Blind Date Gaming: Little Master 2
Tonight's date was a trip. I've been burned out from quite a few Japanese titles lately, mostly bashed over the head with the language barrier and left with mild concussion symptoms. To my surprise, though, this date went relatively well. In fact, I would say it was great! So let's cut the pleasantries and dive into Little Master 2!
You start with a cutscene dictating the story. Yeah, well, you only get my take on it from the static image you see below. I assume you're a knight of this king's army, vowing to protect the kingdom against some big threatening enemy. Pretty standard stuff. Hopefully we won't go at it alone, as a kingdom ought to have a decent military at its disposal. I guess we'll find out who we get to command.
It's like if Dr. Light was a monarch in ye olde England. Hey, Roll's there, too!
You start in a battle that is very reminiscent of Fire Emblem, controlling units on a map and attacking foes in popup battles. Luckily you don't have to worry about weapon durability or anything. There are some different terrains and each unit has pluses and minuses, as you'd expect with any good strategy RPG.
I feel like there's a better way to show movement ranges than dots. Unless you're like Pac-Man, but he has an addiction, so he gets a pass.
Ok, so I get all these units, right? Well okay, let's start a fight! The icons look cute and all, but I don't think the battle-hardened warriors you'd bring into battle would be...
Nope, it's barnyard animals
So...that's different. Your main character is a knight with a sword and magic spells. Your second-in-command is...a cow person? Your flying units are chickens, your archers are rabbits, and then you have this one that looks like a giant board game meeple that I really don't know how to process. THIS? This is your kingdom-saving crew? Well, okay, I guess, I mean at least the enemies are also all silly animals, too.
Nothin' but epic battles at Farmer Brown's
As I played, I discovered a few cool things, though. There are healing tiles that stay active unless you take damage while standing on them. Characters heal themselves a bit each round they don't move. You can find chests with permanent stat powerups. And the mystery deepens with Meeple Man. In fact, he turned into an obsession of mine.
Let's review this guy's capabilities. He has paltry HP, incredible defense, and terrible attack. And I mean those adjectives. The dude almost always takes 1 HP of damage from attacks and only does 1 HP of damage. This makes him incredibly hard to level up (as you get the bulk of XP from the killing blow), but every so often, the game just decides, "nope, he's just gonna absolutely wreck this enemy.” Like, we're talking instadeath.
I think he's taunting, but he just kind of looks like a a mustard canister with arms?
I was so focused on him that he ended up leveling above my entire party. Once he was high leveled, the chance of instakilling skyrocketed. Even worse (for the rest of my XP-craving units), enemies prioritized him, causing them all to fall to the might of the big formless doofus. Further, apparently he can traverse water and even act as a bridge to get land-based troops over to new areas? What is this thing? Why hasn't he gotten his own spin-off game yet?
...Anyway, let's move on. You do get some added story as you go, meeting new characters and gaining some new roles, like a healer. But the healer can only heal 5 times per map? Also, when she gets hit, she turns into a random unit type for the rest of the match. Odd choices in game design were made.
It's surreal seeing human girl, human boy, weird anthropomorphic beefy cow thing (pun intended) with one giant eyebrow. I don't always understand anime.
You do fight a variety of foes, and the maps are pretty fun to traverse and plan out attacks. Some fights are unique, like one where you had to destroy gravestones that kept summing zombie units.
This game does suffer from the same limitation toward XP as Fire Emblem, too, meaning you'll be trying to soften up enemies with strong units and having weak ones do the final blows. It kind of ruins the flow of battle, especially since most new units you grab start at level 1 (and there are almost never any weak enemies to raise those units up at all). At least defeated party members just disappear from battle and are revived in the next fight. It's a bit of a bummer that you can only have so many units on the field at a time, especially when you recruit pretty much anyone you see lying around.
Literally. Stop napping and fight me, other human stuck in farm world!
Regardless, I had a lot of fun with this game. I read up on it a bit and found it has a decent amount of levels to play through. It's a bit slow since you have to watch animations and command each unit slowly one at a time, but it's enjoyable enough to look past these annoyances and some of the odd choices in unit designs. All in all, I would totally date this game again if I could. In fact, it would be nice to try and do a fan translation of it, as one does not currently exist! If I wasn't busy with a family and making an indie game, I probably would be tempted to do just that. Instead of a cool translation, though, you're stuck receiving this Sprite of Passage from me today. If you mix it with 1/2 cup of soy sauce and 3 teaspoons of garlic powder and bake it at 375 degrees for 13 minutes, it turns into some kind of meeple-shaped bread. Feed it to animals to turn them into ruthless warriors!
Awwww yiss, we gonna have a siesta tonight!