless in many other games) is absolutely essential, as many of the enemies you encounter can kill you on their turn if you aren't guarding. Once you get a few sub-turns to play around with, this idea really works in the game's favor as you try to position yourself in a way that lets you use all your sub-turns to attack and leaves you safe from enemy attacks without guarding. This is often risky though, because your character might get smashed if you didn't calculate correctly. The safe bet is to guard up at the end of every turn. At the top of the screen is a lineup of whose turn is coming up. Paying attention to this is important as you don't have to guard if you know your character is about to have two turns in a row. Or maybe it's time to heal up if the boss is about to take two turns before you get a turn again. I wish this lineup was longer, as it only shows you so many turns ahead, and in a battle with many enemies you might not be able to see when your next turn will be. You also can't tell which enemy is which if there are many of the same type, as they all have the same icon on the lineup.

     Most of the time you will be attacking with your character's skills, which are special attacks that use up MP. Each skill has its own attack pattern, so you need to line up your characters properly to get the most out of each turn. Many skills let you attack multiple enemies if you can reach them. Some skills let you attack enemies that are far away. Others need you to close in on the enemy or keep certain spots open on the grid. Some skills let you move when you use them or move your enemies around. The main strategies you will develop will have a lot to do with which characters you choose to use and where those characters need to be positioned in order to use their skills. For example, my favorite character, Gorodo, has a skill that lets him attack at a long distance, but its range is limited if the enemy is directly in front of him. He also has skills that let him move into crowds of enemies and attack them all at close range. So sometimes I would position him off to the side of enemies I really wanted dead so that he could hit them with his long range attack, and other times he would spend his turns moving deep into hordes of enemies to do maximum damage on the greatest number of enemies. Another example would be the main character Baldren, who gets one powerful skill that lets him attack multiple enemies that are directly in front of him, and another skill that lets him attack multiple enemies that are diagonal from him. Each of the six playable characters has a nice set of unique skills with attack patterns that help dictate what strategy is most effective for them to employ.

     You'll often face large amounts of enemies. An average battle might have five to ten enemies, but you'll see a few battles with 30+ enemies. It's pretty cool to see the screen filled with these bad guys. In most fights, weaker enemies can be taken out with just a few hits. Higher level enemies and bosses can sometimes take many, many hits, however. Boss fights often involve an epic exchange of blows between your party and the boss, with its many minions being taken out by collateral damage from your skills. Other bosses come with high-level monsters in their retinue, meaning you have to make a choice about whether to concentrate fire on the deadly boss or try and take out the minions first.

     Normal battles often only take a minute or two. That may make it sound like its easy, but like I said, if you're not careful about your guarding, you can end up dead real quick. If your party gets wiped out, you end up right where you were with your party leader alive and at 1 hp. So the only punishment is that you have to use resources to revive and heal your party members (and you also lose whatever items you used in the battle). Money for the healer can be hard to come by on hard mode, so I would often save before battles I wasn't 100% confident about. Saving before these tough battles also allows you to go all out without worrying about losing all your expensive or rare items, like potions to heal yourself and crystals that give you temporary stat boosts.

     The controls for these battles are a little different, but work well. To move, you select move on the menu and then press the direction you want to go rather than selecting a square on the grid like many of these types of games have you do. Movement is final, you can't take your move back once you press the direction button. You also only move one square per sub-turn, unlike many games that give you a set amount of movement when you use the move command. This may sound limiting, but battle areas are small and once you have a few sub-turns for your characters you can move pretty far in one turn. To execute a normal attack, you select attack from the menu and then press the direction you want to attack in if there is an enemy next to you. If you choose skill, you then get an overlay showing the attack pattern of the skill you want to use. You line it up and press cross to execute. You can go back and pick another skill if you can't line your attack up or you decide something else would be better. Cross is execute, circle is cancel, and triangle centers the camera so you can see the whole battlefield. You can't rotate the camera like many tactical games allow, but centering the camera with triangle works really great. I screwed up a few times using the directional buttons to attack and move, but really no more than I would have using a cursor based system like the one in Front Mission and the like. Using the directional buttons to move has a smooth feeling to it that keeps the battles moving along quite nicely.

     Leveling up works slightly different than the traditional RPG system. Each character that participated in a battle earns the same amount of experience points based on the enemies faced. As long as a character was alive when the enemy was killed, they get the points. Earning enough experience points gains you a level, which increases your max hp and mp, and also gives you skill points (used to equip passive abilities) and additional sub-turns at set levels. Your other stats are improved through rainbow pearls, which are earned by the character who deals the killing blow. You trade these pearls in to an NPC called a Savant to increase your defense, attack, speed, and luck (which governs how often you get a critical hit). You can also increase your hp and mp at the Savant, although it costs a lot of rainbow pearls. There is a limit to how much you can increase each stat, but that limit jumps up every time you level up.

     You can equip passive skills to your characters to give them abilities, such as resistance to status effects, buffs to stats, and even an extra sub-turn. These abilities can be quite expensive, so picking them up can be slow going. Attack skills are also very expensive, but your characters can permanently equip them for free once they are bought.

     Weapons and armor are another big part of character growth in Rainbow Moon. Probably the most dramatic, as a new set of gear can really push the power level of your character up drastically. Weapons and armor are expensive (everything is expensive), but you often end up using them for awhile because weapons and armor are also highly upgradeable. I would often upgrade my weapons and armor so much that I could skip the next level of equipment when it became available and wait for the next generation to purchase new stuff. You upgrade armor by adding materials to it at a blacksmith. Each piece of equipment has a certain number of slots for materials. Materials are dropped by enemies. They add stat boosts to your equipment. Rarer materials can also add positive status effects. Adding enough materials to a piece of equipment adds tremendously to its power. It often makes the decision of when to buy new stuff painful as new weapons and armor usually have higher attack and defense, respectively, but don't have the added stat boosts added on to your upgraded equipment. For example, if you have a sword that you've upgraded a lot, it might give a massive boost to your speed stat. The boost might be so valuable that its better to keep your old sword than to buy a new one with higher attack power but no speed boost. This is exactly why I would often skip a generation of equipment, saving up my money to fully kit out my characters when the next set comes out. I love games that offer you equipment choices between items that are different, not necessarily better, and this game has you making hard decisions like that quite often due to this excellent customization system. Shops update with new equipment periodically after story events. To top it all off, weapons and armor are visible on your character, which is awesome.

     As you've probably gathered, in hard mode you are often short on cash with lots of stuff you could possibly by. That's why by about mid-way through the game I decided to just use three out of my six characters. There is a rock, paper, scissors, Spock, lizard system that makes some enemies weak against attacks by certain characters, and I tried to let that govern what characters I was using for awhile, but that spreads your resources thin. I soon learned that with just a few extra levels, a character that is weak against certain enemy types does just fine, or even better, than a character that is strong against it. So I completed the rest of the game with Baldren, Gorodo, and Dozeru.

     There are other systems in Rainbow Moon, including a food system that makes you eat from time to time or lose hp, a time system that give you bonuses based on what day of the week it is, and a network of wells around the world that have different effects when you use them. There's also a bunch of other stuff, but I think I'm hitting on the main ingredients. The 37 (!) tutorials that pop up when you encounter new stuff will tell you about the rest of it.

     The game is extremely colorful and vibrant. The characters aren't sprites, but they kind of look like 3d high definition versions of classic jrpg characters, or like high def versions of the deformed characters from Final Fantasy 7. It's a very cool effect. The character portraits in the menus are these demented looking drawings... very interesting. At least it looks different than other games.

    Everywhere you go, the environment is constantly moving. Plants blow in the wind, insects fly around, mechanical baubles spin, and pennants flap. Monsters and NOC's walk around or bob in place. Talking to them produces a short voice clip of a greeting. The cheery and bright aesthetic is really cool, and really beautiful, and the many different environment types keep things fresh. Animation is a little stiff and limited, but works good enough.

     The music is pretty good, and includes a lot of upbeat tunes for exploring, gloomy tracks for those dank dungeons, and fast paced music for battles. There's a lot of variety, from chimes and strings to chopping piano, to mysterious woodwinds. It all sounds pretty good and some of the standout tracks will stick in your head.

     I'm writing the first draft of this review after beating the main quest on hard mode. It took me 74 hours. That's a lot of game. Maybe the lengthiest main quest I've ever played. But I had fun almost the whole time. By the end, I was ready for it to be over, but ended up having to grind for a few hours to beat the last boss. But by and large grinding was kept to a minimum. Whenever I got stuck, I would go do side quests until I leveled up a bit, then return to the main quest, so it usually didn't feel like grinding. I've heard that the game takes a lot less time on normal mode, but I can't confirm that. There is an insane amount of postgame content, including leveling up to absurd levels, new quests and enemies that pop up, ultimate equipment to get and upgrade, and optional bosses. After taking a month long break to play Bit.Trip Runner 2, I hopped back in to see if I could get into the post game content. Ten minutes later, I decided I needed more of a break. 

     I also realized after this break that the game was pretty forgettable. I hope I've conveyed that I has a lot of fun playing it, but looking back, I can't really remember much in the way of standout moments like I can with other great games, and it's shocking that I spent 74 hours on it.
     So, close to a year later, I am back, and I have earned the platinum trophy! It took me exactly 100 hours. That's 26 hours of play after the main campaign to get the platinum. And guess what; there is still a lot of stuff I could do in the game if I was so inclined. Right now, I'm happy to take another break that will last at least a year and possibly forever; we'll have to play it by ear.

     I can say that the post game journey to the platinum is mostly pretty fun. At least it is if you follow this post-game guide. In my opinion, a few of the items in this guide are a bit out of order, but it's a great outline to follow to help you go through the post-game quests, as there is a little less in-game direction as to what to do than in the main game. Watching your characters quickly soar to insanely high stats and levels that make the main game look like child's play is quite fun, as is beating on the challenging post-game monsters, some of which you get a little glimpse of from time to time in the main campaign.

     Everything in the post game is a hyperbolic version of the main game: weapons and armor become insanely powerful, monsters are blisteringly fast and hit incredibly hard, and your characters quickly become epicly powerful (at least, until they meet the next set of monsters that kick their butts). It was a long post-game experience, but I had a lot of fun getting the platinum. I'm very happy that I ended my run by beating one of the really tough post-game bosses in an epic slug fest. I definitely needed the year-long break from the main game though.

     I toyed with the idea of raising the game's score because I enjoyed the post-game so much, and indeed it is remarkable how much content the game packs in. Unfortunately I ultimately felt that almost everything I said about the main game also applies to the post-game. It's fun and interesting, but probably pretty forgetful in the long run. A few design flaws start to stick out as well. Namely, using rainbow pearls becomes a chore as you get so many you can max out almost all of your bonuses. This means there is no meaningful choice. You just have to walk to a savant and mash cross. It would be nice if you could set this to automatic. Also, at least on hard mode, the characters you aren't using really fall behind in power, and it would be a huge chore to catch them up. It's a shame, because I would like to play around with the characters I usually don't use, but I don't have the interest in spending time just to make them usable. I wish they gained some experience and pearls just for doing nothing if you don't play as them so that you could use them all. Will I ever pick it up again and try to kill the final 2 post-game uber-bosses? …......possibly.  

     Rating the game on hard mode, I'd put Rainbow Moon in the Great Game, tier 3 category. It's plenty of fun, but a good story, or at least a decent story would have gone a long way in giving the proceedings meaning. Still, I admire the gameplay first approach, and the battles are satisfying, as is customizing your characters. If you're looking for a game like Front Mission, where you fight like 20 big battles, keep in mind that this is nothing like that. I fought exactly 900 battles during the main game according to the stats menu, and most of them were very short. It's a different take on the strategy rpg, and I enjoyed it a lot.

I hope this review is helpful as I'm a little daunted as to how to accurately give my impression of a game this big and time consuming. If it makes no sense or is inaccurate in any way, forgive me.