Spectral Force 3

Spectral Force 3 is the first game in this particular series of Japanese strategy role-playing games to be released in the United States. Players do not need to have played any of the other installments to understand what is going on in this one. Spectral Force 3 is set in a world called Neverland, the game takes place at a time when the evil overlord has been overthrown and his former domains have broken up into 10 nations. Sadly, these nations fall immediately to warring on one another, which creates a ready market for mercenaries.

The hero of Spectral Force 3 is Begina, who (in the way of nearly all Japanese RPGs) is an androgynous looking teenager who has left the small village of his youth on a quest. Along the way he joins a band of mercenaries, only to unexpectedly end up as their leader. Aided by his confidence challenged friend, Diaz, Begina must build up his mercenary band while at the same time uniting Neverland again. At the player's command, he does this by taking contracts from one or another nation to bring down the others.

What makes Spectral Force 3 and similar strategy RPGs different from other computer RPGs is that combat is fought in turns on a square grid by the player's group of characters (up to six here) against the computer controlled forces of the enemies. On their turn, the player moves each character in turn, then has them unleash powers, skills and attacks. In between battles, the player can spend the spoils of battle to build new items. They recruit more characters, level up the ones they have, and play out the cut scenes of the interactions between them.

Not for runners and gunners

The tradition in Japanese strategy RPGs is to have high quality cutscenes, often animated by "name" anime studios, with 2-D paintings of the characters for the dialogue trees, and then low-resolution icons of the characters for the actual combat engine. Spectral Force 3 adheres to all of the traditions, which is odd because the game is only available on the 360. When a player pops a game into their next-gen console for playing on their HDTV, they don't really expect to get graphics that would look almost as good on a PS2.

One of the appeals of Spectral Force 3 is recruiting more characters to Begina's merry band. What is odd though, is that the majority of recruitable characters aren't available to Begina until he defeats the nation that they fight for. This is a little counter intuitive. Players who want an elf in the party must first go destroy the elf nation, not, as the player might expect, aid the elf nation and gain allies that way. One of the other effects of this mechanic is that to unlock all the possible characters, Spectral Force 3 has to be played twice since when the last nation is defeated, the game is over.

The disappointing graphics and the strange recruiting mechanic aside, Spectral Force 3 is a good addition to its genre. The characters and their powers are diverse. The three different power-up mechanics give the player options in the various battles. The AI is competent and some of the battles that include bosses are challenging. There is some grind to getting through the whole game, but it takes about 60 hours to do it the first time, which is roughly twice the play time that most video games provide. Not for people who like to run and gun, Spectral Force 3 is a decent game for people who like the pace of turn-based battle.

One tradition that I wish Japanese RPGs of all stripes would get past is only letting us save in between battles. Spectral Forces 3 isn't as bad as many since its battles are relatively short, but it is still annoying to know that you have to have at least an hour of free time if you plan to sit down and actually advance the game.

—Eric