. It reminded me of my own struggle with
. Sad how the PC-E seems superior in every way, yet it was never translated.
Langrisser II was developed by Masaya and released for the Mega Drive in 1994. It's safe to say that as far as SRPGs and Sega are concerned,
Shining Force,
Sakura Wars and
Langrisser constitute the holy trinity that immediately comes to mind. While
Shining Force garnered quite a following in the West and is still remembered fondly,
Sakura Wars is a very niche product with its mix of VN sections and actual gameplay.
Warsong aka
Langrisser I - which I consider a great game - was the only installment to come out in the West before the series surprisingly resurfaced in recent years with varying degrees of success (apparently,
Langrisser Re:Incarnation = Bad,
Langrisser Mobile = Good). The game was only released in Japan, but as you might have guessed, it received a
fan-translation. I thought it was well done if a bit raw, although I didn't get the impression that the writing/plot was particularly good to begin with, so the translator probably did his best with what he had. It's very basic
power of friendship and light versus darkness stuff, but it gets the job done. Sometimes there was some fairly strong language being thrown around, but it didn't feel out of place, whereas having a villain blurting out 'Shit!' in
FE Gaiden certainly did.
The gameplay in
Langrisser II is pretty much the same as in its predecessor, you don't merely control individual heroes as you'd do in most SRPGs. Instead, each character comes with their own retinue. You can recruit up to 6 troops per general before a battle. Depending on the class of your general, you'll be given access to different kinds of troops. For examples, priests can recruit monks who are particularly good at fighting the undead, whereas Dragon Knights can recruit flying units, Knights can recruit mounted units and so on. Much like
Warsong,
LII features branching promotions, so that when your heroes level up, they'll eventually be given the option to class change. Each class comes with its own stats, powers as well as their own set of recruitable troops. That means each playthrough is going be quite different, opening up new options and offering a lot of replayability. The gameplay follows a stone-scissors-paper formula, so that Mounted Units -> Footsoldiers -> Pikemen -> Mounted Units. Flying units do well against anyone else, but they get predictably annihilated by archers. As alr--
Shush! As already mentioned, Guards/Monks do well against Slimes/Demons/Undead, but they are otherwise completely useless. Terrain is pretty important in
LII.
Woods and mountains take longer to traverse, but they also grant extra defense to units standing on it. Surprisingly enough, units can walk on any body of water, but it'll take them very long to do so, unless they are Mermen - who get a 30% bonus from water and can swim very quickly, but they are also stupidly weak, so there's no point. Maps are well designed with a good mix of indoor and outdoor environments. When indoors, mounted units get heavily nerfed as they can only move half as fast. Interestingly, flying units are unaffected by this, whereas
FE3 forced both Knights and Flyers to dismount and switch to swords when indoors.
One important distinction I like to make among turn-based SRPGs is whether your turn and the enemy turn are entirely team-based, so that you command all of your troops at once and then the enemy does the same - much like
FE - or each individual unit on the map has some kind of stat that determines who's going to act first - much like
Shining Force or
Devil Survivor - which in some cases can be abused and means a character can act twice before the enemy even gets a chance to respond. I'm not saying that one system is necessarily better than the other, but I'll mention that
LII belongs to the first group.
Ordering all of your troops around can sometimes be pretty time-consuming, especially when you have to traverse long stretches of the map before even making it to the enemy. Luckily, you can have the AI taking control over your minions, so you can only focus on your generals. However, there were a few instances when I wanted them to follow my general, but they went astray or got stuck somewhere. It's a cool feature, but even if it takes more time, it's much better to control them manually. Not to mention how positioning is extremely important during fights, seeing as units that stand on a tile adjacent to their general recover 3 HPs after each turn.
The art is from Satoshi Urushihara aka the, uh, Master of Breasts. It's good. The character sprites are nice to look at and really help the characters come to life. The music by Noriyuki Iwadare is one of the best things
Langrisser has going for it and the OST definitely has more spank to it than anything I heard from
FE. Some of the tracks were so good, that I wanted the enemy turn to take longer, so that I could listen to the whole thing. There's something beautifully Mega-Drive about the soundtrack which I doubt any other system could quite replicate.
For comparison purposes, this is the same track from the SFC port:
Finally, I'd like to mention how
LII offered a fair challenge but it wasn't a particularly hard game. Heroes that are defeated in battle are not gone forever and you can even save the game during battles - not a feature I care for, but it's there. I remember
Warsong being slightly harder. All in all,
LII is a great game which doesn't do
much new and pretty much reiterates the formula from
Warsong. Luckily, it still works very well and is a lot of fun.
I give this game 8 Swords of Light out of 10.The SFC port of
LII -
Der Langrisser - also received a fan-translation, but I'm not sure whether it warrants a playthrough at this point in time. I know it has some additional content, but it's still largely the same. Other than that, the only other retro-compliant
Langrisser game which is available in English is
Langrisser IV (also a fan-translation), so I might check that out.