While sometimes games have terrible stories and art that might weird you out, it’s only in extreme cases that I will be prevented from playing a game because of these things. LTAP is a fine RPG - with a few issues here and there - that maybe would’ve fared better with different graphics and tone.
The way this game works is the following: You talk with people, get quests, click on locations to walk there, then you fight some encounters, get rewards, rinse and repeat. You can visit cities to buy gear and do little tasks to get reputation, you can talk with your characters at the campground to try and woo them, you collect a party of various classes and skill sets and fight against increasingly difficult enemies.
The way the story is presented is a bit weird, you have to click through tons of text boxes to progress, the fact that there is an option to ‘skip’ text automatically leads me to believe that the developers knew some people couldn’t stomach all of it. It works a bit weirdly, with you having to enable/disable that mode constantly, and the weird way the right mouse button always open the main menu, whatever you’re doing. But it’s not a deal breaker, although the story is way too long, you still can just skip it and get to the fun stuff - battles.
There’s a movement order - your next turn comes sooner or later depending on the moves you take - a stagger system - you get staggered after a set amount of damage, which is leaving you vulnerable - two rows, a bunch of status ailments and various strategical choices of moves to use against your enemies. They, on the other hand, are complete mysteries, enemy attacks come fast as lightning, with only a few lines in the battle log to explain what they did, having your whole party hit by some spell before another enemy kills a bunch of characters is fine, not knowing what happened isn’t, slow it down, make attacks a bit more cinematic… And while we’re at it, what’s enemy anger? I couldn’t find it anywhere, oh well.
Each character has two classes, one is unique (hero, barbarian, cleric, monk, assassin) and one is an archetype (warrior, rogue, mage). All archetypes share the same skills and the unique classes sometimes have unique skills. I say sometimes because I find that the skills classes have are too much alike and the choice between them are meaningless. Having a class with 5 attack spells that each deal the same damage but inflict a different status ailment is fine. Having five characters be that way is a bit boring. Classes also can equip different gear and having a balanced team makes the difference between winning easily and losing to a group of necromancers that revive themselves.
While in towns, you can build up reputation for them by accomplishing “tasks” that range from fighting a guy to fighting six guys, sometimes you have a restriction on the number of party members you can bring to the fight as well. It’s a bit grindy, but I don’t mind, because the reputation gives you rebates on the shop and you get money while you fight, it’s a good way to buy powerful items. One weird thing is that while you get healed automatically between most fights, in some cases you don’t. Maybe a little heads up of how many fights in a row I’ll have to deal with would be nice.
Finally, the item system. You have about 12 different equipment slots from necklace to belt and shoulder pads and two rings and armor and boots and much more. You also have eight stats that equipment can give you, and you have above ten party members. The problem is that there is no quick way to evaluate gear against what you already have. I would add little up and down arrows, I would add eight of them as a matter of fact, on each character portrait, so you would know for your whole team if that piece of armor is better than what you have in that slot, without having to manually check for everyone.
A bunch of little quirky things I’m not really a fan of won’t break a neat battle system and interesting classes/team building strategies with a bunch of challenging monsters and never ending tasks, I liked that game!