For a few days now I have been dreading the completion of this review. It was a struggle to go through, not because of the contents of the title at hand, but because of the difficulty in portraying said contents in the correct manner. I would love to save a lot of time in this review and just come out and say Record of Agarest War 2 is a horrific mess of a game. Hell, I don’t even want to bury the lead here, I just want to warn fans of RPGs to stay away from this title to the best of their abilities. It’s not even worth the over 1800 words of typed out here. But I have to be professional.

So believe me when I say that I resisted the temptation to make this a one sentence review. Draw your own conclusions on that comment.

Right off the bat, the game throws at you several instances of torture for your retinas. From the opening movie scene to the criminally short and incoherent prologue, we see this mish-mash of ideas compiled into a compacted heap of a game. For those new to the Agarest War series, the game is essentially an RPG on a timer, where one of the main sub-quests is that the protagonist needs to enter a relationship with a female partner in order to proceed to the next generation. In theory, the concept is a marvelous one, as it has a continuing storyline that can be shaped by your actions and the connections you make with your party members.

In practice, it becomes an exercise of repetition and regurgitated banality. It also doesn’t help matters that the characterization in Argarest War 2 is lacking in some cases; granted the storyline also suffers from its own trivial clichés. Agarest War 2 stars Weiss, a swordsman with amnesia who apparently killed a god out of some form of revenge. The death of this god created an event known as the “Day of Light,” which enveloped the world in a blinding flash and then unleashed a horde of monsters and demons from its wake. After being told of this by an agent of the divine named Eva, Weiss is tasked with fulfilling his new destiny: to become the “Vessel” of the power of the god he murdered to atone for his actions.

I fully admit, the plot is not the most original idea in the world, but it does bring up some very powerful and interesting theological themes and questions, something that few games even attempt to do without being too self-referential. That said, Agarest War 2’s execution of this story is mishandled severely. It is mostly due to the dialogue delivery; while it is a subtitled Japanese game, the actual subtitles and translation is fairly poor, with all of the dialouge being clunky in terms of “speech patterns” and having this tendency for explaining things out for the player, rather than just showing it. It also doesn’t help that almost all of the characters never get a feeling of growth or really convey any sort of emotion at all due to their rather one-note personalities, which makes reading the game akin to a poorly written fantasy novel above all else. It also bogs the story down to a sluggish crawl due to the taxing cutscenes that play out.

There is no subtlety in the combat here. It’s a button mash bonanza baby!

The actual combat is also a mixed bag because of the unnecessary complexity it brings to the table. Instead of following the more traditional, six men on the field tactical-style combat that was akin to a Growlanser type of game, Agarest War 2 has decided to scale back the unnecessary movements, borrowing elements of the combat found in Cross Edge. Attacks are now button combos that do different amounts of damage, and field movement is now no longer a feature. Most combat situations will have you attack with one of the four field characters at a time, effortlessly mowing down mooks and mobs with ease or little thinking, making this more of an action-RPG than anything else out there.

But where it gets confusing is the whole skill system that is set up in-game. The skill system is divided into four sub-categories for each button on the PS3 controller, and to unlock special moves or skills you need to essentially grind, and combine skills with other characters to achieve them. So to set up characters, you need to level up and add skills based on the characters proficiency with skills, a total of twelve extra attributes to pay attention to as you grind it out. Add to this a unnecessary skill learning system that throws even more wrinkles into character growth and optimization, and you have one of the most broken, unorthodox and downright bloated character progression trees I have ever seen.

And that is just one aspect of the whole “role-playing” part of the experience. Formations give benefits to attacks, and allow for combo attacks between two or more characters on the field, while “overwaiting” the clock in battle reduces wait-times for attacking. Original skills are special moves activated by the L and R buttons to do massive damage when they become available. The list of features in what should have been a simpler combat system is pretty much endless. All of this is unnecessary too, as all of these features of the combat system basically amount to little to no use for a majority of the game. Even in some boss battles there is no need to go in-depth with the combat mechanics, because it’s just easier to mash a button with two-three characters attacking at a time. And the sad thing is, I doubt even fans of Agarest War or Zero will even appreciate the changes made, which makes the combat aspect an even bigger quagmire of feature creep.