Review: ...just not based on our current generation of chaos
Since Nippon Ichi became the indie darling of PlayStation 2 development with their quirky and amusing strategy role-playing games like Disgaea, anything with their name on it has added notoriety...even if they had little to no involvement in its creation. Such is the case with Generation of Chaos, a turn-based strategy game from Idea Factory and one of the first PSP games of its genre to be released in the US. However, though it might say NIS America on the box, don't expect a Disgaea or La Pucelle game; rather, much of the 'RPG' is stripped away leaving a difficult, cumbersome, frustrating, load-heavy, and very repetitive strategy title that begs the question – when will Sony open up the PS1 emulation service so we can get our Final Fantasy Tactics on?
The Lost Grounds is the home of GoC's story, where there's ten various kingdoms warring with each other over their land – it's all very similar to games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Nobunaga's Ambition in that respect. At the start there's just a pair of these kingdoms to choose from, though eventually the others unlock. There's really little plot to what's going on aside from the same repetitive 'for the kingdom!' sort of battle cries, and certainly nothing on the scale of many other strategy titles or SRPG games. The game tries but most of what it presents is just not very interesting. Instead, you play out about a half-dozen chapters per story mode, each with different objectives to complete.
The main goal of each battle is to win over the location you're at, so you can tax the inhabitants and make money to upgrade your troops and the like. Opposed to a Strategy RPG that has just a few characters on the screen at a time, Generation of Chaos has dozens of enemies and friendlies that you control, though the main goal is to keep your leaders alive or lose the battle. Issuing commands is pretty simple to grasp (though clunky to execute) and you might make some headway right off the bat but the game has a brutal learning curve even with that in mind. You're allowed to save at any point of a battle, which comes in handy for when you get into a huge fight and make a few tactical errors or just plain get your ass kicked by superior forces. It can be extremely unfun to get wasted often, but it happens quite a bit here, which makes for a frustrating game that offers little to no reason to actually play through it if you get stuck.
If you can manage to play on, there's a bit of variety to battles. By successfully fighting, a super gauge builds up that lets you pull off super moves which are dazzling displays of PSP power but also lay waste to everything in your path. When you win battles, generally the head officer of your opposing troops will be captured and three things can happen – you either let him go, kill him, or recruit him to your side, adding a valuable ally to your cause. Like most strategy games, winning grants you experience that can be divvied up between your officers with one caveat – they reach their peak level pretty fast meaning you should definitely spread the wealth.
To go along with the many gameplay issues, there's plenty of technical issues. The load times are frequent and rip up the flow of battles, and though dealing with loading is one of the many things PSP owners deal with on a constant basis, it's pretty bad here. Between that and the super move effects that completely slow down the gameplay, there's a lot of delays going on. The menus are cumbersome to navigate which makes finding the commands to issue annoying, even if they are easy to actually execute. In short, while Generation of Chaos offers a unique take on the strategy genre with its anime-inspired plot and design, it's lacks where it counts.
The game does look pretty decent though, with nice sprites and plenty of flashy effects, though you might want to turn them off after a while because as mentioned, they can cause massive slowdown, which is crazy in a slow-paced strategy game. This ain't Devil May Cry, after all. But there's plenty of on-screen characters which might explain the difficulties with keeping the speed up. The audio features decent war-like music that fits (though the loading curse hits again as there's a delay when loading up a theme), and a heaping helping of cheesy voice acting which is pretty much just little sound bits. For those Japanophiles, the audio track can be switched to Japanese which in this case is a lot better than the hammy English actors.
