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Generation of Chaos: Pandora's Reflection reviewGame: Generation of Chaos: Pandora's ReflectionPlatform: PSP Genre: Real-Time Strategy (Fantasy) Developer: Super Sting AKA: Generation of Chaos 6 (JP) |
Staff review by Kyle Charizanis
February 18, 2013 Developers these days often try to pack as many features into their games as possible, but, for the most part, those features wind up feeling half-assed. In contrast, Generation of Chaos: Pandora’s Reflection emphasizes a single feature and streamlines everything else to accommodate it. I wouldn’t normally fault a game for intentionally leaving out some elements in order to focus on others, but in this case there’s such a dearth of content that the overall experience can’t help but suffer for it.The game’s crown jewel is definitely the battle system. Though combat isn’t perfect, it’s refreshingly different from the norm. Seldom will you find a tactical RPG in which strategy plays as important a role as it does here. You could get through Final Fantasy Tactics and most Fire Emblem titles by playing them as a series of standard battles on a chessboard, but in Pandora’s Reflection you’re required to pay attention to all of your units at once.
Such careful coordination is necessary because conflicts take place in real time. Each time a new one begins, you’ll only be able to dispatch two or three initial units. Capturing strategic map points increases that number, so you’ll have to spread your heroes across the map. The tricky part is that any points you claim can be retaken by enemy units, and some can even be destroyed. Losing this valuable resource immediately reduces your usable unit count by 1. If you were already maxed out, one of your active little sprites is about to die. You’d better hope the last dispatched unit wasn’t itself defending a crucial map point. Enemies will keep sending out their own units, too, especially if you let them gather too much strength. Things can go bad very quickly if you aren’t paying enough attention, and that added pressure makes Pandora’s Reflection more exciting than a number of other tactical games.
The management aspects of the battle map deserve praise, but combat becomes overly simplistic once two fighters actually engage. Individual encounters really just feel like a mini-rhythm game. You pick one of your two or three equipped weapons, then press X repeatedly as circles light up across a silhouette shaped like an axe, sword, or some other weapon. In theory, your choice of weapon is supposed to be a strategic highlight, but you have so little control over everyone’s equipment that in practice it doesn’t much matter. Player and enemy units alike carry several weapons at once, and there’s no way to know ahead of time which one an enemy will defend with. Even if you did have that information, you still wouldn't be able to anticipate where an enemy might move, but player characters need to be sent out to guard map points ahead of time (especially the ones inconveniently located closer to the enemy base). The game has a “weapon triangle” similar to those in the Fire Emblem series, but because of all those variables, it’ll rarely affect your decisions.
Sadly, outside of the conflicts, there isn’t much going on in Pandora’s Reflection. There are no towns, shops, skills, or abilities. Character classes do make an appearance, but you can’t change a given unit’s class and there’s no option to create new recruits from scratch.
The one important thing you CAN do to customize your party members is distribute Alchemy Points. When you win a battle, the game awards you with experience points that are tied to individual units, plus a shared quantity of AP for the overall group. The alchemy system lets you upgrade weapons, heal characters, and allocate more experience to whoever you wish. If you’re like me, though, you’ll spend most of those points upgrading the characters’ weapons, since combatants tend to gain more than enough experience already by routinely slaughtering foes. Unfortunately, the alchemy system only looks like it’s giving you a bunch of options; in reality, it’s just a fairly linear way to increase your weapons’ power, one point at a time.
The lack of customization hurts, but the game’s complete lack of visual environments is perhaps its most obvious oversight. When your characters are walking around town, trekking through a dense forest, or getting attacked by vicious monsters, you don’t get to see any of it. There are always just two large text windows on the screen, and some accompanying music. I can’t imagine why the artists didn’t throw in some background scenes of buildings or fields or… SOMETHING.
The lack of visual splendor is a real shame, because Pandora’s Reflection otherwise has a dark and intriguing atmosphere. You begin the game in charge of two orphaned siblings--a boy and girl--who are traveling aimlessly through the world while the brother continually makes medicine for his ailing sister. Wherever they go, all they find are corruption, poverty, and mysterious poison rain. The soundtrack is full of sad violin melodies, and even the world map looks bleak. I wasn’t expecting any of this, so it caught me off guard in a good way. There was definitely some potential here, but the game’s intense focus on its battle system means that the atmospheric world isn’t as fleshed out as it should have been. Characters are introduced and join your team too quickly for you to have the chance to really grow attached to them, and the plot often feels like a transparent machination that exists mostly to facilitate an ever-increasing number of skirmishes. I like where the writers were headed, but the poor detail and lacking complexity don’t support their apparent aspirations.
It’s also worth mentioning that this game feels very Japanese. Clearly it was made with a niche audience in mind. I’m cool with that--I am part of that audience, after all--but if you find that sort of thing bothersome, you’ll have a lot of trouble getting into Pandora’s Reflection. The artwork is all anime-styled, with well-drawn character portraits and pleasant menu layouts (as they ought to be, since you’ll be seeing so much of them). Sometimes, people you’ll meet are actually humanoid cats or frogs, and no explanation is ever offered. Often with games like this, publishers outside of Japan will end up only including the English dub (for various reasons), but Pandora’s Reflection actually offers the original Japanese voiceovers as the only option. The voice work is good, and every spoken part is accompanied by text anyway, so it’s not like the lack of English audio hurts the game in any way.
Generation of Chaos: Pandora's Reflection left me feeling conflicted in the end. I don’t want to come down too hard on it for leaving out so much stuff, because it’s clearly trying to zero in on the battle system. At the same time, though, the developers could easily have put in background drawings and expanded the storyline without negatively impacting everything else. It’s ultimately a fun game with excellent intentions, but at the end of the day, there’s not quite enough to it.
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