Blackguards (PC) Second Opinion Review

Right from the start, as the game is launched, comes a character creation menu, letting players select a character class, along with some basic physical traits to be selected to customise how the protagonist will look. This looks very much like the process of creating a character sheet in a pen-and-paper RPG. The game does feel very generic at first, with the main character lacking any real fancy visual traits to make him or her feel "cool," but that's a general thing in Western RPGs, very often counterbalanced by a more complex writing style fleshing out the personality of said characters better than any JRPG could. Blackguards is no exception to this. The story may not feel like anything exceptional for the first few hours but really does become interesting further in. The hero or heroine, depending on the gender of choice, was accused of murdering their childhood friend of noble descent. Obviously, the man or woman of low caste that the player incarnates, being found in the immediate surroundings of the murder scene leads them to be taken in for questioning (in other words "being punched to near death"), thrown in prison, and sentenced to death by hanging in the space of a mere few hours. If it wasn't already obvious, the story of Blackguards does indeed take place in medieval times, in an old RPG tradition.

One of the most striking aspects, however, is the game's structure - totally devoid of any form of exploration. Indeed, very much like any Final Fantasy Tactics structure, the game world is traversed using a general world map. Anything beyond this, such as exploring dungeons or specific places on the world map, is also done by moving a cursor along a simplistic drawn map of the area, all leading to locations that make up the battle scenes.

The playable characters are never controlled directly outside of battle, and even visits to villages present a general scene of those populated areas that the player has to click on to interact with, without seeing the lead characters at all. The main centre of interest in the game is decidedly the battle scenes and thank God those are at least done very well. Battle scenes, like in many Tactical-RPGs, are divided into smaller spaces that the characters can move about in by a certain amount. Here they are hexagonal-shaped, unlike series such as Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, where they would be squares. On the basic side of things, movement and actions are performed very much like they would in Fire Emblem, where a character can move a certain amount of spaces and then take action before its turn ends, except here enemy and allied units take turns one after the other, rather than one side moving all of its units and the other doing so right after. This is, again, very similar to Square Enix's Tactics games, yet it differs in that each character will be allowed to walk a longer distance in exchange of not taking any action during the current turn, which makes strategy work a bit differently.

Another great point of interest comes from how much interaction can be made with the environments themselves. For example, very early on in the game, a battle scene can be concluded very quickly by activating a lever that drops a massive chandelier onto some guards' heads. Original examples like these are aplenty throughout the game, forcing the player to come up with more strategic ideas than the simple enemy placement and movement calculations one would expect from a Fire Emblem game, for example.

This makes battles very interesting indeed, and quite rightly so as they make up pretty much all of the interactive parts of the game! The way the environment plays a huge part in how battles unfold is not so far off from was done in The Last Story actually, except here choosing to do so has to be weighed more heavily as taking such actions may make the player waste a turn in doing so, rather than a small portion of time.

The array of actions that may be performed is also, in a very pen-and-paper fashion again, far more varied than what would be expected from a typical console Tactical RPG. Each character has a whole bunch of different types of skills that they can learn, from spells to special attacks, each requiring the building of certain specific stats rather than others to specialise that character into using these rather than others, and so on. As the game unfolds the huge array of complicated stats, numbers and possible skills to unlock proves to be a throwback to those old days of role playing. Battles indeed yield AP instead of experience and the game doesn't use any form of traditional levelling system, rather relying on growing individual stats by investing AP in them. This is again much like the recently reviewed Shadowrun Returns, which used karma points instead, although Blackguards is far more convoluted and complicated as it uses an insane amount of varied stats, divided into obscure category names. It is all very long-winded and deep and this makes its most obvious problem all the more apparent: it requires reading through massive pages of tutorials explaining what each type of stat does, each type of skill, each skill in itself, and the list goes on.

In the early hours of the game, as the battle and growth system are still a bit obscure to new players unfamiliar with pen-and-paper RPGs and the story has yet to show its teeth and how interesting it becomes, the complexity of it all really makes it more off-putting than it needed to be. What this means in the end is that the game will only show its real worth to those who will be patient enough to look past its initial shortcomings and will come back for more and invest their time in understanding how all of these intricacies work together and can be mastered to make the most of the otherwise really cool battle system.

This is a bit of a shame as the game is not otherwise un-pretty, though it's not exactly super impressive either compared to other modern games. The voice acting can be pretty convincing at times, at least as far as the main characters are concerned, and actually includes some cast of British voices from The Last Story and Xenoblade Chronicles, no less! The soundtrack is standard Western RPG fare - not exactly of Jeremy Soule quality, but it does contain a few memorable tracks that fit perfectly within the universe and story. Blackguards indeed has some decent production values, even more so for a new franchise that came out of nowhere, at least in video game form. There have been other games based off The Dark Eye before, also developed by Daedalic Entertainment, but these were point-and-click adventure games and not proper RPG adaptations of the original material. This adaptation does indeed work well but takes some serious personal investment to really get into it, especially so for players with no previous experience of how complicated pen-and-paper games can get.