Hands-on: Agarest – Generations of War 2

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Agarest: Generations of War 2 (previously called: Record of Agarest War 2) has been recently released digitally on PC via Steam. Before that, it was actually a PS3 exclusive, that came out in 2012 (for Europe and America, at least).  After more than a week of gameplay, we’re ready to give you our first impressions of this game.

The game presents itself like an “anime style” game, and doesn’t try to hide the great amount of “fanservice” (Wikipedia sums up that term pretty well). In fact, the whole plot is used as a way to hide a “dating simulator”. But we’ll talk more about the story in the full review, for now let’s talk about the most important aspects of the game.

As for the actual gameplay, it’s a turn-based RPG, which plays on two separate 6×7 grids, one for your party and one for the enemies. There are four different type of regular attacks: high attacks, power attacks, ground attacks and paralyze attacks, it’s up to you to decide what’s better to use with different monsters. You can also have more than one character attack at once, which proves to be really helpful. Be careful not to have only one character do all of the attacks, because the more you’ll attack, the more time will pass before it will be his/her turn again.

That’s putting it simply, the gameplay is actually more complex than that and we’ll talk about it in more detail on our full review.

The graphics are really nice, it’s a mix of 2D sprites in a 3D world, it reminds us of Final Fantasy VI. The sprites themselves are exceptionally well done, the special moves effects are also hard to improve. The soundtrack is also pretty good: nothing spectacular, but you’ll probably find yourself singing the tunes along.

This game is not easily intuitive, and requires some work to get used to. But if you’ll have the patience to give it a try, once you understand the gameplay mechanics, you might be pleasantly surprised by the quality of this game. Of course, if you don’t like anime-styled games, any kind of “fanservice” or are not a fan of RPGs, then this game is not for you. For those who do, please stay tuned to find out more!