GrimGrimoire

Or should that be 'GRiMgRiMoiRe'?

Have you ever thought that what the Real-Time Strategy genre needed most was magical anime girls commanding elves and faeries through the corridors of an ancient castle that's also a magic school, with controls that, due to the nature of the PlayStation 2, result in stripping the 'real-time' part away?

If the answer is yes, I don't know what lead you to want that specifically, but I do know that you can find it in GrimGrimoire. New student Lillet Blan is about to find herself repeating a week of magical battles to uncover the truth about something or other. Probably something important to her, I guess?

I don't really know. I should just hop in and find out.

Fun Times

I'm emulating this PlayStation 2 release, and like many titles found on the system, it makes use of all its power to chuck out detailed, minimally animated artwork instead of polygon-people. I joke, but sometimes you don't need character models, and GrimGrimoire works better with artwork.

It's hard to deny that the artwork is impressive. The only animation you get is the subtle morphing of the image to go along with speech or breathing, but you can't say they half-arsed this. I'm not a massive fan of young blonds clutching books, desperate to learn magic, but if I'm in this for the long haul, at least I'm not looking at garbage.

Frustrations

The writing, though. That's less than stellar. These speeches are all voiced, and other than the intro sounding like they lost the master tapes and had to stick a microphone in front of the PC speaker to record new ones, they don't sound terrible. Cliché, perhaps, but not terrible. It's the writing that really gets to me.

I haven't watched or read Harry Potter, and while I bet he probably did put his foot in it, regarding offending a race of magical creatures, it probably wasn't this cringe-inducing.

A few cutscenes to introduce us to other students will stupid names, and the reason to not wander the halls at night, don't do much to sway me towards the idea of GrimGrimoire featuring heavily in my free time.

I came into this game completely blind, save for knowing that it was an RTS. I can't imagine how, based on what I've seen so far.

The game is split into books, or pages of a diary, even GrimGrimoire isn't quite sure which, and the first book serves as our tutorial to the world of magic. In this place, you're not born with an innate special ability, you don't study the ether or chant spells in front of a candle. No, here, you just boss elves around as some kind of slave labour.

And so the RTS begins. Doesn't look much like one, does it, but here it is. That rune on the left is a spawn point for magical creatures, like a barracks, and that mana crystal on the right is your resource to pay for everything, like, uhm, Tiberium in Command & Conquer.

Pressing the square button over an elf pauses the game to allow you to issue orders, but this guy is only good for collecting Mana that we can spend to make more elves to collect Mana faster. Indeed, it's what we have to do to complete this tutorial - not prove that you can make one or two more elves, no. Ten more.

Amazing. I definitely think I'm capable of spawning more elves, thanks. What's next?

Another cutscene introduces yet more characters with stupid names, and I continue to care about none of them. They don't appeal to me in any way, and nothing that emerges from their mouths is of interest to me. Bellend, or whatever his name is on the left here, is set up to be the twat of the school. Like a right prick, he tells us to not forget his name. Good job, mate. Can I do more gameplay now?

The next lesson introduces us to fairies, who are described as hard to control, but function as any other unit in an RTS does. You select them, you issue them with orders, they go about and get them done, in this case, shooting little monsters.

As it turns out, it's not too tricky to press square on a fairy and X near an enemy, and it really isn't difficult to sit back and wait for the health bars to be knocked down, bit by bit, with the odd graphic of a claw scratch layered on top of the action.

It's really not much to look at, but again, it's not half-arsed. There's something to like here. Not for me, but for someone, I'm sure.

It was at this point that I thought I'd had enough. This was just getting silly now, but you can't end in the middle of a cutscene. At least see where it goes.

Amoretta has just described this guy as her uncle. He is a demon and the school's sorcery teacher. I am definitely out.

Final Word

I have - as you can tell - no idea how the game of GrimGrimoire develops. I can read about there being four different kinds of magic, which lead to lots of variety amongst unit types and, presumably, strategies, but then I immediately get to read about control issues. When you remember that this is a console RTS that fails in the RT part, you have to wonder just what GrimGrimoire has going for it.

Is it different? Definitely. I can name no other RTS that looks or plays like this. Magic schools are usually RPG affairs, so points for originality turning one into an RTS instead. But is it a successful one?

I can't say personally, having been too bored to play it for any length of time. Let's skim some more Wikipedia, let's see... oh, commercial flop. Well, there we go.

The 1001 list aims to highlight must-play games regardless of their commercial success, however, and for simply trying something different, and looking pretty good doing it, GrimGrimoire probably is worth at least a little look.

I literally can't give you a reason to stick around, because I couldn't even manage that, but have my eyes been opened to the possibilities video games can offer? Yes. In a good way? Yeeass? No? Iunno.

Fun Facts

The developers were fans of StarCraft and were given the freedom to create what they wanted, which was obviously a fantasy side-scrolling RTS, but due to time constraints, the story had limited characters and a Groundhog style looping narrative.

GrimGrimoire, developed by Vanillaware, first released in 2007.

Version played: PlayStation 2, 2007, via emulation.