Rondo of Swords

Features

• Multiple storylines and endings
• Customizable skills and strategic devices
• Ability to send troops on errands and quests
• Momentum counter to gain stat bonuses and control your enemy targets
• Challenging strategy RPG gameplay

Customer Reviews

Highly recommend!
This is quite a unique little strategy game for the DS. I'm not fond of Japanese RPGs in general, so I was glad to find ROS isn't too "Japanese". There is some lengthy dialogue and meandering stories, but it's not overdone or too obtuse. If you've played a lot of strategy games, it will probably take a few hours for you to forget everything you've learned and figure out what you're doing and how to play. There's a steep initial learning curve. I think a lot of people picked it up, couldn't figure it out in less than and hour and gave up. That's why all you hear is how difficult it is. You *will* probably have to start over a couple times as you realize you didn't know what you were doing at first. But after that, the game is challenging, but not hardcore. It's also surprisingly deep. It's a long game with many things to discover and characters to unlock. Character balance is an issue, but with so many character to choose from (once you unlock them) it's easily forgivable and after beating the game, it is enormously fun to replay and build up the weaker characters for new challenges. If you like strategy games and have an open mind, you'll probably really appreciate Rondo of Swords.

Rondo of Swords, Elegy of Good Game Play
Have you ever played a game that you could swear hated you personally? That's how I feel about Rondo of Swords, a game that seems to have been designed with the expressed purpose of being as unfair as possible.

I won't go into the story because there is nothing to talk about here. There is barely a storyline and what little there is serves merely to shoe string the tactical battles together. Between each mission there is a little bit of scrolling text that tells you where your army traveled to and what new disaster befell them. Then the action switches to the battlefield where the units will chew the fat for a bit, one of the bad guys will spring up and laugh maniacally, and then they get down to the business of tactical combat.

With a story line this thin, Rondo of Swords is left to live and die by its combat system. The basic idea of the combat system is unique. Basically, units have a set number of squares they can move through. You draw a route on the touch screen for the unit to follow and any enemy character you pass through will be attacked and any unused ally character you pass through can give you some kind of status boost like healing or increased chance of hitting the target. On paper it sounds like a pretty good idea, but RoS has designed it so the system works against you.

Let us count the ways RoS fudges its game play:
1) Worthless mages- In RoS, there are two types of long range fighters: archers and mages. Archers can move around the field and then attack. Mages can only move or attack. It's either one or the other. So the choice often comes down to if the mage will attack the enemy baring down on it or flee to safety. To add to their worthlessness, mages can't take a hit and will almost always die with one attack. If you are lucky enough to get the enemy positioned so the mage can fight, magic points are so stingy that you will be lucky if you can cast more than two spells in a battle. The kicker is that, by the time I gave up at the 15th battle or so, half of my units were mages.

2)Worthless Shopping- Like most RPGs, RoS lets you buy stuff to upgrade fighters and give you an edge on the battle field. Unlike most RPGs, RoS gives you no control over what you buy. During battles, you can send unused units to pick up some stuff for you. You have no control over what the unit purchases and there is a chance the unit will loose all your money and come back empty handed. Also, some units are better at shopping than others and it seemed that the more invaluable the unit was on the battlefield, the better it was at shopping and vice versa. As a result, I rarely used the feature because the unit would come back with junk.


3) The Zone of Control- As if to make up for having units that are easy to kill and throwing tons of enemies at you, you have the route system that allows you to attack multiple enemies. But then RoS goes and turns it against you with a lovely skill called the ZoC or Zone of Control. Basically, this skill will stop a unit's charge dead in its tracks and prevent it from attacking or moving any more. You tend to face big clusters of enemies with this skill while you only have one unit that can do this, and the enemy ZoC seems to activate almost all the time while yours doesn't. This creates a situation where the enemy is free to hammer at your entire army while you struggle to wear down one of their units.

4) Unbalanced game play- I should think that most games should shoot for a kind of natural progression of difficulty. RoS has a feature were you can restart the current battle and keep all the experience earned during the aborted battle and regain all defeated units and used items. I imagine this is so you can level up units that have been inactive for a while and perfect your battlefield strategy, but what makes it so cheap is that you are practically forced to use it. On some maps, the only conceivable way to win is to basically restart the battle over and over until you have beefed up your very best fighters to have way more levels than the enemy.
And you must do this for hours sometimes. To give you an example, it took me nine hours to reach the 14th or so battle. I bought this game used and the previous owner had a game save that indicated it took him seven hours to reach the fifth battle.

This isn't to say that RoS is completely impossible. For every battle designed for maximum forehead vein popping, there is one that is actually quite nicely balanced. Challenging but a workable challenge. It's during these that you can see what a great game RoS could have been. But still, RoS is like a plate with half fillet mignon and half regurgitated cheeseburger and I wouldn't call that edible.

A Unique take on SRPG
Rondo of Swords has a unique take on SRPGs where the emphasis is on the path that you take along with the direction when attacking an opponent. After a lot of cookie cutter SRPGs this is refreshing. It is however not as easy as some other titles (even the tutorials take a long time).

A Challenging New Take on the Genre
Yes, Rondo of Swords is not an easy game. It forces players to unlearn what they have learned about SRPGS. Your 200 hours of Disgaea or your total domination of FFT will not help you here. The mechanic is drastically different, and it requires a new kind of strategy to conquer.

Here's where I had the most fun; learning the new wrinkles in the gameplay system, using the environment and positioning to my advantage and actually playing a game where a character mobility is as important as their relative strength. RoS is an odd bird in the RPG world, but the innovation is worth the frustration.

Now even with all the challenging fun, this game is nowhere near perfect. The documentation is terrible, along with the in-game tutorial. The larger metagame is never really explored (errands) and mistakes can be made without any chance to go back and fix them. For this part of the game gamefaqs.com is your friend. Along with lack luster unit/environmental art, uninteresting/sometimes repetitive music, and other strange design choices this game loses a star from me.

All that being said, for fans of SRPGS Rondo is a real gem. Playing it is like nothing you have ever tried before. Winning battles, even after a few tries, carries an extra sense of accomplishment because of the actual tactical thinking needed to overcome the foes. Unfortunately, non genre-stalwarts should probably find another game.

Very Difficult
I bought this game with high hopes thinking it would be like Jeanne D'Arc and FF War of the Lions I couldn't have been more wrong. This game is very challenging. Most of the battles you probably have to repeat 2-4 times just to get through them. The story line is next to extinct it's just going from one battle to the next. In most games you can go to a general store to pick up healing items not so in this game you have to have a member of your party pick up the items while your fighting, unfortunatly about 80% of the time they end up losing all your money and don't bring back any items which leaves you with no way to heal yourself in battle. If your looking for a good stratagy RPG I suggest getting FF tactics War of the Lions or Jeanne D'Arc both are challenging and have very good story lines. The only thing Rondo of Swords leaves you with is the overwhelming desire to scream your head off.