By Kurt Kalata
The strategy RPG genre has been gaining steam slowly in America. While most Westerners were introduced to it through Sega's Shining Force (in the 16-bit era) or Final Fantasy Tactics (in the 32-bit era), it's been a mainstay in Japanese video gaming since Nintendo's Fire Emblem was introduced for the Famicom in the late 80s. One of the most popular out of all of these was Masaya's Langrisser series. While the first game was brought out in America way back in the Genesis era (retitled "Warsong"), the rest of the games never left Japan, mostly due to the low-tech quality of the graphics and general unpopularity RPGs at the time. While the series essentially died off with the Saturn (not technically - more on that later), Langrisser has remained one of the greatest strategy games in video gaming.
What sets Langrisser apart from others of its kind is its tremendous scale. Most similar games have you controlling between five and ten single units. By comparison, in Langrisser it's not uncommon to control over thirty units at one time, fighting against scores of enemies on a single map. The main characters are extremely powerful units dubbed "generals". Each general commands a Battalion of generic soldiers, and the two share an important symbiotic relationship with each other. Soldiers are relatively weak, but are available in great numbers and relatively dispensable. Keeping your soldiers close not only keeps the general safe, but awards them with a stat bonus, allowing for far more efficient combat. It sounds like it's a pain to keep track of all of these units, but you don't have to move them all individually - if you leave them be, they'll automatically set up a defensive formation around their leader. All generals have healing abilities for both themselves and their troops, which is yet another advantage of keeping them close. Killing enemies yields not only experience points (which are applied to the troop as a whole, rather than individual characters), but also yields cash to recruit additional soldiers or buy equipment for your generals. This is another important part of the strategy - if you kill a general, all of their troops will die automatically. But eliminating them one by one and saving the leader for last, while more dangerous, will lead to greater rewards. After gaining enough levels, you have a choice to promote a general to higher classes, so you have some role in their character development.
If managing such a huge army weren't enough, most scenarios have you fighting alongside several computer guided NPC characters. Certain installments let you give vague orders to your compatriots, but they tend to do dumb things anyway.
Much like other strategy games, there are three primary unit types that have various advantages and disadvantages over each other like rock, paper, scissors. Terrain bonuses also play a heavy part in strategy, as hiding in forests or mountains give you incredibly advantages over fighting out in the open. When you engage in combat, the game switches to a zoomed in side view depicting the battle (much like Military Madness or its spiritual successor, Advance Wars.) Regular soldiers charge at each other, clashing until they fall. Generals attack with magic spells that tear through regular warriors. While they're fun at first, most of the games let you turn these sequences off, as they make the long battles seem even more drawn out.
All of the games revolve around the holy sword Langrisser and its counterpart, the Alhazard. Each Langrisser game is also populated with a huge cast of characters, both good and evil. There's quite a bit of dialogue in battle, which makes it all the more frustrating that it was never translated from Japanese.
These characters are brought to life by the beautiful illustrations by artist Satoshi Urushihara, notable for anime such as Legend of Lemear and Plastic Little, and infamous for hentai like Ragnarok City and Front Innocent. Urushihara has a specialty for designing attractive, scantily glad girls with wistful doe eyes and impossibly pert breasts, but he doesn't stray away from creating stylish male characters with overflowing spikes of vibrantly colored hair, suited up in stylishly bulked-up armor. They're some some of the most detailed character portraits ever seen for any video game, and certainly far better than anything seen in the 16-bit era.
Langrisser's other main star is its primary composer, Noriyuki Iwadare. Famous for composing classics such as Lunar and Grandia for Game Arts, Iwadare's music is full of heavy synth rock, with far more energetic flavor than the brooding orchestrations from the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics.
The true Langrisser series includes five games, originating on the Genesis/Mega Drive, and ending on the Saturn/Playstation. The Dreamcast installment is largely considered a bastardization and goes unacknowledged by most fans.
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Langrisser (Saturn)
Langrisser 2 (Saturn)
Langrisser 3
Langrisser 2
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