4.5/5 ★ – crimson2877's review of Crimson Shroud.

Beaten: Nov 30 2021 Time: 7 Hours Platform: 3DS I love Yasumi Matsuno's work. I mean, I haven't actually played that many of his games, but the ones I have are amazing. Final Fantasy XII is my favorite FF game, being a weird hybrid of that series' stylings and, uh, Knights of the Old Republic? And Vagrant Story is a massively experimental exercise in being Dark Souls 7 years before Dark Souls, but with a much stranger combat system. I wanna say Crimson Shroud mostly takes after Vagrant Story, but that's only half-true. Crimson Shroud feels like Yasumi Matsuno wrote a treatment for Vagrant Story 2, left Square Enix, started using that treatment as the basis for a D&D campaign with some friends, and then 15 years later said "screw it let's put this thing out". Now the way that JRPGs tend to take from D&D has always been really interesting to me, from Dragon Quest's very consolized and well-considered version of Wizardry to Final Fantasy 1's, uh, less-considered idea of "what if we just use mechanics from D&D but redo all the math and it's insane", but Crimson Shroud is a whole different story. This whole game feels like an homage to TTRPGs. When you use skills and spells in combat, you roll 3D models of dice to make checks. The character models aren't fluidly animated, but rather are representations of the kind of miniatures you'd use when playing with friends. Instead of a 3D world you freely move around in, you have a map. You pick a room, and you move into it. Then the game describes what happens. This part especially is *exactly* like playing D&D with a good DM, and Matsuno is maybe the best DM. It's not all straight out of D&D though. The combat system is fairly standard turn-based JRPG fare, and the combat design is actually most similar to Vagrant Story. You don't level up, and you don't get any kind of intrinsic stat bonuses. Instead, it's all about the equipment you're using. There's this really cool item melding system, where if you have multiple of the same weapon you can merge them together to make a stronger one. You can also meld weapons with spellbooks, because magic is ALSO tied only to equipment. The only thing your characters gain (every couple of battles) is new skills, which are like spells but generally only affect the caster. If you want to get really deep into this system, there's myriad stats you can attempt to min/max, but if you want to be more casual with it you can pretty easily just meld what you're using or switch it out for whatever cool new weapon that big enemy just dropped. It works really well, especially in such a short game. That's all great, but it's not really the best part of this game. No, that'd be the story and the writing. If you've played any of Matsuno's games before, you know what you're in for. His writing carries this medieval flair, but doesn't feel archaic. Rather, it feels like a period piece. This game in particular goes *heavy* on the world-building, since it doesn't have Ivalice to base itself on. Over the course of this fairly short game (only about seven hours!) you get a real sense of the history and culture of the country you're in, but also you feel every detail of the palace you're in, from the narrative of its existence to the specific use of every implement in every room you wander into. Occasionally the narration will drift a bit, and when it does you know you're in for a treat. Honestly, this feels like the Kentucky Route Zero of JRPGs. Even though KRZ came out later, and is even more focused on its prose and novelistic tone. Crimson Shroud by contrast is just a short JRPG that isn't afraid to mess with all the established conventions of the genre, whether it's for narrative purpose or immersion or even just for fun. If you've got a 3DS (or the motivation to set up an emulator), definitely give it a shot!