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Reviews » Makai Kingdom [PS2]

In today's gaming industry, unlike previous ages, niche games can really survive. Even niche genres can survive. Even niche genres that have to be imported can survive. Sure, while here stateside you've got a current trend of publishers only picking up "safe" titles, like sequels upon sequels upon sequels, or license-based shovelware, it's good to know that other companies worldwide, like Nippon Ichi Software, have grown popular enough in their native land to export games on their own, no matter how bizarre they may be.

Which brings us to Makai Kingdom, Nippon Ichi's latest offering in the Strategy RPG genre. Before diving right in to what makes Makai Kingdom a special and worthwhile game, I have to assume that not everyone has been exposed to the Strategy RPG genre, or knows they've been exposed to the Strategy RPG genre, so it's time for some Knowledge. Strategy RPGs (or "Strategic RPGs" or "Tactical RPGs" or just simply "SRPGs") are games like normal Japanese-style RPGs, with characters, classes, spells, stats, levels, etc, all kinds of standard things you'd expect. The main difference is that instead of being like Final Fantasy, where you have a ~9 character party of which you choose 3-4 active characters at a time, and fight in turn-based combat where you have little or no control over character movement, SRPGs tend to have a large number of Characters, often randomly generated or completely customizable. SRPGs also tend to take place on some manner of 3D playing field, providing you with a new layer of combat. This expands the usual process of "Character A attack Enemy B with Tech C" to "Character A move to Point X to get within attacking range of Enemy B who is at Point Y, attack With Area Affect Spell C to catch Enemies D-G in the blast as well". Some SRPGs take a tile-based approach to movement, making them feel a lot like Very Special Chess, while others use a more freeform radius-based movement system. SRPGs tend to have a huge variety of classes, and characters you can build up and specialize and transform and change jobs and make them into whatever super ultra mega death ninja from hell you could possibly want.

SRPGs are also all over the place, even if you didn't know that's what they were. Some prime examples are Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the Fire Emblem games for the GBA, and most recently the games from Nippon Ichi: La Pucelle Tactics, Disgaea, Phantom Brave, and Makai Kingdom. Nippon Ichi has somewhat taken up the SRPG torch in recent years, having pumped out four huge deep SRPGs that actually made it to America and other parts of the world.

For people who have played previous games from that list of Nippon Ichi SRPGs, let me give a quick overview of Makai Kingdom. It's like if you took Phantom Brave's Movement/Combat/Confine System, made the Confine system not suck by making confinements permanent until you decide to change them, mixed in Disgaea's Transmigration system, and put it all in Disgaea's setting of The Netherworld. Oh, and then you added new stuff like Extensions, Free Dungeons, Facilities, Vehicles and High-Tech Weaponry.

For the rest of you, here's the long version. Makai Kingdom takes place in a bizarre multidimensional hell called The Netherworld. It's far from serious, it's not really light-hearted, but it's also not the hell of the Diablo universe. All these dimensions have Overlords, said Overlords attempt to invade and overthrow neighboring dimensions to gain power. Disgaea followed the story of one such Overlord, Laharl, and Makai Kingdom follows another, Lord Zetta. In the game's prologue, everything goes wrong for Zetta. He was a powerful guy, more or less invincible, but then he found that the magical tome responsible for keeping his dimensions all intact had been erased. Then, to make things even worse, he destroyed the book, not thinking of the consequences, that doing so would nuke everything he had built up. As a last-ditch effort, he confined himself to the book, resulting in a powerless, netherworld-less, immobile sentient book.

Not being one to just give up, Lord Zetta enlists the help of some neighboring overlords, and has them help him rebuild his vast army, so he can overthrow enough new neighboring dimensions to get back enough power to get out of the book. And this is where the game actually starts.

Game mechanics work like this: first you summon some spirits up and confine them to Stuff to build your army of characters to fight with. This "Confine" system is quite versatile, and is one of the main aspects of the game. When you decide you want a new fighter, you find some item from your inventory. Any item. Could be a tree you found out on the battlefield, a piece of armor, a big rock, a dagger, whatever. Summon it to your town and walk your leader over to it and select it to create a new character. From there you get a choice of any of the classes currently available to you, and what "level" of that class you can create. I could go on about classes for pages, because that on it's own is a very complex system, just know that there are classes (healers, warriors, swordsmen, engineers, mages, etc) and as you level up characters in those classes you unlock more powerful levels of those classes (with better base stat modifiers) and occasionally unlock new classes altogether. Each class has a unique set of stat modifiers, stat bonuses, specialty weapons, attacks and spells.

Once you've confined some characters, you head over to the Makai Gate and go off to invade new exciting places. The combat area of the game is divided into Episodes and Levels. Unlike previous Nippon Ichi games, each Episode is "written" by a different new overlord, lending different little tweaks and changes to the base idea of the level, and adding a ton of replayability. At the start of each individual level there might be a little skit about the overall plot, but those are usually skippable and not incredibly relevant. Once you get out onto the battlefield, it's time to start combat. When you start, everything will be laid out. Enemies will be on the board in their starting positions, and Zetta (in conveniently portable book form) will be sitting out on the field. Zetta is your spawn point, and you can invite your characters a certain starting radius from his location, and then move them around to go kill assorted enemies. There are two ways to "complete" a level, either eliminate all enemies or reach the level's point quota. Every kill gives you a certain number of points, which get racked up for the end of a match to see what bonus swag you get to take home. However, if you decide you want to bail early, you can quickly dispatch high-point enemies to meet the quota allowing you to run off.

So then you get to cruise around through the levels, killing stuff, leveling up, gaining new levels and skills for all your assorted characters, but what if you want to change your beefy warrior into that neat swordsman class you just unlocked? Well, there's two ways to handle this. The first is to transmigrate the character, if possible. In certain conditions, on really good characters, you can have them "wish" in town to transmigrate, which lets them keep their base stats, keep the skills they've learned, change class, but start back at level 1. This sounds like it sucks, because hey, your level 20 guy might now be stuck down at level 1 again. But they have all their previously-learned skills and stats, making them quite powerful for a level 1 character, which makes leveling them back up pretty easy when your level 1 guy can take out level 15 enemies in one hit.

The other way is to pass them through a cheap facility. Facilities are buildings you can store people in for easy deployability on the field. Instead of inviting people directly, you can shove a bunch of people into a fortress, and then deploy the fortress, and then deploy the people from the fortress. This lets you send people deeper into enemy territory faster, and also has added bonuses that can be gleaned from certain types of facilities. If you deploy someone from a "Hospital" facility, they automatically get some HP restored at the beginning of each turn. Characters deployed from "Academy" facilities gain 50% more Experience through battle. Characters deployed from "Fortress" facilities gain an attack modifier, and so on. Facilities are made out of characters, though. When you want to make a facility, you effectively strip the "soul" of a character out of their body, and make the body into a facility. Then, the soul - containing the character's name, stats, job history, skills, etc - goes into storage, and when it comes time to confine something again, you get the option of bringing that character back, sorta like a transmigration, but different. So when they come back, you get the choice of remaking them into whatever level-1 class you want.

The game is rather long. It may not seem long if you just look at it as the nine episodes of 4-7 levels a piece that make up the story mode of the game. That portion of the game took me 30 hours, and I wasn't really taking my time. The real bulk of the gameplay comes after you beat it, from exploring the vast and complex class system, newgame+ and the large assortment of alternate endings, finding all the secret bonus dungeons and event battles, fighting and defeating all the secret bosses, and all the other stuff I don't even know about yet because I'm nowhere near reaching it. The game may seem small, but it really really isn't. But the somewhat nice thing is, if you don't want to go through all that stuff, you don't have to. It's all optional. The basic story mode requires barely any powerleveling at all, and you can have a perfectly good time running through the game without having to spend hours on end level-grinding to make sure you'll be powerful enough to progress, and even if that's all you do it's still going to provide you with enough entertainment time to justify the purchase. And if you want to go spend time powerleveling like mad, there's a huuuuuuuge amount of extra content to play with. If you can really get into that, know that there's a ton to keep you occupied.

Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed with Makai Kingdom. There's a very short list of SRPGs I've enjoyed over time, and some I've had an incredibly hard time getting into, despite trying so hard. Makai Kingdom ended up being very easy to get into, and stayed fun the whole way through, unlike other games where you either reach a point where you're completely godlike and there's nothing any enemy can hope to do but get in your way, or others where eventually you reach a brick wall that requires 37 hours of intense powerleveling to get past, it struck a good balance between the two. I kept getting more powerful, but never so powerful that it felt game-breaking. I, of course, fully expect this to change in NewGame+.

Comparatively, I only have experience with one other Nippon Ichi game to put it up against, and that's Disgaea. Compared to Disgaea, I think Disgaea ended up being the better game. Disgaea had a more coherent story, playable characters that had a story for them, and skills that were easier to get into. The skills specifically bug me, for even simple classes in Disgaea like mages, there was a clear progression to your spells. You'd get an elemental spell, as you used it you'd unlock better ranges and better areas of effect, and then eventually you'd unlock the more powerful version of it. And then that one would get a better range or area of effect. In Makai Kingdom, skill upgrades feel few and far between. But that can be solved by the fact that you can quite easily jump from class to class and pick up proficiencies for a wide variety of weapons rather easily, a practice which would result in characters that don't just have to use their same basic attack over and over. I have heard second hand that Makai Kingdom feels like the game Phantom Brave was supposed to be. The specific reason I keep coming across is that it isn't bogged down by the old broken version of the confine system (where characters would have to be confined EVERY match, and they'd expire after a set number of turns).

So if you're a fan of Nippon Ichi games or SRPGs in general, it'd probably be in your best interests to run right out and get Makai Kingdom. If you're new to the genre, and are interested in a rather complex game, and aren't scared by having it be your first SRPG, go ahead and get it, but consider picking up the strategy guide from Double Jump while you're at it, as you'll probably need it. Personally, I can quite easily see Makai Kingdom sticking around in my PS2 and getting frequent play until the insane glut of new stuff rolls out in September.

Makai Kingdom - PS2

Presentation

Cute Anime-ish sprites on a 3D playing field may sound lame and underpowered for a PS2 game, but it surprisingly works really well.

Gameplay

Not a game you'll master in 15 minutes, but once you get past the somewhat steep learning curve it's complex, fun, and only repetitive when you want it to be.

Replayability

A normal run through the game barely scratches the surface of the content that's in there. If you're up for some power leveling you could probably milk this game indefinitely.

Value

Standard retail price may seem kinda steep for a quirky complex niche title, but if you love the Genre it's worth it.

Overall

Makai Kingdom is a complicated, huge and deep game. If you're up for that, it's a great way to break up this dry spell of new releases recently.