Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Sep 1, 2021

  So, Soul Nomad is probably one of my favorite Nippon Ichi games of all time, and I still have my PS2 copy to this day, so I was incredibly hyped when I heard this was getting a steam port. With that out of the way however, the game is ultimately, a straight port of the PS2 version, so that may dampen it for some people. That said, this is the first time ever that the game has ever gotten a re-release and tracking down a physical copy is quite the endeavor, speaking from personal experience I had to scour every gamestop and used game store around me for 3 months before I found a copy, and this was more than 10 years ago now, so it's probably harder now than it was back then. So this makes the steam/switch port the easiest way to get the game. Now lets discuss the gameplay: so the core of the battle system is that you control squads of units in battle, the sizes ranging from 1 unit to 9, and in many ways it reminds me of an old game called Ogre Battle for the SNES/PSX where the premise was the same mixed with the turn order system of Final Fantasy X. You will always have the Main Character's squad deployed at the start of every battle, and at the start of the game, it will be the only squad you have access to. Once you advance along in the story however, you open up more squads, and equally important, more squad room types. Squad rooms function as the core bonus of the squad they're in, the starting room you have access at the start has no bonus, but as you unlock more rooms you get bonuses like damage increased by tiles moved, to bonuses like stats increased by percentage of stamina missing. Stamina also plays an important role in combat, every action taken be it, moving, attacking, defending or using squad skills uses stamina and if a squads stamina hits 0 that squad dies, you also incur a stat malus for having your stamina below 50% and finally, special attack skills can only be used at 80% or below making it something of a balancing act. There is however ways to recover stamina, if no action is taken at all in a squads turn they recover a portion of their stamina and items also recover stamina. Squads are staffed with units obtained via the story, or much like Disgaea created by you. Each unit has an ability or attack used in a specific row of a squads formation, healers for example heal everyone in the squad when placed in the rear, other classes may hit a row or column of the enemy squad depending on row placement. Squads can also be equipped with items, with the caveat that they are used up after the battles completion, with one exception. These items increase stats like attack, magic, critical chance, and movement, making them useful for getting though encounters without needing to grind much. It would not be a Nippon Ichi Software game if there wasn't an infinite dungeon to grind in, in this game it's called inspection. Inspection is the way you upgrade your squad rooms in Soul Nomad, as well as level grind. As you increase your rooms strength the bonus it gets from equipped items increases as well as the room bonus, it is also how you increase squad capacity taking it from the base value to 9, not all that necessary early on, but becomes very useful as you progress. Inspection is also that aforementioned exception to squad equip items being used up after a battle's end, during inspection every item equipped is carried over into the next battle and remains after you finish, only being used once you go into a normal battle. As for the story, it's a bit more heavy than say, a Disgaea story, though not without humor, mostly in the form of Gig's commentary on the on goings around him. The second story path unlocked after you start a New game Plus is... probably the darkest thing NIS has ever done and probably will ever do. Speaking of Gig, the dub voice is amazing and Yuri Lowenthal absolutely owns the role as Gig. The dub overall is one i would consider NIS' best dubbings barring how annoying Danette can get. All in all the game might not be what some people wanted, but for 20 bucks, it's still a solid port and still cheaper than trying to track down a disc copy of the game for PS2. I personally recommend getting it if you are a fan of the more non-traditional NIS games and/or want to hear more Gig if you're a fan of him in Disgaea 4 and 5.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 1, 2021

  I played it for a bit, and I can tell it's just a straight port of the original. No Widescreen support, no redone UI, no nothing. They did increase the resolution of the font, so neat. It is better than playing off an emulator, but the price may be a bit steep for what it is. I would've liked a fast-forward option at least. This is still a really nice game, so I'd definitely recommend it still.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 6, 2022

  Soul Nomad & The World Eaters is an experiment with a questionable outcome. During the PS2 era, when NIS would make a game, it would always end up as a Disgaea clone. Both, being kinda-the-same in both gameplay and the story. A tactical RPG with a light-hearted story and a ton of replay worth. Soul Nomad, however, turned out completely different. Soul Nomad is more or less an old-school Japanese strategy game with some RPG elements. It has a ton of endings and quite a few of easter eggs, but honestly though? - it's only worth finishing two times. Once a normal campaign, once a second campaign. Your first playtrough will be quite enjoyable and will hold some challenge. Once you finish the game, it restarts and you will be given an ability to do the second campaign off the bat.. but the difficulty will be broken. Without abusing the leveling strats it is literally impossible to finish... luckily it takes about 10-15 minutes of farming to powerlevel all your way trough as long as you have the items to do so. Unless you're willing to manually increase your level before each mission, you'll likely end up having a completely busted character. That is a trap, however. The "best" ending cannot be achieved if your character cannot die. The story in this game starts as your average Disgaea title but slowly goes a completely different route, becoming serious, depressing and emotionally taxing. The author combines both campaigns not in a way of them being connected somehow, but in a way that the second campaign will become desirable. "You didn't like what you saw during your first playtrough? - just destroy it then". It's a very unique type of storytelling and, so far, I haven't seen any other game utilizing it. However, it works only as long as you're using English version. The Japanese original... well... It would be a praise to call it "bad". No matter if you understand Japanese or not, just don't use neither the VO or text. Forget that they exist. The translation here isn't a "translation". It actually changes the text in quite a few places to improve the overall story & characters. And about the Ja VO - it's just bad (quality included). If I'd make a guess why it wasn't a big success - it's this, the original Japanese version. The port itself is quite K but far from being perfect. The sprites are just stretched (even the fonts) and honestly, you can get a better result running the game on a specific software with the DX11 support. The mouse controls are good, but the game suffers from native PS2 UI so it plays kinda the same on the controller too. Basically, it's literally a PS2 port and that's about it. It just works and doesn't suffer from any bugs or optimization issues. The price is a bit too much for a PS2 era game and what is even more strange - it rarely has discounts more than 20%. Don't get me wrong, it is a good game but it certainly isn't worth the full price. Grab it on 20%+ discount.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 6, 2021

  No widescreen support. The toggleable sprite filters don't really play nice with surrounding lighting effects. Some map textures don't line up correctly. The UI looks worse for the upscaling - the dialogue box's background in particular. Audio doesn't seem any better than the original. Background and character art has not been rescanned to take advantage of the higher resolution. There's no option to automatically play the next line when a line finishes, unlike subsequent NIS titles. Still has the issues of the original, like the annoying room shuffling, your teams being displayed in enemy colours in the Arrange Menu, the lack of information on unit abilities - you have to go into combat to know if your new dancer will buff INT or SPD from this row. This seems inferior to a PS2 emulation if you have access to that and a bit of time to fiddle with the settings. Otherwise, still an excellent game.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 1, 2021

  Ah brings back my childhood memories, great story and funny conversation to follow. Gig always be my favorite character from NIS games.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 13, 2022

  Love this game!!! Probably my favorite NIS game. Functions a lot like Ogre Battle but with some Disgaea juice in the mix. The writing is kinda bad at times - Gig calls multiple people retarded lol - but outside of a few instances it's good. This port is not very good - a bunch of textures are still the same resolution as the PS2, which looks ugly as piss on modern displays - but honestly just breaking it out of the PS2 jail it was stuck in is good enough for me.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 1, 2021

  Compared to NIS's other ports like Disgaea 2 PC, this is massively disappointing. The audio is heavily compressed, none of the UI was redone, the artwork wasn't rescanned/rexported to fit HD screens, and there's no widescreen support. I was really looking forward to this release, but I don't see what it has over any old PS2 emulator.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 27, 2022

  This is one of my favorite games from my youth, and honestly holds up to this day. I don't think I can really name another game that is quite like Soul Nomad/Soul Cradle other than maybe X-Com with a ton of mods installed, or maybe X-Com blended with Fire Emblem/Advance Wars. The basic concept of the gameplay is as you progress through the story, you unlock units you can put into individual squads (or Rooms, as the game calls it), with each squad led by one unit who will be able to provide different bonuses or abilities. You can make any unit a squad leader, and this will allow them to do different things in the map during a battle. Think of it like Fire Emblem, except instead of just one guy against one guy, it's entire squads duking it out. And outside of individual fights, you can use different abilities to provide buffs or debuffs, AOEs, instant-damage attacks, all sorts of things. You can do a lot with this, and it only gets deeper from there. Each room you have can be equipped with "decor" items that give bonuses or unique effects to their squads, and you can run through RNG dungeons from the squad organization menu to give individual rooms points that can then be used to modify stats of individual units in a room. On top of this, you have multiple other systems in the background, some working off RNG, some not, along with two merchants you buy from at all times. The merchants in question don't upgrade their shop inventories on their own, so you have to fight the merchants, kill them, and then they get replaced immediately with better guys. Rinse and repeat. In towns and cities, you can interact with various townsfolk through the use of "Gig Edicts" (basically this game's equivalent to items). There's a lot of stuff you can do in this game, and in NG+ and onward there's several different bits of content you can experience. The base normal route story is roughly 30+ hours, though your first run could last a while as you organize your squads and run through side content. There's a lot of things to experience in this game, and I highly recommend anyone at least try it. This game deserves a resurgence, and I'm glad it finally has a proper PC release to encourage that. Also: if you have any gameplay/mechanics questions, feel free to comment or message me and I'll help you out. I had to learn about a lot of this game's mechanics the hard way as a kid, and still remember a lot (along with learning some new things on my current replay). Also on topic of the PC port itself: it's pretty much a 1 for 1 port of the PS2 version with some basic options for video settings. Honestly, you don't need much else besides that. It runs very well, looks gorgeous, and has some great spritework and music. Everything looks, feels, and sounds great. This port could've gone so very badly, but I'm glad it works so well.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 29, 2022

  Not really a review of the game, but a confirmation that the reported black screen issue from several months ago was not encountered by me. Purchase in confidence. Win 10 RTX2070S Ryzen7 3700X 32GB DDR4 3200 CL16 As for the game, it's scaled up and displays in 4:3, but can be stretched to 16:9. I'd recommend disabling the sprite filters because the blending modes are going to be painful on the eyes and generally looks terrible. Supports easy m+kb play as well as standard x-input controllers. If you missed out on this game in the PS2 era, this is a good way to play it without having to dig out old hardware and/or source a disc. This is one of NIS's earlier titles, so be warned that there's some... quirks as NIS were experimenting with different gameplay ideas and were wrapping new titles/universes around them at this time.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2021

  Literally, actually literally, unplayable. I loved this game as a kid and I was so overjoyed to learn it was available on Steam. But when I tried to play the game all I would get was a black screen with the game supposedly running in the background. I checked the forums and this is apparently a glitch that has been going on for months since launch with no solutions, I tried every possible workaround listed several which required going so deep into various computer functions I worried about damaging my computer and none worked. The bare minimum a developer should be able to do is deliver an actually working product that can so much as turn on. By this point as best I can tell this game is just abandoned ware