Jeanne d'Arc was said to be a great game for people who enjoyed FFT, and I can confirm this.
People who know FFT will easily understand the concept of the game. You get rid of most of what I find annoying in RPGs (building up your character, dialogs with stupid NPCs, etc...) and spend your time in strategical combat phases. You usually choose up to 5 of your characters to go on the battlefield, and there you go.
The scenario is interesting (although, obviously, very far from the actual facts... I don't recall there were goblins in middle-age France), the anime sequences are alright, and the overall "manga" touch of the game is not too annoying (assuming you're a grown up and are fed up with the style of Shonen mangas, this game is still alright - just saying because I tend to avoid games where the main character is a 14 years-old kid with eyes big as an apple and hair the color of puked red-bull)
As far as strategy goes, so far so good. If you played FFT, the first missions will be too easy for you, but after a few hours of play, things start to get tricky and challenging. I haven't found a level where I'm completely blocked yet (I remember some levels in FFT where I had to take back a very old savegame in order to improve my main character and get him to find a specific coat to protect against a very specific enemy, or something like that)
The AI is sometimes very dumb, and most of the times I feel like if it weren't for the very advantageous initial position they have (bowmen in very high places, mages protected by heavy infantry units,...) I would just rip it appart. I've seen times where the AI just seemed to "forget" to kill one of my characters and instead focused on other ones, which often gave me enough time to heal the wounded during the next turn. Nevertheless, as I said, initial placements of the units still make it very challenging most of the time.
The graphics, besides the manga touch, are very good (nice cell shading on 3D characters) and use the features of the PSP very well. Sometimes when there's a lot of detail it's difficult to see what's going on though (which wasn't the case in the "16 bit" look and feel of FFTactics). Also, there are some scenes when it feels to me like the devs are using a dithering technique (I think it's how it's called) showing only one pixel out of two... is that to reduce computation/display times? Is it to simulate some fog? I don't really know, but it looks "cheap". But one really has to pay attention to see that kind of detail. If you notice the scanlines on the PSP3000 like I do, you'll probably notice that kind of effect too. But that's really a minor issue, and the rest of the game just looks very good.
As far as strategical heroic fantasy goes, I think it's very good. As it's been said, people who enjoyed FFT can't go wrong with Jeanne d'Arc. I wish there was the same kind of game in a cyberpunk environment... I'm thinking of an old game called Syndicate... although I never played it, it sure looked like the kind of game I would enjoy on the PSP.
It's a fairly old game, so it can be found for cheap in most countries.
By the way, the game is not available on the European PSN, which sucks considering it talks about a war between Great Britain and France, but that's not surprising from Sony who completely failed their digital strategy and re-demonstrate it on a regular basis.
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