Yggdra Union – We’ll Never Fight Alone

Have you ever had the feeling that you needed a really good SRPG (strategy role playing game) that strays away from the classic formula? You know when you’ve played Final Fantasy Tactics or Luminous Arc far too many times, but you still enjoy the genre? I know I am, and that is where this hidden gem, Yggdra Union – We’ll Never Fight Alone comes in.

The game is available on both the GBA and the PSP. What I like about the game is the fact that it strays from the formulaic SRPG. It has a style that is a bit reminiscent of Fire Emblem, and of course you can’t have an SPRG without the really basic mechanics that is worked into every game. You have the rock, paper, scissors groups (swords, archers, axes) that each have an advantage over another group. There is the turn based aspect where you take turns to do whatever you plan to do. What is different about this game is that the amount of movement all your characters go through is decided by a card chosen at the start which dictates how powerful your attacks are, the special moves you can do and even the amount of steps you can move. Even odder is the fact that in any given turn only one single battle can be carried out.

Needless to say the picking of the cards is absolutely critical to winning. Even though the attack power of most cards are only slightly different, the difference could mean whether a unit stays alive for another turn or not. There is also the special abilities. When fighting, you zoom into a view of several characters fighting, in which you can control whether they are passive or aggressive. When you are in passive, you can charge up your bar so that when you reach 100% you can use your special move, or you get more time to fight aggressively. On the other hand, aggressive drains that bar and allows your characters to survive longer and deal more damage in the individual fights. The special abilities are devastating, be it killing almost all of the characters or simply dealing a lot more damage. You are also limited to the amount of cards you have. Suppose the game allows you to carry 6 for a particular battle, it would mean that after 6 turns, you’d lose because you ran out of cards.

The key point of the game is the union feature (as the title “We’ll Never Fight Alone” suggests), and it is what separates Yggdra Union from the rest. As mentioned earlier, in a single turn, you can only have one battle, which is sort of a lie. By placing your units in formation, you can chain attacks together, so that essentially you are initiating a single battle, but you are actually having multiple fights. If it just so happens that you are out of formation and your opponent is able to join 3 groups together for a fight, your single unit has to participate in all 3 battles, and if you happen to lose one, you start the next battle with a reduced force. This unique take on battling means that formation is absolutely critical. Unlike other SRPGs where placement is merely avoiding attacks, the placement could mean that you might not fight at all.

The rules seem complex, but the game does a pretty good job of easing you into the mechanics. Some of the skills aren’t introduced early on, and you are stuck with your basic SRPG for maybe the first 30 minutes of the game. And they introduce new rules one at a time over the first few hours of gameplay in nice clips. Most reviews present the game as an overwhelming experience, but I thought the integration of the rules is quite successful.

I’m a huge fan of the style of the game, but there are plenty of people who just plain hate this game. Gamespot rated both versions quite low, and I think it deserves much higher, not only because it actually tried something new in this genre (at a time where no other game tried to), but because it was successful. I think it is one of those games that you either love or you absolutely hate. There are definitely parallels to Fire Emblem, in terms of style and story, so if you enjoyed Fire Emblem, you should love this game as well.

The presentation for this game is absolutely fantastic for a GBA game, there is a whole stack of tunes running in the background and a lot of cute animations. For a PSP game, I’d rate it fairly average, it seems to me they took the GBA graphics and merely increased some of the resolution and reorganized the game a little. Personally, I played the game on a GBA console, actually a Gameboy Micro. There are so many graphics crammed together on such a tiny screen it was sometimes hard to find the necessary information, but the cluttered look gives the battle animations a really epic feel even though there were only 12 or so characters on screen. When you have 12 characters crammed into a portion of the screen with bubbles showing taunts or cries while displaying a bunch of numbers, you get a feeling of this really busy game, even though you are just watching an animation while pressing left and right to adjust the passive-aggressive scale.

On the other hand, I tried the PSP game a little while ago, wiped the game off my card seeing as I couldn’t port a save over from GBA, and just reloaded it to remind myself of the game. It certainly has some excellent values, there’s a lot of voice acting, almost the complete script is voiced, and the menus are cleaner, much cleaner. On a Gameboy Micro you have all these things crammed into a screen that was smaller than the size of your glasses lens, whereas on the PSP, they have 4x the room to display all of these things. As a result, things are easier to find, and they kept the busy feeling by increasing the amount of characters displayed on the screen. The pictures are clearer and everything is bigger while keeping the style of the original. Personally I prefer the portability of the Gameboy Micro, the game is a bit simplistic for a PSP game, and I also think that the buttons work better on the GBA. But I can see why people would want to play the game on the PSP, a larger brighter screen, better graphics and voices make for a nice experience. Not to mention some people carry their PSP consoles around anyways.

I think Yggdra Union is one of the best GBA games released (and one of the last). It is extremely satisfying to win, the controls work great, and best of all, the developers actually showed some innovation when designing it. If you happen to see a copy at a garage sale or perhaps being sold at an EB Games for cheap, definitely pick it up and try it, you won’t be disappointed.