Humble Mobile Bundle: KEMCO X HyperDevbox! #2 - Legna Tactica

The Kingdom of Legna is at war with the Empire of Izrool, and you're a trainee soldier who isn't the best, but tries very hard. Then you inexplicably start getting put in charge of important missions as the enemy starts employing demons and monsters in the war.

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Overall: It’s KEMCO/Hit-Point sensibilities, only with a tactical rpg framework. The difficulty level is perfectly reasonably and the grinding isn’t overdone; the plot is nothing new but half-decent. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. I enjoyed it as a change of pace.

Humble Mobile Bundle: KEMCO X HyperDevbox! (wrap up)

This bundle included Bonds of the Skies, Chronus Arc Premium and Crystareino Premium, but I've already played all of those.

Blazing Souls Accelate - A tactical rpg for people who really love the meat of tactical rpgs: Zillions of collectibles, multiple types of XP that can be used to craft and upgrade items in different ways, multiple methods of chaining attacks in battle, etc. The thing is, I found the battles slow and ponderous (especially given the number of different things you'll have to grind) and I'm not terribly interested in mastering half a dozen different upgrade systems. The plot involves an asshole with a heart of gold and a mysterious girl with amnesia, in a world where new “human genomes” have been created to replace humanity. So it's safe to assume it won't tread any original ground.

Generation of Chaos - More of a Tactics Ogre-style war simulator than the skirmish simulator that is a typical jrpg. You control cities on a board game-like abstraction map and move your generals (and their attending soldiers) around the map, taking control of various areas and fighting with enemy squadrons. I could barely tell what was going on, especially given that I made characters at the very beginning but they don't even seem to appear in the first giant map battle. There's certainly got to be some strategy to which units you send against which others, how to use your skills well, what formations to set, etc...but the game has far too many moving parts, far too few explanations, and no useful tutorial.

Spectral Souls - In the same vein as the other two HyperDevBox games, it’s an over-complicated and insufficiently interesting trpg. I’m not even bothering installing it. Amusingly, I recently found an old list of games I was vaguely intrigued by, and the PSP versions of these games were on there—but I had opted not even to buy them used because they were very low-rated. Turns out, that was the right call.

Overall: This bundle ended up worthwhile for the two games I reviewed under separate headers, and I supposed it was good to be able to try these games effectively for free, so now I know they aren’t worth my time.