Brigandine LoR: It’s shiny. I’ve beaten five of the six rulers and am working on wrapping up Eliza’s quest now. I’m enjoying the experience obviously! There's more polish and everything from questing to leveling has been tweaked, but the core mechanics are the same. You're trying to take over five other countries and defend your own borders while doing it. The changes under the hood are subtle but there; it feels like about the same jump from Brig to GE.
The AI is improved from GE. It is better about threat assessment and uses status much more effectively. I had a couple of resets early because of this. I would use standard tactics and Ivona (Bard line) would Curse Song Grados; Tim would follow up by using Dimension him across the map and completely screwing up my plan. It still has large flaws about damage distribution and unit placement, but it is a step in the right direction. The AI also understands how to use react, which it did not in previous versions. Placement is still critical. Making your attack line in a certain spot or way can make the difference between an easy win or a loss; that is unchanged. The biggest gap is that the AI still doesn't fully understand how to position units and attack in the right way. It still sends in High Centaurs ahead of meat shields, making them easy targets for sniping. It does the same for high movement units like Wyverns. It also sometimes makes poor calculations in terms of movement costs; it will not spend the extra turn or two and have all three enemy groups attack at once. You can really see this on mobility restricted maps with a lot of bridges; Tim’s western border with Taila and Rudo is a very good example of this.
The change in the quest system and EXP curve are big deals. More on that in a bit.
The rulers are better balanced than in Brig. The AI will use all the rulers and will get them leveled up; no longer do you have a situation where Lyonesse or Lance just sit there and do nothing most of the game. Even if they don't, Rubino and Taila are competent enough at base level. They're also all more durable as well. Even Taila has good base defense and a decent HP score. The rulers benefit from having more ranged options and status protection, they don't charge the line as much as they did in earlier versions of Brig and are harder to snipe. It still happens from time to time (Rudo especially) but it's less of a sure thing than in earlier versions. The AI is more aggressive on the whole as far as attacking and staying in battles. They don't usually retreat after losing a knight. It makes them more vulnerable to getting several knights wounded at once, but it also makes you have to work harder for victories and sometimes can cost you monsters. That aggressiveness is a net positive for the AI; it makes tough defensive fights even harder and that is where the majority of challenge lies in the mid and late game.
Questing is different. The stat up quests are gone and so are the wounded quests; each quest takes just a month. Each town has two to three areas to quest in, along with training grounds. Training grounds awards 100-300 EXP each session; it can't fail. The changes to the EXP and questing system dovetail with this. It's faster to level up. It takes slightly under 2096 EXP to get a L1 Knight to L10; it takes around 5000 to do it in Brig. The leveling seems to slow around L15 and by L20 it feels comparable to earlier Brig games. The AI on hard is very aggressive about sending low level knights and monsters out to the training grounds. It's rare outside of the early game that you will ever face a knight under L10, questing gives the AI a constant source of higher level monsters to throw at you. There are around 18 quest knights. I've found them to be utterly unremarkable. They either join massively under leveled or are just unremarkable across the board. A few like Malak or Matthias are really good? The rest are not great. Some of the Rune Knights have very specific join requirements; one only joins 9 seasons into the game and requires you send a Knight with 300 or more rune out questing.
Each area has four gear types you can get. There are three rarity tiers; an area tends to have one-two pieces of that gear on each tier. The chalice item are the monster level up items (Missing link, Champion Medal etc). Each area also only drops one of the three types of stat up potions. So, there is a point to questing in different areas if you want to see everything or want a specific piece of gear. I wish the game was more transparent about this and told you more about it, but it's a minor complaint in a game that does a pretty good job with mechanical transparency. Questing success for items/gear is tied to both unit level and character class. You aren't very likely to get really high level loot from a L2 Fighter; whereas a L30 Treasure Hunter stands a much better chance of pulling down rare gear.
Questing can get you some extremely powerful gear, but the fairly restrictive time limit on hard along with a constant need for higher level knights for border pushes limits the amount of it you can do in the normal game. The equipment system was also reworked. Each Knight and Monster has a weapon slot, an armor slot, a glove/helmet slot, and an accessory slot. There are light, medium, and heavy tiers of armor as well and you get a theming bonus for having gear of the same rarity tier equipped. There is a tremendous amount of gear and power available, but the sheer scope and number of items means it takes longer to get the high end gear. The super rares are powerful, but they're more just a really lucky bonus early on or something for doing some of the Mana Distortion fights. Timer is off once you unite the map, so you can send all 30+ knights questing every month until you're happy with your gear. Not really relevant for beating the game, more just if you want to see some of the shinies or really go after the optional fights.
The male and female knight lines were reworked pretty drastically. Gone are the days of branching mage paths; there only split paths are on male Knights (Swordsman/Knight and then Dark Knight/Paladin at the L20 promotion for Knight). Fighter, Berserker, Thief, Grappler, Mage, Cleric vs Assassin, Cleric, Mage, Bard, Lancer, Archer. I think the female classes are better, but that's mostly due to Wizard feeling pretty inferior to Witch and the sadness that is Grappler in this game. It's pretty well balanced, there are merits to each class line. Actual discussion of each class will be in another post, as this is already too damn long. Stat imbalance is kind of a thing in this game. Gilliam starts as a Cardinal.. with like 65 INT. Yeah. Meanwhile Kyle has over 100 INT as a Paladin. Ginny is a Berserker with 38 AGI which is hideous. It's sometimes used as a story device (Ginny is a drunk and past his prime). It did make me carefully check the knights stat pages before using them.
Monster changes. There were a bunch of balance tweaks. Fairie and Djinn lines have been replaced by Imps and Elementals. The only line removed entirely are Gryphons; they were merged with Rocs. Angels, Dragons, Devils, and Hydras all lost promotions or have promotions gated by rare quest items. Goblins were added and Mandrakes got a new promotion unlocked by a quest item. Costs were tweaked, skillsets were rebalanced. A strong theme in the design of this game is that the designers were trying to avoid classes that completely moot other classes, IE Angels no longer get Cure or Halo and they only get Heal after promoting to Archangels. There is generally a reason to try the different classes, even if they're not all on the same level of effectiveness. Angels and Dragons are still at the top of the food chain, but you have to work harder for it, and they aren't as strong as they used to be. The same applies to Knight classes- only one class in the game gets each Geno spell; only Witches get Meteor Doom and only Wizards get Solid.
Status is deadly in this game. The developers built an entire line (Mermaids) around this and arguably Giants as well; you have to work harder to get access to petrify and paralysis. It's a good design choice, as you could do hideous things to the game with Roc spam before. I'm guessing that's the reason as well that 5 of 6 leaders are status immune; they fully understand how dangerous it is. It's something that merits more discussion whenever I look at class balance.
The world map has been tweaked. It's enough to feel and handle differently than regular Brigandine, but not different enough to provide a drastically different playstyle. You'll have to defend 5~ borders at some point in the game and that will be the hardest thing you face in the normal game. I've found it best to just cycle through Knights even so often in your main attack group, to help with defense. Even with the rebalanced EXP system, I found it better to use really strong low level knights rather than quest them; the EXP questing I found best for secondary knights like Rakta or Leonore. They're good knights and you will need them some point during the game, but not immediately and they're not good enough at the start to justify using.
The aftergame is fun once, but I would much rather have a hard mode with unlimited time so you can sit back and watch the AI/see what they can do with more time. GE had this; one of the options in its story mode let you turn off the timer and just watch the fireworks. That dynamic experience and challenge is more interesting to me than any static final; it also lets you see how you handle it when a country comes knocking with some truly nasty setups after taking over the rest of the map after five years. The final boss is the same thing; it was fun once but after that it's just something in the way. It isn't just Brig where I tend to feel this way; XCOM2 is a great game but I am bored of the final fight by this point. The dynamic missions and quests are what's fresh after several playthroughs and that is what I truly enjoy.
The character art is great but the fanservice is way the hell over the top. The writing is there. There's a few scenes I've liked, but the overall plot isn't great and has some cringe attached as well. The translation is pretty stiff and there are definitely typos/grammar issues throughout, but that is to be expected for a game that got released the same day worldwide. One thing I liked in particular is that every single country has done awful things; no one is even close to remotely clean. Guimole has blackbirds, Norzaleo has occupation/exploitation of of Gustava, etc. I will say that Rudo is an unlikeable bastard, more so than any of the leaders in Brig. Zemeckis was painted as the nominal villain of the first game, but it's clear that he wasn't personally evil, just driven and ruthless. Rudo starts the game off by killing off his father and starting a religious war. Other charming things including executing prisoners and having a literal god complex to go along with psychological manipulation and general asshattery. I kept watching his scenes to see if he'd get any redeeming personality traits and nope, not really. A scene that struck home in a good way was Stella and Adieu talking about ego and sense of self was clever and there are other bits scattered throughout as said. I'm not playing this for the bits of story though, I'm playing it for the grand conquest and strategy.
I'm hoping for DLC (I will pay money for a Zemeckis or Dryst quest knight) and more content in general along with more modes. Even if I don't get that, it's been a fun ride and I'm glad that I got to play it.
