Gladius Review
Lucas Arts may be the single most awesome US game company out there. Sure, they turn out some crap games too, but by and large they make stuff that's at least solid, if not good. On a fairly regular basis their games are great, and they pretty much single-handedly were responsible for making the adventure game genre fun for about six years straight. Gladius comes from these same folks, and is billed as a tactical RPG, which means it's in the running against my favorite game of all time, Final Fantasy Tactics. Let's see how it stacks up, hmm?
First off, let's get to the meat of any game: the play itself. Gladius is a pretty up-front, balls-to-the-wall tactical RPG, with very little in the way. The good is, if you like RPGs where you can move people around, Gladius is good. The bad is, if you like doing much of anything else in your RPGs, Gladius is bad. There are some strange little mini-games attached to making attacks - mainly timing and button-mashing fests where it gives the players something vaguely more active to do, but since that can be turned off, and also since that's not much of a departure from the main feature of play, it doesn't factor in a whole lot. What that ultimately boils down to is whether you like having a say in your critical hits or not. Ultimately, it has great tactical RPG gameplay, but pretty much nothing else. This means I like it a lot, but I somehow doubt it'll appeal to less patient folks. A quick note - if you dislike loading times, you whiny bastard, make a note that Gladius has them, in spades. They're not bad, on the grand scale of loading times, but they're there. Oh, and there's also co-op play, which is actually pretty neat.
Let's tackle the characters and story next. Allow me to breakdown the plot for you. You're a gladiator: you fight people. There's a vaguely more complex back story to each character, but in base, the entire game is just an excuse to have a great deal of tactical RPG play. Unlike FFT, which managed to have a dynamic and interesting story that ALSO provided plenty of tactical fights, the dev team for Gladius really didn't do much other than come up with a passable story and throw the character straight into the arena. I found that simultaneously silly and excusable; since the game doesn't really try to couch it in other terms, and since it was pretty much advertised as being entirely about gameplay and little about plot, I'm not so irate about this. Still, I'm handing the lowest score out here, just 'cause a sucky story is a sucky story is a suck. Character-wise, the game does somewhat better, without being anything spectacular. At the start you get to choose one of two major characters; Ursula, aka Norse woman with a sword, and Valens, aka Roman guy with a sword. Basically, Ursula's the beginner mode, with a fairly moderate difficulty scale and a good variety of abilities, and Valens is the bad-ass hard difficulty. Coincidentally, Valens rocks much more than Ursula. I can't make much comment on the personalities - they're only marginally better than archetypal, and really do little for the game except for introduce the player to the integral systems and provide some witty repartee. Unlike, say, the original Grandia, wherein the personality of the major characters superseded the poor plot and produced a surprisingly good story based entirely on character development, Gladius depends entirely on its gameplay to provide a rickety structure of story.
Sonically, Gladius is excellent. It has a great soundtrack, which was clearly performed by a real orchestra. It is, in fact, fairly reminiscent of a few tracks from the Gladiator soundtrack, and is both entirely appropriate and awesome. It's just plain good, and the universal high quality rivals a good Final Fantasy soundtrack. Big thumbs up! The varying in-game sounds are clear, high-quality, too, and fairly diverse. I get a great deal of joy out of the sounds my opponents make when they get hit. As for the voice acting, well, it's a fairly mixed bag. Some is really quite good, but a couple characters were depicted by people who wouldn't know proper syllabic emphasis if they were choked with alphabits every time they got a line wrong. Especially Usus - god is that guy awful. Iiiiiiiiiii'm USUS!
Graphically, the game is pretty good. Good animation, interesting character design, just some good quality stuff. My one complaint is that some of the facial expressions are over-done. Especially the mountain-eyebrow of Urlan, who looks like his eyeball is about to rocket out of his face at times. Just sort of over the top, you know? In general, though, the textures, the animation, the everything looks good.
When it comes to replay, I'd say this game has marginal replay. Two characters, and thus two difficulty levels, helps out notably, but I don't know whether this'll be a game I'll be coming back to once a year or not. There's a fair bet that, once I've run through the game completely with both characters and seen most of what there is to see, I won't have a great interest in coming back later. Was it worth the initial $50? Yes, I'd definitely say so; it's a very entertaining game, that I'm getting tons of hours out of.
Final Scores:
Replayability - 5/10
Gameplay - 9/10
Characters and Story - 4/10
Graphics - 9/10
Sound and Music - 9/10
Overall - 8/10