Mar 5

Mar 5 Review | Redemption Reapers - Not Your Granddad's Fire Emblem

Redemption Reapers starts with a woman telling the audience she has no right to be happy. She has done something terrible - in no uncertain terms, the next immediate thing we are greeted with as players is a cheerfully mechanical tutorial on how to fail to save a village from the orc army marauding through it. In even less uncertain terms, this is the equivalent of the game approaching your drunk at a bar and shaking you as if you're old friends and saying hey pal: "This is not your DAD's Fire Emblem."

It's a certain type of fantasy story, one that comes between covers in a blood-soaked trade paperback only found at thrifting bookstores and second-hand places. Redemption Reapers is not a hardcover book, and anywhere you find the paperback copy of it should have at least a dozen dog-eared pages and pencil scribblings denoting a price on the interior of the cover. It's probably 49.99 now, and what I'm saying is if it were a book it'd be less than five dollars and the back cover would be falling off.

Here we're greeted again by a familiar visual language. Players can steer their smouldering hunks and gorgeous sword-girls through ash-soaked battlefields by way of pushing them through blue squares and staying out of the range of red ones, but Reapers communicates the desperation of the cast at the beginning by making everyone a little too soft and giving them just a little less movement range than they should have. Every battle is an affair of positioning and turtling at as fast of a speed this kind of game can allow: never is there a reason to split your party up, these battles are staircase fencing matches from pirate books, town square rumbles and desperate cuts through alleyways and side-streets of giant cities never realized in any way other than in small diorama.

How blood-soaked is it? on normal difficulty experienced players familiar with the tactics genre are likely to lose multiple missions in a row - the roster of characters stays very small for the first dozen or so chapters to set the mood of a small group of soldiers fighting insurmountable odds. Allies show up only to give dialogue and disappear between missions. Rather than hinging on exploring personalities, these are fantasy characters given life through struggle. Die, reload, die, reload. Enemies cover your retreat and hound you down through numerous dungeon encounters. Players will be intimately familiar with the sound of steel clipping flesh by the end, and not much else.

If it weren't so dressed up in black leather and quality voice dubbing, it might be easier to go play the new Fire Emblem game with its mystery list of forever emblems and nostalgia. Defeat in Redemption Reapers is an affair fit for a red wedding: loss usually comes in a cascade of severe punishment for tactical missteps, and not watching one character die alone. Chapters doll out plot elements at the same pace they do battle: at a glacial pace, with each chapter coming in around one to one and a half hours for completion. Don't be fooled by the size of the map or the number of Mort there are to kill, even while party members urge you to slaughter and slaughter even still.

Oh, will they call out for you to make peace with blade and blood first: and you should listen to them before you stride into battle. Redemption Reapers treats even make-believe war as an affair of blood sweat, holding room for tears later in the plot. "Don't break formation!" our heroes give battlefield cries texturing chapter after chapter of battlefield indulgence, but they also aren't simply calls of personality: most of the hand-holding the game does is through these snippets of panicked cry over shuffling feet, gnashing teeth and drawn steel, it's good practice for a player to listen to their companions.

There used to be a kind of genre for this dime-novel fantasy story that's mostly only being explored by unfortunately conservative writers in both style and politics; while Redemption Reapers does absolutely nothing to reinvent the wheel the, call of fantasy is that the wheel seldom needs re-inventing, it just needs to be given one or two more turns to bring things around again. Redemption Reapers harkens back to series like The Black Company but is missing a little of the panache and humour those books have in them. Much of modern fantasy tends to embrace the weird or roll their eyes at it, but what the game is really missing is any sense of levity or camaraderie in its first chapters. I wonder how many swords the director owns? from the construction of the world to the disposition of the characters in it: Redemption Reapers makes me more interested in listening to the director talk about the things that are so obviously close to their heart it's worth seeing the ways they miss the mark trying to capture them.