This is one of my favorite games from my youth, and honestly holds up to this day. I don't think I can really name another game that is quite like Soul Nomad/Soul Cradle other than maybe X-Com with a ton of mods installed, or maybe X-Com blended with Fire Emblem/Advance Wars.

The basic concept of the gameplay is as you progress through the story, you unlock units you can put into individual squads (or Rooms, as the game calls it), with each squad led by one unit who will be able to provide different bonuses or abilities. You can make any unit a squad leader, and this will allow them to do different things in the map during a battle.

Think of it like Fire Emblem, except instead of just one guy against one guy, it's entire squads duking it out. And outside of individual fights, you can use different abilities to provide buffs or debuffs, AOEs, instant-damage attacks, all sorts of things. You can do a lot with this, and it only gets deeper from there. Each room you have can be equipped with "decor" items that give bonuses or unique effects to their squads, and you can run through RNG dungeons from the squad organization menu to give individual rooms points that can then be used to modify stats of individual units in a room. On top of this, you have multiple other systems in the background, some working off RNG, some not, along with two merchants you buy from at all times. The merchants in question don't upgrade their shop inventories on their own, so you have to fight the merchants, kill them, and then they get replaced immediately with better guys. Rinse and repeat. In towns and cities, you can interact with various townsfolk through the use of "Gig Edicts" (basically this game's equivalent to items). There's a lot of stuff you can do in this game, and in NG+ and onward there's several different bits of content you can experience. The base normal route story is roughly 30+ hours, though your first run could last a while as you organize your squads and run through side content.

There's a lot of things to experience in this game, and I highly recommend anyone at least try it. This game deserves a resurgence, and I'm glad it finally has a proper PC release to encourage that.

Also: if you have any gameplay/mechanics questions, feel free to comment or message me and I'll help you out. I had to learn about a lot of this game's mechanics the hard way as a kid, and still remember a lot (along with learning some new things on my current replay).

Also on topic of the PC port itself: it's pretty much a 1 for 1 port of the PS2 version with some basic options for video settings. Honestly, you don't need much else besides that. It runs very well, looks gorgeous, and has some great spritework and music. Everything looks, feels, and sounds great. This port could've gone so very badly, but I'm glad it works so well.

This is one of my favorite games from my youth, and honestly holds up to this day. I don't think I can really name another game that is quite like Soul Nomad/Soul Cradle other than maybe X-Com with a ton of mods installed, or maybe X-Com blended with Fire Emblem/Advance Wars. The basic concept of the gameplay is as you progress through the story, you unlock units you can put into individual squads (or Rooms, as the game calls it), with each squad led by one unit who will be able to provide different bonuses or abilities. You can make any unit a squad leader, and this will allow them to do different things in the map during a battle. Think of it like Fire Emblem, except instead of just one guy against one guy, it's entire squads duking it out. And outside of individual fights, you can use different abilities to provide buffs or debuffs, AOEs, instant-damage attacks, all sorts of things. You can do a lot with this, and it only gets deeper from there. Each room you have can be equipped with "decor" items that give bonuses or unique effects to their squads, and you can run through RNG dungeons from the squad organization menu to give individual rooms points that can then be used to modify stats of individual units in a room. On top of this, you have multiple other systems in the background, some working off RNG, some not, along with two merchants you buy from at all times. The merchants in question don't upgrade their shop inventories on their own, so you have to fight the merchants, kill them, and then they get replaced immediately with better guys. Rinse and repeat. In towns and cities, you can interact with various townsfolk through the use of "Gig Edicts" (basically this game's equivalent to items). There's a lot of stuff you can do in this game, and in NG+ and onward there's several different bits of content you can experience. The base normal route story is roughly 30+ hours, though your first run could last a while as you organize your squads and run through side content. There's a lot of things to experience in this game, and I highly recommend anyone at least try it. This game deserves a resurgence, and I'm glad it finally has a proper PC release to encourage that. Also: if you have any gameplay/mechanics questions, feel free to comment or message me and I'll help you out. I had to learn about a lot of this game's mechanics the hard way as a kid, and still remember a lot (along with learning some new things on my current replay). Also on topic of the PC port itself: it's pretty much a 1 for 1 port of the PS2 version with some basic options for video settings. Honestly, you don't need much else besides that. It runs very well, looks gorgeous, and has some great spritework and music. Everything looks, feels, and sounds great. This port could've gone so very badly, but I'm glad it works so well.