The Spirit Engine II is an interesting game. The title itself is a bit of a misnomer. It actually has nothing at all to do with the original Spirit Engine game – I guess the developer couldn’t think of any new title, so he just used the name brand of his previous game, a la Final Fantasy? I haven’t played the original game, though, so I have no idea how it compares and will only be discussing this one.
TSE2 is an RPG, but a bit of a weird one. The game was made in an engine normally used for platformers, so movement is one-dimensional. In every area, you can only run from one end to the other, occasionally interacting with or running into interesting bits. This, naturally, makes the game incredibly linear, with very few opportunities for exploration and no fancy maneuvering. Enemies are placed at varying points along areas, and you trigger a battle as soon as you move close enough, without transitioning to a separate battle screen. It’s a bit hard to describe, so here’s a picture:
The battle system itself is pretty unique. I suppose its closest analogue would be the “active-time battle” system of the later Final Fantasy games. Enemies and allies both constantly accrue “energy” (the green bars below the sprites in that screenshot) as time goes on, and are able to perform actions once it reaches a certain threshold. However, you don’t select actions once the bar fills up; you can assign actions at any time, and characters will simply execute your commands automatically when they can. You can also “pause” a character to make them wait and allow their energy bar to fill up, at which point points of energy instead go towards making the resulting attack more powerful. So, basically, you can forfeit some actions to make the next attack more powerful than usual – which is a lifesaver in some places where enemies have absolutely ridiculous defenses.
One caveat of this system is that it is possible essentially let the battles run themselves, encouraged by the ability to form “skill chains” of linked skill behaviors instead of just selecting one at a time. The game tends to counter this by making battles incredibly difficult, however. There are no attrition or survival mechanics, as your party is fully restored after every battle, so the game doesn’t pull its punches on even normal battles. I played the game on easy and got pretty frequent game overs in the latter half of the game – I have no idea how painful higher difficulties must be. As a result, strategy is highly encouraged. Much of the strategy revolves around an “exploit the weakness” kind of mechanic, sort of. There are three types of damage – piercing (edged weapons, basically), concussive, and magical – and every enemy has both a flat damage soak and percentage-based damage reduction. Generally, you want to figure out what damage type they have the least resistance to and attack with that.
I don’t think the game is very well-balanced, though. Character customization and progression is handled by distributing points gained on a level up into skills of the player’s choice – however, their usefulness is rather scattershot. Some skills feel pretty inferior to others or have very situational uses. In particular, there is one class with the ability to create a defensive barrier or smokescreen – and I quickly found myself making them spend all their turns in battle doing that and nothing else. The damage output from enemies is terrifying, and I really don’t think there are many ways to keep up with it other than using those defensive skills constantly (the passive health upgrade skills certainly don’t do much). As a result, their skill distribution was really wonky, with virtually no points in offensive skills. I’m not sure if this was intended or what, but I felt it really marginalized that character in battles.
Also, I guess in an effort to create flavor and uniqueness among the character selections, each of the nine playable characters is missing a skill from their class’ set (except for the knights, for some reason – they’re all the same). This is not well-balanced at all, however. In general, one character is missing a skill that’s practically useless, one is missing a skill that’s useful but which you can do without, and one is missing a skill that’s almost vital. I guess maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of difficulty thing? If so, it’s not communicated clearly at all. (The game doesn’t even tell you any of this – the only way you’d know that an extra skill exists would be by looking at the manual.)
There is one feature I really like, though: spellcasters have low health (as is standard for the genre), but they also have a special secondary health meter that constantly regenerates and absorbs physical damage for them, allowing them to safely fight on the frontlines instead of having to hide them in the back of your party lest a monster sneeze on them too hard. The spellcaster class is actually the most defensive overall, with specialized abilities to soak or protect against almost every kind of damage. It’s an interesting turnaround from how spellcasters usually work in RPGs.
Something interesting the game does is how it handles equipment and currency. Currency is an extremely limited and valuable resource – there is no renewable source of it, as enemies don’t drop it. You can only get it from treasure chests, selling items, or completing quests. I unfortunately didn’t realize this on my first playthrough, and didn’t have enough left over to buy any of the nifty end-game items. It doesn’t help that you can’t revisit areas once you’ve completed them, and many of the items have unique powerups, not just a generic increase in potency.
However, overall I felt the gameplay was mostly just a speed bump for the story content, as in so many RPGs. You’ll fight monsters often and they can be pretty tough to take down, but after a certain point there isn’t much you can do except wail on them. There is a nice bit of gameplay/story integration, though, in that certain story events will give characters an emotional mood that affects their battle abilities (usually adversely). For example, if characters are angry, their defensive and support skills will incur a penalty, while their offensive skills get a bonus. The opposite occurs if they are nervous, and so on. It’s mostly a minor gimmick, though I was a bit annoyed how almost all of them incur negative penalties, making it simply feel like a way to make the game harder. I still think it’s a nice touch, though.
The story is completely linear with no real interactive elements, except at the very beginning. Your party is made up of three characters, but at the beginning of the game, you are allowed to select from a total of nine. Here’s a screenshot:
The only caveat is that you can’t have two characters of the same “color”, as they each end up serving specific character roles. The blue (top-row) characters are all snarky, cynical antihero types, the yellow (middle-row) characters are perky idealists, and the green (bottom-row) characters are the rational, serious ones. Even within their own archetypes, though, characters have strikingly different personalities and there’s a lot of unique dialogue, and many characters have their own subplot or at least a few unique scenes. The downside to this is that you’ll have to play the game at least three times if you want to see all the characters. However, it gets worse: combinatorial explosion strikes due to the fact that there are some unique scenes that revolve around two specific characters interacting. There aren’t many of these (I think), but their presence makes the completionist in me weep. (At least the game has a metric ton of foreshadowing for you to appreciate on a replay.)
Anyway, in the beginning, your three party members are awkwardly thrown together in order to mount a rescue mission for a small village, as two children have been kidnapped by strange masked cultist-like guys. Little do they know that this will throw them into a complicated and sinister web of political intrigue, warfare, and ancient secrets. The plot relies rather heavily on big reveals and the like, so I can’t say much about it without spoiling everything, but I thought it was pretty good. A big theme throughout it is miscommunication, distrust, and political fearmongering, and the adverse effects they have on both countries and individuals. The overall message seems to be one in favor of peace and diplomacy – many of the plot’s events could have been avoided entirely if people were more willing to talk to one another. There’s also a running theme of authoritarianism vs. libertarianism (or something quite similar), but manages to present a fairly nuanced view instead of coming down fully on the libertarianism side like it seems every single work with that conflict does nowadays.
One bit in particular I really liked was a point towards the end where you have to kill human enemies for the first time in the game. There are fights with human enemies before then, but they’re infrequent and afterwards you’re always assured that they’re just unconscious. This is the first time you’re actually killing people, and this isn’t lost on the characters, who write in their journal entries that they feel absolutely awful and terrified about what they’re going to have to do. It’s a nice humanitarian touch that helps avoid making the characters look like violent psychopaths, as so many RPG protagonists can be seen as.
However, there’s no interactivity (which is pretty important, because the characters do an awful lot of philosophizing, rationalizing, and pontificating about complicated moral issues), and I must say that the endgame is pretty predictable and a little bit disappointing. The ending itself is also irritatingly open-ended and inconclusive.
I really think the story does a great job with character development, though. Many cutscenes simply revolve around characters interacting, and the plot is greatly focused around their dynamic, as they’re pretty disconnected from the major goings-on and simply spend most of their time running around trying to figure out what’s going on. They have real, plot-driven character growth, and it can be pretty surprising to see the ways they develop and come together as a group. I particularly liked Charlotte’s character – she appears at first to be a generic happy-go-lucky idealist, but it’s later revealed that such a worldview is closer to how she wants to act rather than what she actually is, and her backstory has a lot of pretty dark stuff going on in it. I thought the other two female characters were well-written as well, and Ionae has probably the most extreme and pronounced character development of all of them. The only character I didn’t like that much was Mericious, who is basically just a snobbish, rude, overly-religious jerk, and his character doesn’t really go anywhere from there. I had hoped tossing the atheist character in the party with him might lead to something interesting on that front, but they only have a few conversations towards the start of the game and that’s about it. (Oh, and yes, one of the “priest” characters is an atheist, which I thought was pretty interesting.)
Another neat feature about the characters is that they each keep a journal. There are a shockingly large amount of entries, for almost every plot occurrence, even minor ones. Like with story dialogue, there is some generic text that overlaps between characters, but a surprisingly large amount of text is flavored with the individual characters’ own writing styles. (Charlotte’s in particular has a nice touch – she’s barely literate, and so her journals are spattered with misspellings and grammar mistakes.) The only problem is that, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to go back to read earlier journal entries once they’re replaced by the newest one, and there’s no clear indication when journals update. Still, it’s nice to be able to see characters’ introspections and personal analyses of the situation.
The worldbuilding is also fascinating, though unfortunately we only get to see small pieces of it. The country the game takes place in is apparently ruled by what appear to be weird alien-like things called “Rakari”, though not in a typical alien overlord-type fashion. They grant the humans a lot of autonomy (though some people feel that the parliament is just a puppet government) and seem genuinely invested in stability and the greater good, though they can be coldly logical, and some late-game revelations show that they do some pretty questionable things ostensibly for the safety of humanity. They aren’t the only strange fantasy creatures around though – mysterious “cloud children” fly through the skies and cause people a lot of concern about air travel. There are also the random monsters you fight, some of which are plainly bizarre. The game does a good job of not falling into the trap of using typical fantasy creatures, and makes its inhabitants feel truly alien, as a good fantasy story should. It’s interesting to see a world where humans coexist with such creatures.
Oh, and before I forget: the music is phenomenal. There is an amazing diversity in the music, and practically every area and scene has a unique theme. The only downside to this is that leitmotifs and recurring tracks are kept to a minimum, but I’m willing to forgive that because, as I said, phenomenal. Seriously, go listen to it.
Overall, I’d recommend at least trying it (it is freeware). It’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, and you’ll need a lot of time on your hands if you want to see all the character subplots, but I liked the plot and the gameplay was tolerable. Just make sure to play on easy mode if you aren’t a masochist.