GrimGrimoire follows the story of a young initiate, named Lillet Blan, to a esteemed school of the magical arts. Here the comparisons to Harry Potter begin but by no means stop, especially when we're introduced to the academy’s head master, Gammel Dore. Hmmm, the name sounds familiar. The almost sickeningly sweet and innocent Lillet begins to settle into her new home where she expects to learn the ins and outs of magical craft. After her first few days tragedy strikes and Lillet must, as all good new students to magical learning facilities do, triumph over evil. The twist is that following the incident, Lillet is forced to live the same few days leading up to the transpiring of these terrible events in the style of the movie 'Groundhog Day'. This all continues until she gets to the bottom of the mysterious cause for the evil that threatens her world. Using her grimoires she must tackle this wickedness and right the wrongs of her multiple pasts.
“Grimoires?” we hear you ask. Grimoires are the books in which magicians keep their lists of spells and parlour tricks, ready to be whipped out at the first sign of danger. In GrimGrimoire there are four types of magic, Glamour magic: used for summoning fairies and unicorns, Necromancy: used for summoning the undead, Sorcery: used for summoning demonic creatures, and Alchemy: a science infused with magic. As you progress through Lillett’s story more and more grimoires will become available to you, meaning that the scope of your magical ability will expand, thus enabling you to take on increasingly difficult enemies in more varied and complex ways.
Unsurprisingly Tinkerbell fell just short of defeating the dragon.
As in most other real-time strategies at its heart GrimGrimoire has resource collecting. In this case its mana that fuels our heroine’s ability to wage magical warfare upon her foes. Mana is gathered from crystals dotted throughout the levels. And the means in which these are mined are the grimoire’s base units, such as elves or ghosts, from each of the four elements of magic. However once a particular branch of magic is harvesting a crystal none of your other branches can touch it meaning elves and ghosts can’t harvest from the same site as they’re from different branches. The mana gained from each crystal can still be utilized by any of your areas of magic.
Once sufficient mana has been reaped then the process of building up your defences takes place. Rather than being restricted to building bases of a single faction, as you would in a Command and Conquer style game, while you progress through GrimGrimoire you’ll slowly build up to having all the game’s forces at your disposal. And you’ll need them. Structures to be built are runes from which you can summon creatures to do your bidding, all at the cost of mana.
The best thing about the gameplay in GrimGrimoire is just how amazingly balanced all the units are. The ‘rock, paper, scissors’ analogy has become a tired old platitude when discussing the gameplay of the great RTS’s, but in this case it’s one that actually rings incredibly true.
It is nigh impossible to take on your adversaries by simply amassing a huge number of random troops and rushing in. And as tempting as it is to summon a couple of dragons, each taking up half the screen, in order for them to labouriously lumber toward enemies to deliver their desimating fiery damage, you'll eventually be thwarted. At first it seems like the most obvious thing to do. However you’ll soon learn that as soon as you send a throng of Glamour magic based troops up against just a couple of your enemy’s troops, only to watch them quickly disappear into the ether, picked off one by one and failing to substantially damage their target. Likewise your dragon’s can very quickly be taken down if the right troops come up against them. Every unit has a counter.
Overall the interface works incredibly well. Rather than a map, your entire view is based on a cutaway of the hallways and alcoves within the school’s walls. There are three levels of zoom that let you get a pretty good idea of what’s going on whilst moving the current view around with the right thumb stick. Within this field of view lays your units and runes, all of which can be interacted with using a pointer controlled with the left thumbstick. Units can be selected as a single unit or using the directional pad, selected in homogenous groups or cycled through. A great design choice that the developers have implemented here is that once a unit is selected the game pauses meaning that what could become a clunky, game spoiling, controller interface does not interfere with your chances of victory. To attack you simply click on your unit, the game freezes and you scroll your view to the enemy and click on them.
"If we ignore him I'm sure he'll just leave us alone".
As well implemented as the controls are there are a few areas in which they are lacking. There is no ability to for groups or rally points, things that those playing RTS’s in recent years have become accustomed to and expectant of. Also groups cannot be formed of multiple unit types, which can become annoying when you’ve gathered troops from numerous runes. Story is slotted in between levels and is told via some well rendered 2D cutscenes in a un-animated, typically Japanese style. These look great but when coupled with hammy dialogue they do the interesting story an injustice.
One of the main issues with GrimGrimoire is the lack of level variety. Each level places you in what is essentially the same environment. Sure a few stairways get added, the enemy positions their units differently, but you’ll still find yourself dragging your magical creatures around the same dull looking cutaway castle. This is especially problematic when some of the levels can last almost a couple of hours. With no mid level save staring at the same hallways can become pretty dull. It would have been great to have seen some more varied environments.
Where GrimGrimoire succeeds it does so fantastically. However its drawbacks, such as repetitive levels and a few niggling interface issues, hold it back from being the truly fantastic experience that it could most definitely have been. Average story exposition also takes away from the interesting idea that is the ‘groundhog day’ like situation Lillet is placed in. All things considered GrimGrimoire will provide those pining for some RTS action a great time, as this is definitely one of the better implementations of the genre around for consoles, it's just a shame that it misses out in a few areas.
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