Gladius

Gladius Overview

Gladius for the Sony Playstaion 2, the Nintendo GameCube, and the Microsoft Xbox is a turn based strategy tactics role playing game that was released in late 2003. Players take on the role of a gladiator in ancient Rome where he or she will take part in countless battles for their freedom. The story is very slow paced and is mostly expressed through short dialogues and side quests. Story aside this game has about 100+ hours of game play and is a great play for any fan of tactics style role playing games.

Gladius Screenshots

[Show as slideshow]

Gladius Featured Video

Full Review

Gladius Review

By, Ronald Wartow

Backdrop

.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.

The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).

Gameplay

Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.

The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.

Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.

Combat

Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.

Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.

Fresh Features

Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.

To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)

Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.

Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.

Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.

Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.

Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.

In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.

Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.

Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.

Time for Completion

Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.

Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.

Shortcomings

While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.

From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.

The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.

The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.

Final Word

We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!

Final Grade: B

If you yearn for a profound, convoluted, tactically strategic, turn-based combat RPG, where neither the story nor the side quests get in the way, then Gladius will float your boat. Gladius plunges the player into the primitive world of gladiators, where hundreds of battles are in store for the player. The game provides roughly 50 hours of engrossing gaming, akin to its seeming, renowned predecessors, like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre. The game evokes constant memories of many great games, where “Just One More Battle!” became your rallying call. The 50-hour completion time was required just for plowing through the main plot, abstaining from side quests and the impulse to fight every battle available. Easily, the earnest player could burn up greater than 100 hours to finish the game leaving no stone unturned.

Though this review is of the Xbox version, it appears that the Playstation 2 and Gamecube storylines and gameplay are identical, the only difference being graphics specific to each console.

Gladius takes place during an ancient time of war, where gladiatorial arenas were spread throughout the land. The player chooses one of two heroes, Valens or Ursula, each with their own storyline. Each hero becomes the leader of their own gladiatorial school for the campaign ahead. Each hero starts the game with a powerful sidekick. Depending on your gladiatorial schools’ ranking (Amateur, Semi-Pro, or Pro), your hero can recruit up to 16 different gladiator classes, all with varying skills (from literally hundreds) and special environmental elemental affinities (fire vs. water, for example). All this can be described in one word – “magic”! Your school eventually grows in size, and into a diverse and powerful fighting force. The gladiator classes are colorful, ranging from brutish barbarian types to spell-casting pixies. The gladiators traditionally gain levels from experience points earned in battles, opening up new skill opportunities, and more powerful equipment.

The World is divided into 4 regions, each with several gladiatorial arenas. The arenas are all different, some with a few spectators around nothing more than a pit, and grand stadiums where the combats are watched by thousands of cheering fans. Each arena offers various combat leagues for your gladiators to enter, each with multiple battles and requirements to win the league’s cup. Once your school wins the cup of every league at an arena, the arena’s chief tournament must be beaten. Once all arena tournaments in a region have been won, your gladiators must prevail in the region’s championship. Only after winning the championship of each of the regions does the school qualify to fight in the High Tournament. Winning there is a prerequisite to completing Gladius.

Each arena contains a store where gladiators can upgrade equipment, for a hefty price, usually. The variety of weapons, weapons, armor and enhancing artifacts in Gladius is overwhelming, with many specialty items available only in the stores. The game is reported to have close to 500 distinctive weapons, armors and artifacts.

Gameplay Gladius has an average learning curve, helped by a very good tutorial. The combat leagues, tournaments, and championships offer a staggering diversity of fighting tests and require real strategy from the player.

Unlike Gladius, many RPG’s let the player develop a core party ever increasing in strength through myriad combats with adversaries. Play long enough, and your party members become immensely strong conquerors, usually making the endgame anticlimactic. On the other hand, Gladius, many Arena league contests have stringent eligibility requirements. Often, the player must leave powerhouse gladiators on the sideline, and roam the countryside to recruit specialized gladiators for a particular battle. Examples: some battles require that you use only gladiators from the particular region in which the player is located, or the gladiators must be female, or, of a certain class. You get the idea! This makes for exciting and interesting prologues to many battles.

The variety of combats presented will keep the player on their toes. First, the types of opponents range from savage beasts to parties of magic users. Victory in some combats is are based on special game conditions, like King of the Hill, what school can destroy the other’s monument first, and what school can inflict the most damage on the other school. Many times, up to four schools have gladiators in a particular league combat, making for a seeming infinite variety of combat encounters, and other combats can be 1 on 1 or 2 on 2. These are just a handful of examples. My favorite battle setup was where the selected gladiators had to win a series of 3 or 4 challenges without any healing in between.

Though, generally, no more than 6 gladiators compete against another school, one of the game’s nice features causes some combat slowdown. This is because each move, swing, spell, and skill is accompanied by a striking animation, but, after awhile, you wish there was a game option to turn off the animations to speed up the combats, particularly given the hundreds of combats playing the entire game entails.

Though some battles, especially those on the World Map, outside arenas, offer treasure chests for the opening, many times gladiators need to use items seemingly only available in the stores. Having trouble winning a particular league combat, try out some other leagues or wander around the world to other towns.

Two appreciated departures from the classic games Gladius resembles are the appreciably shorter battle length and onscreen character size. My statistics for the game’s first half, conquering 2 of the 4 regions, showed 181 battles during 24 hours of Gladius gaming. (Gladiuskeeps an incredible statistics database readily viewable by the player.) That works out to about 7.5 minutes per battle, relatively quick compared to the 30-60 minute battles of Final Fantasy Tactics, and Tactics Ogre. What’s more, rather than maneuver tiny, sometimes indistinguishable, units around the screen, Gladius’ gladiators are very large, sometimes filling the game screen’s height during close infighting battle maneuvers.

Throughout the game, especially the victory and defeat anthems, a rousing musical score worthy of the subject matter can be heard, though it does get repetitive after the 50th battle. Loading times from 5 to 10 seconds occur quite frequently, like before and after battles and cut scenes. (I have read online threads complaining about longer load times on the Playstation 2 and Gamecube, but have no actual experience with the game on those consoles.)

Fight! Fight! Fight! For Your School! Gladius is beyond doubt a game of turn-based gladiatorial battles, laced with heavy doses of movement and attack strategy choices. The slow-moving story, related through conversational cut scenes and the relatively few side quests, essentially pale in comparison. The Gladius drill is uncomplicated, and will be repeated many times over during the course of the game.

While the combat is truly turn-based, most combat actions in Gladius require a bit of arcade-like finger-twitching, requiring the mastery of swing meters. These meters display hot spots which, when reached by a moving icon, require the precise clicking of certain console pad buttons, sometimes in a particular order, during a combat attack. If you press the right buttons when the hot spots are reached, your gladiator scores a critical hit during the attack. This adds an action element, which initially alarmed an arcade-challenged gamer like me. So, originally I used the game’s option screen to disable the meters, but critical hits by the computer were few and far between. So, I switched the meters back on and, after some practice mainly restoring saved games after many early battle defeats, the swing meter became a fun challenge, and enhanced gameplay appreciably.

Another key factor in combat success is the crowd meter. When a gladiator performs a particularly hard hit inflicting tons of damage, or successfully executes a devastating combo, the crowd goes wild. When this happens, the crowd meter increase is accompanied by movement, initiative, and similar combat advantages. So, pleasing the crowd is crucial to success in the games, and adds a nice reward for a triumphant combat turn.

In the first half the game, healers are essentially nonexistent, so there’s nothing a character can do to cure another low on hit points. When gladiators fall in combat, even a hero, they stay down, though, after the battle, they are resurrected with full hit points ready for the next encounter. The same cannot be said of the combat that takes place on the relatively-confined World Map. These are chance encounters, usually bandits or low-lifers. If characters collapse in combat, their end is permanent. (Gaming purists will be devastated and move on with grace and dignity. The rest of us will reload a saved game.) If the hero falls in this type of non-arena encounter, the “GAME OVER” appears quite rapidly.

Bottom Line My few minor criticisms aside, I unabashedly recommend Gladius. The proof is in the fact that several gaming sessions involved 8 straight hours playing the game, without even the hint of a yawn.

Finally though I did not try these modes out, competitive multiplayer and a cooperative mode for as many as 4 players is available.

Final Grade: 90%

Screenshots

Gladius Screenshots

[Show as slideshow]

Videos

Gladius Videos

Gladius Trailer

Guides / Links

Gladius Guides / Links

Gladius Wikipedia Entry

FAQ/Walkthrough