Personally, I think it's a worthwhile RPG, and a fun little experiment by one of the genre's best designers. If you're thinking, "Oh god, that sounds terrible," then you probably won't. If that little anecdote has you thinking, "Oh come on, Kat obviously can't handle a proper old-school RPG," then you will probably enjoy Crimson Shroud. This is why I both love and hate reviews – they force me to persevere. I say 'almost' because, if I'm being honest with myself, I probably would have quit after being stuck for two solid hours. It was enough that I was almost willing to put up with the grind of killing skeletons until they dropped a certain piece of loot that would allow me to continue. I was charmed by the dice and the battle system. With that caveat, Crimson Shroud did actually manage to get its hooks into me in relatively short order. Its storytelling, combat, and exploration are about as raw as it gets. Crimson Shroud really isn't interested in fancy pyrotechnics or other frills. Most people will know whether or not like they like it from the first moment that they get a good look at the art, which is extremely rough. I think it's fair to say that it's an acquired taste. Crimson Shroud isn't the easiest of RPGs. As the mid-game rolled into the late game, hits became critical. More often than not, I found myself putting them into accuracy. The main wrinkle can be found in the ability to add dice to any attack, which will increase its power or accuracy. The strategy is primarily wrapped up in deciding whether to buff a character and then launch an attack, or use both an offensive skill and an attack. Drawing upon its Japanese roots, Crimson Shroud is a turn-based affair featuring a mix of skills and magic. Whatever shortcomings it might have, however, are greatly mitigated by what turns out to be a very good battle system. But in some ways, its overall lack of transparency makes it hard to recommend. It's the sort of quest that is unapologetic in reaching out to old-school RPG fans, and I suppose there's a kind of stubborn nobility to that. Either that, or they'll give up entirely. Suffice to say, a lot of people will either be compelled to look up the answer to the dilemma on Google. I know I'm not alone in getting completely and utterly stuck around Chapter 2. In that, it's less like a D&D module and more like, say, a 1980's dungeon crawler. The story lasts around seven hours, with at least three of those hours spent stumbling around trying to figure out what to do. I compare Crimson Shroud to a one-shot adventure because, in video game terms, that's pretty much what it is. Being a downloadable title though, it's necessarily shorter than a lot of Matsuno's more epic titles. Crimson Shroud's dark fantasy setting is one of his hallmarks, as is the complicated battle system. It was written and directed by Yasumi Matusno, who is best known for his work on Tactics Ogre, Vagrant Story, and Final Fantasy XII. For longtime tabletop gamers, it's a treat.%Gallery-173328%Ĭrimson Shroud also features an impeccable pedigree. Characters are represented by the tiny figurines used to map distance, and the story is told across long tracts of text, as if the Dungeon Master were actually narrating. As with the classic Dungeons & Dragons games, multiple dice are used in everything from rolling for initiative to determining whether the party can launch a surprise attack. In essence, Crimson Shroud is a one-shot tabletop adventure for the Nintendo 3DS. But Crimson Shroud is one of the few I can think of to literally feature dice. Even role-playing shooters like Alpha Protocol feature dice rolls to an extent. You may not see them, but dice rolls are pretty much everywhere in RPGs.
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