"Right, men. Confuse the...CAT!"

I still don’t have my gaming rigs set up in my new house yet, so when Atlus’ Knights in the Nightmare for my Nintendo DS came in the mail courtesy of my Gamefly subscription, I was happy to break my eight day video game withdrawal by locking myself in my bathroom while my wife kept fluffing her tea cozies and hanging drapes.

I had heard multiple gaming sites and podcasts dance around the room with this game, some hating it, some loving it, but all agreed that it was definitely one of the most unique games they’d seen come out in a long while.

Hit me after the jump for my thoughts.

Busy, busy wisp.

Published by Atlus, who has a track record of green lighting projects that most big studios would run screaming from, Knights is of a similar vein.  And that vein is a lot of big crazy, insane-asylum ideas all crammed into one game.  If you’ve ever heard of the insanity that was Odin Sphere for the PS2, you’ll know where this game is coming from.

And that’s what makes it unique and so bizarre that I had to give it a try.  I’m always trying to find break out games from the usual space-marine-bang-bang shooter that any kind of innovation is a welcome change of pace from the usual.

So let me try to break this mind-melting game down into it’s basics for someone who’s never seen it before. Look, it took me an hour to dig through the very detailed and very complex tutorial, so don’t expect me to be able to do it justice here.

The fantasy based story is a little convoluted as it jumps back and forth in time focused around a disaster at the Castle Aventheim, but it starts to come together as you go through the game.

The game’s foundation is a Final Fantasy Tactics style turn-based strategy game.  The trick here is that instead of moving separate units around, your character is a “wisp” that you control with your stylus.  When you move the wisp over a character on your team, your team member “activates” and you can then direct them to action.

Each “level” usually consists between five to ten rounds, with each round usually spawning 2-4 creatures at a time.  Your job is to direct the knights, who are generally stationary, to attack when the creatures cross into their line-of-sight, of which, every class of knight has a different attack radius.  The creatures, in their defense, shoot out a variety of attacks that zoom all over the screen, attacking your wisp.

Instead of basic turns, each turn, you are given 60 seconds to conduct actions.  While the characters you can control can’t be injured, your wisp can be, which takes time off of the clock.  Each move you make takes time, but the clock stops when you’re moving around the screen.  While you’ve got plenty of time to plan attacks, you find yourself under constant fire, so you’re never really sitting back and contemplating your next move.

At the bottom of the screen is a goal diagram called the enemy matrix, which shows which creatures you’ve killed and which ones are still active.  At the end of each round, a slot machine style selection starts where you can try to manipulate which creatures are coming up for the next round. To beat the level, you have to kill the creatures in tic-tac-toe style “breakthrough” before you run out of rounds.

Confused?  You should be.  This is not a pick-up-and-play casual game; this ain’t no Peggle here.  This doesn’t even take weapon selection, special attacks, elemental attacks, Law and Chaos phase cycles, character levelinorg  “transoul” sacrificing into account: the list goes on and on.  This game is deep, and even after going through the full tutorial, I’m still learning about things only through gameplay and trial and error.

I’ve only put about six hours into the game, although my wife has to be getting suspicious that I’m spending so much time in the bathroom while she’s putting the house together.  But this game has really grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.  I want to keep playing it, and fortunately for me, they have a leveling component where you can log into your save and go back to replay levels to keep leveling your characters and gaining equipment.  Much like the Disgaea series (again, published by Atlus), if you want to spend 200 hours playing, they are happy to oblige.

If you’re into complex strategic RPGs, then you’d be crazy to miss out on this little number.  Game developer Sting has done a great job here, and Atlus and has again bent the laws of gaming standards to put out another underground sleeper  hit. Highly recommended.

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