I just got done playing about 5 hours of Brave Soul and figured I would post some impressions quick before I went to bed.
Story: You get kicked out of your house by your parents for being lazy and are forced to go find work. You decide to become a hunter (mercenary kinda). I really like the main character . He has kinda a sarcastic attitude and suits me well. So far the story would get a 6-7/10 but I have not finished yet and the reason for so low is while you build up your hunter rank there is not a whole lot of story development.
Gameplay: Once you get used to the controls the game plays fairly easy. I am playing on hard difficulty and have no problems. The AI is fairly intelligent and the game was tough enough to kill me once. For the most part though its fairly easy and gets kind of repetitive. I hope you have a decent memory because the dungeons are maze like .
Sound: I like most of the midi music in the game, the only exception is the shop music. The intro music was very good and the intro movie was excellent as well.
Translation: The translation is good, I have only found a couple typos. The game loading screen at the very beginning say “Game Loding” (made me laugh) and there was a couple others that were extremely minor. The localization seems very good up to this point.
Final Thoughts:
I’ve playing about 5 hours and ended up going after Carol (not my first choice but she kinda grew on me, her fear of ghosts is cute ). I think I am probably about 3/4 the way through the game, so that would put it at about 7-8 hours to complete if you read the text. The tab feature is extremely nice, you can fly through events you have already seen and the choices you get in the game are well thought out and tough to make. Each woman reacts to your choice immediately and you can get a feel for their personality. I like this aspect and I like the fact that you are forced to choose just 2 out of the 5 women for your party. One complaint I have and this goes for alot of RPG’s is I wish they would make different character pictures for the different armor types, I get so much more satisfaction equiping a high end platemail suit when my character on the screen changes and looks better. Thats just me though. As for armor/weapons etc. you are given the standard options for customization: Magic dmg types, speed or power, magic defense or physical defense etc. Also there are quite a few available.
Well if anyone actually read this dribble, I hope it helped. I am pleased with the game as a whole so far. It was able to keep me playing instead of going to a party tonight, thats always a good sign in a game when you look up one minute and its 10pm and the next time you look up its 3am and you don’t want to go to bed . I hope you guys get your copy soon and I can hear your thoughts. Good night!