Forums > Submission Feedback > woodhouse's Rondo of Swords review

I pretty much agree with this review. I bought it when it was released, but stopped at stage 11. This game is very unfair and not fun to play. It's only redeeming quality is the way it alters conventional SRPG mechanics, but it's so unbalanced that I really couldn't stand playing it anymore.

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Reading about its brutal unbalanced difficulty (just about everyone whose review I've read so far mentioned it), I can't help but wonder if the option to "Egress" (to use the Shining Force term) from battles to indefinitely redo them and keep your exp was added as an afterthought; an attempt to offset the punishing difficulty without having to rebalance the entire game.

The combat system sounds interesting, but oddities like enemies being unassailable if they have walls on three sides and mages/archers not being able to get close enough to fight without getting trampled on the next turn by enemies passing through your tanks...they just don't sound intentional. More like something that was likely discovered in testing but no easy solution was found.

"Deep in the earth I faced a fight that I could never win. The blameless and the base destroyed, and all that might have been. -- GK"

That might be true, though Momentum Counter (which I don't think this review mentions, but probably should) tries to rebalance the thing. MC is a stat that increases based on performance and draws enemy attention. If you put a character with 60 MC and a character with 20 MC in positions so that the enemy can only attack one of them, they will go for the character with 60. There are skills that let you increase MC for free as well. There's also a skill called ZOC (Zone of Control) which prevents enemies from passing through you, thus protecting allies behind you. Both of those should problem be mentioned in the review since they are the bread and butter of the game.

Still though, very unbalanced and needlessly difficult. That's just poor design.

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