Combat itself is at the core of Crimson Shroud, since this is pretty much what you’ll spend most of your relatively short playthrough doing. Get used to waggling your stylus (or analog stick) around, because dice rolls constitute one of the more important aspects of combat, whether its determining the success of a buff or the possibility of lifting the Fog of War during a combat encounter, and so on. Even dice rolls only really have an effect in combat. It does need to be mentioned, though, that the game doesn’t *really* play like a tabletop RPG: there is no elaborate rule system and not much actual choice in terms of the storyline - instead, it merely attempts to give back the general atmosphere associated with such games. Gameplay-wise, Crimson Shroud is a simple affair: you move from room to room, looting chests and vanquishing foes as the story unfolds in short cutscenes and narration. In a nutshell, Crimson Shroud oozes the classic Matsuno style in terms of visuals, music and narrative - as such, you can expect a fairly serious tale with a unique, dark fantasy vibe. I do greatly enjoy his style, but that’s just me - from this soundtrack, I would recommend listening to the first minute of the track “Sinner’s Requiem”, that one happens to be my personal favorite. He’s one of those “love it or hate it” type of composers, and if you heard some of his previous works, you probably won’t come across anything remarkably new in here, either, nor will Crimson Shroud change your mind about him. Speaking of Matsuno and his inseparable companions, the soundtrack -much like in various other Matsuno titles- was once again provided by Hitoshi Sakimoto, a renowned composer with a large array of video game/anime soundtracks under his belt - Final Fantasy 12, Vagrant Story, Romeo x Juliet (anime), the entire Valkyria Chronicles series - the list could go on and on. Smith, so if you liked the fancy archaic dialogue of, say, Final Fantasy 12 (another previous translation work of Smith), you’ll feel right at home in this game as well. The game was localized by veteran Matsuno translator Alexander O. The story, in a nutshell, concerns three adventurers-for-hire: the warrior Giauque, the rogue Lippi and the young sorceress Frea (serving as your permanent three-member party for the entire game), who are hired to enter an old, decaying ruin to search for an ancient tome that might be connected to the legendary “Crimson Shroud”, one of the oldest magical artifacts (so-called “gifts”) left in the world.Ĭrimson Shroud -the game, I mean- is basically supposed to be an homage to tabletop roleplaying games, most notably Dungeons and Dragons - all characters appear as little figurines (meaning they don’t actually move in cutscenes or battle, but rather awkwardly wobble around) progressing on the labyrinthine map with a blueprint straight out of any DnD campaign worth its salt, while the story itself is told via carefully phrased narration aimed to simulate what it would be like to sit at a table and listen to a game master ramble in eloquent prose. Here are my thoughts on it after two full playthroughs.Ĭrimson Shroud was originally released as one of the games included in the collection Guild 01, but is now available as a separate eShop download. Legendary game designer Yasumi Matsuno (Vagrant Story, Tactics Ogre, FF Tactics, FF12) returns on the 3DS with his latest project, a short and sweet dungeon crawler / tabletop RPG homage released back in 2012 while he was still working with Level 5.
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