So I Tried… Agarest - Generations of War

Each edition of So I Tried… a member of GameGrin will try a game they have never tried before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time I went for the PC version of Agarest: Generations of War.

What I thought it was

A sprawling Japanese Role Playing Game, which I’ve had installed and unplayed for far too long. Seriously, I thought “Ooh, this looks cool”, installed it and still haven’t gotten around to playing it. But I’ve had Morrowind installed for about six months, whereas Agrest has only been two or so… Oh! I’ve just remembered that it has a mechanic where you quest about the place and then your kid does it -- hence the “Generations” part of the title. No, I’m not thinking of Rogue Legacy...

What it actually is

A tactical JRPG with a very dated look to it, and a desire to keep things moving slowly. My time ran out whilst I was barely halfway through destroying a boulder -- I wish I were kidding.
So you play this kid Leonhardt who is headed to war with his country against another country. It’s all a very racist invasion, as he realises, when one of his commanders tries to kill an elf, and Leonhardt decides to fight for her and turn his back on humankind. It isn’t helped that the last time I heard such justifications, it was in a movie based during the Vietnam War -- along the lines of “She might be helping those against us.”
The battles are quite slow, thanks to having completely separate movement and action phases, rather than having them bundled together like most tactical RPGs. It slows down play, and in a game where there’s more fighting than talking (bafflingly, for an RPG), it really kills interest.

Will I keep playing

Not another moment. Usually I’ll finish up whatever fight I’m in, or whatever I’m doing, then save and quit. For this, I quit as soon as my alarm went off, then uninstalled it before writing this up… It’s far too slow, and it’s not helped by the dated graphics from 2007 looking like they belonged on the SNES. Well, the character sprites did -- which is even more baffling, that you’d have nice and smooth backgrounds with smooth models for cutscenes, yet the most blurred and horrid looking sprites for the main part of your game…?