Your squad formation, squad bonuses, and the number of characters who can join a squad are all down to a dice roll. Squads need to be assigned to Rooms, and Rooms are entirely random. Building squads is way more hassle than it’s worth. Outside of combat, the game is equally tedious. Interconnecting Mechanics Don’t Do It Either There’s not much going on here, and when that tiny morsel of fun is obfuscated by layer upon layer of tedium, it doesn’t exactly make for a recommendable ride. Watching as 15 enemies all slowly take their turns moving around the shockingly large battle maps is time that could be spent doing literally anything else. There are a lot of enemies in any given stage of Soul Nomad. This is nice, but that isn’t the real issue with the combat pacing. Whilst the port lacks any game speed enhancements, Soul Nomad does allow you to skip the lengthy battle animations and replace them with short variants. You move and watch an animation play out of things dying, then repeat. There are no flanking bonuses, or benefits for teaming with other squads – it’s all so…boring. There’s very little in terms of strategic depth here. You can also use items that have all manner of funky effects once you dig into them a bit. This could be attacking, attacking with a special finisher, or using tactics to buff stats. In terms of in-battle mechanics, a squad can move and typically perform one action. Your main squad summons in additional squads at the start of the game, although this has a monetary cost for doing so. Each squad is composed of 1 or more characters. Your main character is the focal point of every battle. It initially showed some promise, but it quickly lost a lot of its momentum and ended up feeling rather enervating. Unfortunately, the gameplay isn’t all that fantastic either. The story isn’t bad, but it isn’t good enough to carry this much weight. As much as I enjoy a good story, I play these games for the gameplay, and when there are endless cutscenes expositing plot details between every battle, it got tiring. My biggest gripe is that there is too much of it. It manages to balance the seriousness of the game’s tone and themes with the comedic elements in a way that, whilst not on the level of Phantom Brave, certainly felt well-executed. The sword is given to you, Gig becomes your personal satan and you have to go on a jolly jaunt to save the world.įor what it’s worth, the story in Soul Nomad is pretty good. Gig is killed, trapped in a sword, and then left to rot for about 200 years.

World Eaters are leviathanic monstrosities that can destroy entire cities in a single attack for the record. The world was ravaged by a nefarious “god” called Gig and his legion of World Eaters. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the actual game. Quality of life issues start and end with game speed and animation canceling – neither of which exist making Soul Nomad painfully slow to play. But still, old eyes are not designed to endure imagery this blurry. It looks substantially better on handheld. It has a disgusting blur on everything from maps to characters, and it was honestly fairly painful to sit through – at least on the TV. This is a PlayStation 2 game, with the bare minimum graphical enhancements and zero quality of life improvements. Why do I say this? They did nothing with this game. This is the second half of the NIS Collection Volume 1, and it is easily the lesser of the two games and NIS thought so too. Kinda Shoddyįrom the get-go, let’s talk about the port. Soul Nomad & The World Eaters is one of the very few games that I haven’t dabbled in (until now), so I was quite excited to see what interesting systems and mechanics were jigged and altered from a standard NIS entry. They were pivotal parts of my childhood and, yeah, I played practically all of them.

Soul nomad and the world eaters gypsia