Mercenaries Blaze: Dawn of the Twin Dragons
The latest entry into the indie turn based strategy series Mercenaries brings some quality of life improvements that bring the franchise closer to greatness, but still falls short in execution.
The biggest upgrade from the previous entries is the introduction of fully rendered 3D maps. This means you can spin the view around to get a full 360 degree view. After that the artwork is a huge step up. The character portraits are beautiful to look at. However that’s the only graphics that were improved.
We follow Lester, a former noble whose family has fallen from grace. His father was a staunch defender of justice and equal rights in the kingdom you call home, but his enemies plotted against him and had him assassinated. The story picks up with him leading the mercenary squad Twin Dragons with his long time friend, and legal immigrant, Alvah. Illegal immigrants are highly pursued and are given the option of converting to the local religion, or be sent to work camps. We follow Lester as he makes some tough choices with a branching story about 1/3rd of the way through.
The story branches at a decision to leave your mercenary squad and join the military squad of a highly accredited general and friend of Lester’s father, or to stay with your long time friend. My first run through I chose to stay with my mercenaries. It was a good story, a bit plain and generic. I enjoyed it though. On my second play through I joined the general, but due to a huge oversight in the developers with balance, I hit a wall about 90% of the way through the game. I chose to play the game on the “maniac” difficulty on my new game plus, but you reach a battle where most of your main party is sent on a separate mission, and you’re left with only one other member, and two extremely weak guest characters. I attempted this battle about 10 times before I gave up. Unfortunately that means I only finished one of the two story paths here. Which is a shame, because I was enjoying this story path much more than the other. The game doesn’t require grinding on normal difficulties, so there isn’t a fast way to grind. This really left a bad taste in my mouth, because until then I was enjoying the game for what it was; a budget indie title inspired heavily by Tactics Ogre.
Mechanics wise there was one that stood out, and one I’ve never seen before. When you level skills up, you’re able to choose which level of skill you’ll use. So a “heal” spell can have its casting level altered to affect how strong it is. If your MP is low, or you only need to heal, say 30%, and not 50% you can adjust for that.
I’d say give this a shot, but join the general on your first path on normal difficulty, and do the path where you don’t join him on the maniac difficulty. The political drama, which has many parallels with race and religious context seen in our current world bring the story some believability. I believe I snagged this on a sale so I’d say money well spent. About a 30 hours play through to do both paths.
