Why I buy this one ?
- Multiple storylines and endings
- Customizable skills and strategic devices
- Ability to send troops on errands and quests
- Momentum counter to gain stat bonuses and control your enemy targets
- Challenging strategy RPG gameplay

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What our customer's say!

"An interesting failure of a game", Like many others here, I like these types of turn-based strategy games. Rondo unfortunately is mixed game that you might want to avoid. It requires lots and lots of trial and error and patience. You cant just buy items you need: you have to send some of your troops to the market and the game will decide whether the shopping trip went well or not. So you've played a map and then the map ends and only THEN do you found out if you lost all of your cash or not. This is not fun -- it is only needlessly annoying. Other aspects of the game are similarly and needlessly annoying. Its a darned shame because there is a really solid game under the hood.

"Almost, but not quite.", I am a long time follower of Atlus releases, one might even call me a fanatic about it ;) But this game falls short of the usual greatness that I expect from Atlus, though it just barely misses the mark.

By barely missing the mark I mean, this game, with a few very minor tweaks, would indeed be what I expected from an "epic" Atlus title.

Gameplay in Rondo of Swords moves from map to map without ever letting you have a break. Battle, after battle, after battle. Yes, this adds to the stategy - IE, making sure that you keep your people alive, so that they can fight in the next battle, etc. However, the other RPG elements such as shopping, outfitting your people, sidequests, etc. while present require you to sacrifice those people from the next battle, and there's never a time to do anything but battle. No equipping your people. No random battles or training area in which to lvl up under levelled and/or new people. Etc. etc. Granted, this is part of what makes the game difficult (IE impossible without a walkthrough or several restarts), but it also makes it not-so-fun.

Also, if you are just playing along, going with the flow, its very easy to miss the ability to recruit key characters and very easy to get to the 10th, or 11th stage, and be UNABLE to continue since you don't have enough people to put on the battlefield and complete the other objectives. If you play with a walkthrough, it becomes somewhat bearable.

The combat system? New, unique, refreshing, different, cool.
Skill customization on characters? Very good.

But this game needs to give you a break. An essential element of any RPG is the ability to stop, go back, do something other than the main storyline arc to beef up your people if you're having trouble. If you have trouble in this game? All you can do is start the entire game over and try something different. Which after the 3rd or so time, gets frustrating.

I know what you're thinking ~ but seriously, I'm a veteran gamer, have been playing RPGS and now tactical RPGs for over 20 years, this isn't "the game's too hard for me" - I'm an Atlus fan, I expect it to be difficult, in fact the challenge level in most Atlus games is what keeps me coming back for more. But more than challenging, this game is Punishing, and its very easy to get yourself into a position where continuing is impossible.

"Decent but annoying", Overall, this is a very good game. The battle system is innovative and mostly enjoyable, as it building up the characters. To an earlier review that said mages are useless: you just haven't built them up enough. At higher levels, their long-range makes them indispensable. The storyline is thin but somewhat interesting. Be warned that this is not an easy game: until you learn the intricacies of how everything works, you will face 'Game Over' many times. Even after you learn the game well, you'll still find yourself facing it often. However, one of the redeeming features of the game is the ability to restart the current battle without losing any experience you've gained. I might even suggest that the game is unwinnable without using this feature a lot.

The major drawbacks of this game are:
* The music is horrible and annoying. Worse, there is no option to turn off the music and keep the sound effects, so you'll quickly play this game with the volume turned all the way down
* The combat can be slow. Each attack is done with a long animated sequence which can be bypassed, but only after it starts up. Worse, the enemies can take a long time to attack, and go one by one. I don't know how powerful the CPU on a DS is, but you can literally count the seconds while an enemy thinks about the next step to make in stages with a lot of enemy options in it. So you'll find yourself putting the game down and doing something else for a while, leaving it running, so that you can come back to it when the enemy turn is finished. Which could be literally 5 minutes later.
* The shopping/quest system is poorly designed and the game would probably be the better without it.
* It would have been really nice if there were a visual indicator of how far each ally and enemy can move during a move. This is very important knowledge, and can be figured out manually by seeing how far a unit can move and then counting squares on the screen, but this can get tedious.
* The game is difficult, but a little more on "stupid difficult" than "challenging difficult". Some enemies will knock you out in one hit. There are slow, laborious ways to make your way through some levels without getting killed (e.g. the archer plus healer yo/yo move), but doing so gets real old real quick.

I know that's a lot of negatives, but the game is fun for a while. Some quick hints to max out the enjoyment for those who try this game: get the archer, and get Cotton. Use a cheat site to figure out how to get them. Also, powerup Marie and Margus. The rest of the characters don't really matter too much, although another magic user is handy later on, and someone with really long movement (e.g. 10) can be handy as well. Having Cotton makes the game difficult instead of nigh-impossible.


"Highly recommend!", This is quite a unique little strategy game for the DS. I'm not fond of Japanese RPGs in general, so I was glad to find ROS isn't too "Japanese". There is some lengthy dialogue and meandering stories, but it's not overdone or too obtuse. If you've played a lot of strategy games, it will probably take a few hours for you to forget everything you've learned and figure out what you're doing and how to play. There's a steep initial learning curve. I think a lot of people picked it up, couldn't figure it out in less than and hour and gave up. That's why all you hear is how difficult it is. You *will* probably have to start over a couple times as you realize you didn't know what you were doing at first. But after that, the game is challenging, but not hardcore. It's also surprisingly deep. It's a long game with many things to discover and characters to unlock. Character balance is an issue, but with so many character to choose from (once you unlock them) it's easily forgivable and after beating the game, it is enormously fun to replay and build up the weaker characters for new challenges. If you like strategy games and have an open mind, you'll probably really appreciate Rondo of Swords.

"Rondo of Swords, Elegy of Good Game Play", Have you ever played a game that you could swear hated you personally? That's how I feel about Rondo of Swords, a game that seems to have been designed with the expressed purpose of being as unfair as possible.

I won't go into the story because there is nothing to talk about here. There is barely a storyline and what little there is serves merely to shoe string the tactical battles together. Between each mission there is a little bit of scrolling text that tells you where your army traveled to and what new disaster befell them. Then the action switches to the battlefield where the units will chew the fat for a bit, one of the bad guys will spring up and laugh maniacally, and then they get down to the business of tactical combat.

With a story line this thin, Rondo of Swords is left to live and die by its combat system. The basic idea of the combat system is unique. Basically, units have a set number of squares they can move through. You draw a route on the touch screen for the unit to follow and any enemy character you pass through will be attacked and any unused ally character you pass through can give you some kind of status boost like healing or increased chance of hitting the target. On paper it sounds like a pretty good idea, but RoS has designed it so the system works against you.

Let us count the ways RoS fudges its game play:
1) Worthless mages- In RoS, there are two types of long range fighters: archers and mages. Archers can move around the field and then attack. Mages can only move or attack. It's either one or the other. So the choice often comes down to if the mage will attack the enemy baring down on it or flee to safety. To add to their worthlessness, mages can't take a hit and will almost always die with one attack. If you are lucky enough to get the enemy positioned so the mage can fight, magic points are so stingy that you will be lucky if you can cast more than two spells in a battle. The kicker is that, by the time I gave up at the 15th battle or so, half of my units were mages.

2)Worthless Shopping- Like most RPGs, RoS lets you buy stuff to upgrade fighters and give you an edge on the battle field. Unlike most RPGs, RoS gives you no control over what you buy. During battles, you can send unused units to pick up some stuff for you. You have no control over what the unit purchases and there is a chance the unit will loose all your money and come back empty handed. Also, some units are better at shopping than others and it seemed that the more invaluable the unit was on the battlefield, the better it was at shopping and vice versa. As a result, I rarely used the feature because the unit would come back with junk.


3) The Zone of Control- As if to make up for having units that are easy to kill and throwing tons of enemies at you, you have the route system that allows you to attack multiple enemies. But then RoS goes and turns it against you with a lovely skill called the ZoC or Zone of Control. Basically, this skill will stop a unit's charge dead in its tracks and prevent it from attacking or moving any more. You tend to face big clusters of enemies with this skill while you only have one unit that can do this, and the enemy ZoC seems to activate almost all the time while yours doesn't. This creates a situation where the enemy is free to hammer at your entire army while you struggle to wear down one of their units.

4) Unbalanced game play- I should think that most games should shoot for a kind of natural progression of difficulty. RoS has a feature were you can restart the current battle and keep all the experience earned during the aborted battle and regain all defeated units and used items. I imagine this is so you can level up units that have been inactive for a while and perfect your battlefield strategy, but what makes it so cheap is that you are practically forced to use it. On some maps, the only conceivable way to win is to basically restart the battle over and over until you have beefed up your very best fighters to have way more levels than the enemy.
And you must do this for hours sometimes. To give you an example, it took me nine hours to reach the 14th or so battle. I bought this game used and the previous owner had a game save that indicated it took him seven hours to reach the fifth battle.

This isn't to say that RoS is completely impossible. For every battle designed for maximum forehead vein popping, there is one that is actually quite nicely balanced. Challenging but a workable challenge. It's during these that you can see what a great game RoS could have been. But still, RoS is like a plate with half fillet mignon and half regurgitated cheeseburger and I wouldn't call that edible.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"A must have", Before you play the game, I suggest everyone does a run through the tutorial available from the start menu. There are ten lessons in all, each that will teach you how to play the game, otherwise you might find yourself frustrated when the enemy owns you in two seconds flat.


I'm not far into the game yet, but the battle system is interesting. Instead of moving to the side, front, or behind the enemy you have to drag your character through the enemy otherwise no damage will be done. Unfortunately there are times where you cannot attack an enemy with this strategy because of the ZOC.

With the battle system aside, I'm really happy with this game. The story progresses pretty fast, and so far the only draw back is the lack of free roaming. I'm hoping that once I get a little further into the game I can go to different locations to level up, without furthering the story line.

The art is beautiful, and the background music is pleasing to the ears. I highly recommend this to any fan of RPGs and strategy games.