As grim as you wanna be

Have you ever read a grimoire, or book of magical wisdom? They’re commonly dark and scary, bursting with information about cursing your foes into utter misery. Placing the word ”grim” in front of ”grimoire” leads to ideas about sinister magical creatures hell-bent on punishing all who exist to suffer mortal agony.

GrimGrimoire is a brightly colored story about a cute little girl.

Well, at first it is. Released by VanillaWare and Nippon Ichi Software on June 26 exclusively for the PlayStation 2, GrimGrimoire is a real-time strategy (RTS) game that tells the tale of young Lillet Blan, a budding young sorceress who has been invited to study magic at a mysterious school in the countryside. This school, called the Magic Academy, has various disciplines of magical study and is led by headmaster Gammel Dore, a Merlin-like old wizard who sports a long white beard and spends his time training young magicians.

The story grows darker with each hour and each new grimoire–the game’s method of teaching spells and unlocking battle characters–is more grim than the last. There are moments of dark, clever humor splashed throughout the game, though much of it makes me question the Everyone 10+ rating (as in, for gamers 10 and over) that Grimoire received. I’m guessing that the Entertainment Software Rating Board saw only the cute, two-dimensional graphics and simple learning curve before rating this game. The jokes here aren’t really E10+. For example, there’s a dialogue between a devil professor and his pretty–presumably underage–lady student about whom he “wonders how it feels to be deep inside of.” Classy.

The gameplay is simple enough for the E10+ crowd, at least in the early stages. There are three levels of difficulty on the first play-through, with “sweet” being the easiest and “normal” the hardest. Normal is a cakewalk for the first few hours, though later battles are a much more enjoyable challenge.

The battle system is similar to RTS battlers like Command and Conquer or Warcraft III in that you control an entire field of characters, summoning fighters to attack the enemy’s bases–called runes–as you defend your own. You call upon a wide range of allies who can lead forward assaults, defend your runes or collect mana, the magical lifeblood of Grimoire. As you summon larger quantities of allies, your strategic area expands and multiple areas will require your attention, making timing a key element of your strategy.

The learning curve for this battle system is about an hour long, though it would be a lot shorter if the game didn’t impose its superfluous tutorial system onto gamers.

The story begins to loop in time after the fifth day, as Lillet encounters the dark wizard Archmage, whose former castle serves as the modern-day Magic Academy. He appears after the first five days to terrorize sweet little Lillet and thus initiates a time-space loop that causes wild changes to the story and a massive potential for strategic time-flow manipulation in the game.

The gameplay goes from small and simple to widespread and involved in a hurry, and this abrupt shift forces gamers to use all they’ve learned to stay alive. This sudden challenge makes Grimoire all the more enjoyable and every five days–about four hours of gameplay–brings about some wonderful story development and new magic to incorporate into your strategy.

The latter half of Grimoire’s battle system gets tiring, as battles will easily exceed an hour of ally conjuring and enemy killing. The story stays fresh enough to make it worth these endurance trials, though it would have been nice to see some of those earlier surprises towards the end, as the new stuff made each fresh battle enjoyable.

Though Grimoire purports 40 hours of gameplay, you’ll finish in 20 if you’ve ever played a role-playing or strategy game before. It’s $40 off the shelves, but if you’re gaming on a budget, you can beat Grimoire during a weeklong rental. Overall, if you’re an RTS veteran, give this game a shot and if you’ve never bothered to play strategy games, Grimoire is a great place to start.