La Pucelle impressions

   In America, the Puppet Princess series was probably doomed to failure from the beginning. The female gaming demographic wasn't large enough to support the first game, Rhapsody, and its cutesy graphics and extreme lack of challenge didn't do much to ingratiate itself to strategy RPG aficionados. After the poor performance of the first title, the odds of any further installments coming to the US are virtually nil--which is a shame, considering the polish and depth of La Pucelle, the series' first spin-off title.

   Since it's set in Paprika Kingdom rather than Marl Kingdom, La Pucelle isn't a true entry in the Marl Story. A few elements from the main series make an appearance here, such as the Rosenqueen shops and certain enemy designs, but in all other respects La Pucelle is a new story. It begins at a religious school as three students bicker amongst themselves; these are your heroes. Sister Prier is the nominal leader of the trio, but her lagging study habits and quick temper often allow quiet, mildly snooty Sister Alouette to show her up. Somewhere in between the two is Culotte, an easygoing boy eager to demonstrate his knowledge but in no hurry to assume command. The three of them begin the game's first chapter by making an excursion into zombie-infested waterways to find the root of the recent troubles.

   A short series of battles serves as introduction to La Pucelle's strategy system, which is leagues more complex than anything seen in Rhapsody. Though it employs the same isometric perspective, that's about where the similarities end. La Pucelle's battlefields are much larger affairs, with the varying heights and rotatable maps that strategy enthusiasts have come to expect in next-gen titles. The battles are an odd hybrid of the alternating-turn Shining Force and agility-based Tactics Ogre systems: during your turn, you may choose which enemies to engage, but the actual conflict doesn't happen until you end your turn. Once the turn is over, each engagement plays out in a separate full-screen animation in which each combatant involved acts in order of agility stat; it's possible for the enemy to attack one of your fighters on its turn and end up dead before it can inflict any damage, if your agility is high enough. If you'd like to avoid the enemy's counterattack, casting spells will bring up a similar animation wherein only the caster's turn plays out, leaving him or her safe from harm for the duration of that turn.

   There's a lot more to do in battle than move around and attack, however. A far more integral part of the battle system is the indirect way of attacking enemies using each map's "Unclean Points." Both a help and a hindrance, Unclean Points will spawn monsters if left unattended, and since most battles end only when the enemy is completely destroyed, you need to purify the Unclean Points in order to get rid of them and finish the fight. But their secondary function means that it's sometimes in the player's best interest to leave one or two around: from each Unclean Points issues a colored stream that runs until it hits either a wall or a combatant. If the stream hits any character, enemy or ally, on the field, it will reroute itself in the direction that character is facing. A long chain can be worth setting up, because once the Unclean Point is purified, every enemy standing in the stream will suffer a moderate amount of damage--and if you set the stream up just right so that it's 15 or more spaces long, hits at least one enemy, and loops back in on itself, you can activate a Miracle attack that'll lay waste to all enemies on the battlefield.

   Getting this to happen can be difficult with only a few controllable characters to ensure the stream goes in the direction you want, especially since enemies have a tendency to send the flow in undesirable directions. Fortunately, there's a way to get more warm bodies to send the stream in a desirable direction: most enemies can be captured with careful preparation. If two main party members purify an enemy, and a third uses a special command on it in the same turn, the enemy will become a controllable party member which can be used in battle or to direct Unclean Point flows.

   Setting up long Unclean Point chains is also the way to upgrade weapons and armor, which gain levels independently of the characters themselves. Standard experience points are only attained through defeating enemies by regular combat, so balancing party members' actions between purification and combat is important lest they end up with weak weaponry or innate statistics.

   Though the gameplay has been improved in spades since Rhapsody, the visuals have undergone only moderate enhancement. Character sprites are better animated, with an array of amusing reactions for Prier that includes eyeballs bursting into flame and maniacal laughter, and the backgrounds are generally nicer and in higher resolution. Apart from that, though, there's little that couldn't have been done on the PSone. This is somewhat understandable, given that the game comes on a single CD which also includes voice acting for the major dialogue scenes, but also somewhat disappointing given how much more the PS2 is capable of.

   There are other such oddities, like the inability to properly explore towns--instead, you move in a straight line through them, with a window popping up to notify you when a piece of scenery can be examined or entered--but on the whole, La Pucelle is a well-done game that could potentially find success in the States, had its chances not already been hobbled by its inferior predecessor. Until some forward-thinking company grabs the American rights, La Pucelle will remain a hidden gem for import RPG fans only.