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Der Langrisser was developed by Masaya and released in 1996 for the SFC. It's a remake of
Langrisser II for the Mega Drive. Visually,
DL looks both sharper and darker than
L2 and it fully delivers the kind of aesthetics you'd expect from an SFC title. Highly polished, but a far cry from the colorful, almost cartoonish Mega Drive graphics.
DL didn't merely receive a graphical overhaul as it also comes with branching story paths, more dialog and better fleshed out characters - including new characters. It's not so much that it received a better fan translation than
L2, it's just that the translator had more to work with. The
fan translation was indeed good, although again some characters - mostly villains - occasionally use pretty strong language and I can't help but wonder if that's consistent with the original Japanese script.
While the core gameplay mechanics remain unchanged, there are some notable differences. As you start the game, you'll get asked several questions. Your answers determine the starting class of the main character. It didn't exactly bother me, but I didn't think it added much either. Then again, I'm the type of guy who gets annoyed when the game asks you to pick a name for your character. Whereas you could assign mixed units to your generals in the previous games - e.g. 2 pikemen and 4 soldiers - now you have to stick to just one unit class for all of your troops. There are more restrictions, like mages only being able to recruit three units. Interestingly, that doesn't seem to apply to enemy mages, that'll often come with a full 6-unit party. Enemy generals are also allowed to recruit mixed units, apparently.
That's not as bad as it sounds because the game is not hard. Not at all. While it's definitely not as insultingly easy as some suggest, but it's still a bit easier than
L2, which wasn't a difficult game itself. Obviously, the game can get stupidly easy aka a boring slog if you abuse the saving system. I ignored it just as I did back when I played
L2. However, I was tempted to use it a couple of times because there are either in-game cutscenes or conversations during battles and no way to skip those. Meaning that if you start a battle from scratch, you'll have to go through all that junk one more time. It doesn't help that there's no option to make the message speed faster or skip conversations altogether. Again, this could be worse if the game was hard and you had to restart levels constantly, but luckily that wasn't the case.
But the real shortcoming is that the gameplay in
DL feels somewhat
cumbersome. I could tell battles felt noticeably slower this time around. I didn't check it, but I believe the scrolling speed is slower and selecting units and ordering them around seemed to take so much longer. And the enemy turns, God, the enemy turns took so much more time. I believe that's a consequence of
DL running on completely different tech than
L2 and probably being built on an entirely different engine as well. Whereas
Warsong and
L2 look about the same,
DL is a pretty different beast and is no coincidence that all the maps were remade from scratch. Some of them were heavily overhauled, others are close to the original, others were missing entirely.
I can make that kind of comparison as I played through the Light path, which is largely the same as the campaign from
L2. Not that I didn't want to try out one of the new story paths, but I played the game blind and I missed the chance. I wouldn't even know branching storylines were an option if I didn't read about it online. Still, it's safe to say that
DL does indeed come with tons of extra content compared to
L2. Quantity-wise, there's no doubt that
DL wins hands down - that said, the campaign in
L2 features more levels than any of the campaigns from
DL, while you'll only get more levels out of the latter if you're willing to start a new game. Quality-wise, I thought the gameplay felt faster and not as clunky on the Mega Drive. The visuals and sound are a matter of taste, but the Mega Drive version is better in either departments if you ask me - especially the music.
I expect some quality-of-life enhancements from a remake. For example,
FE3 letting you check the movement range of enemy units so that I didn't have to count tiles as in
FE1.
Or again,
FE11 letting you skip the enemy turn entirely.
Obviously, there's no such tech jump between the SNES and the MD, but I definitely wasn't expecting the gameplay to actually be
slower. That said, I didn't hate the game or anything, I thought it was actually pretty good. The gameplay is still pretty fun. In fact, I liked
DL whenever it did something that reminded me of
L2 and disliked it when it did something different. While I'm sure playing through the other story paths might be a worthwhile gaming experience, I'm sure that wouldn't do much to change my rating or address any of my issues with the game, as they are entirely related to the gameplay rather than the story. I would also be more inclined to play through them if I didn't have to start a new game, if the gameplay wasn't as slow as it is and if I didn't feel
DL was a solid but still inferior version of an older game.
I give this game 7 Zauberer out of 10.
EDIT: Bumped to 8/10 after playing through the Imperial campaign.