Gladius (Xbox) Reviews
By D. Riley
Posted December 3, 2003

Fore! ...hey...wait...

I despise RPGs (save for Christmas break, for some reason unbeknownst to me), so it's kind of a funny coincidence that I find myself seized by rapture every time a strategy-based role playing game hits the market. I don't know - it's something about the whole board game mentality of it all, all those percentages and especially, especially the way they let you buy stuff that just puts it in this echelon that's far above your stupid, mundane Final Fantasies and Dragon Warriors. Do they even make Dragon Warrior anymore? My guess is no, because they didn't let you buy enough stuff.

But yeah, the strategy game just speaks to me in a way that no other stupid, boring, turn-based game (like your favorite RPG, for example) could ever hope to accomplish. However, the idea of the serious console style turn based strategy has been cloistered off in The Land of the Rising Sun since its very inception. LucasArts, who I know made those Star Wars movies steps up to the plate and says "Nuts that Japan, I've got your jambas right here." With 'jambas' being a metaphorical correlation to the makings of an excellent strategy game.

Despite LucasArts's affinity towards games that involve lots of pixying about and people getting their hands cut off by evil emperors, there's little of the sort contained in Gladius. I have yet to even find something resembling your standard lightsaber or Star Wars shooty-deal (though, I am only ten hours in). Gladius isn't a game about the grumpy guy who played Indiana Jones or space squids that can somehow fly spaceships and lead an army. No, Gladius is the story of six hundred different trite and overused character types and their quest for victory.

Stop me if you've heard this before. Valens is the son of a father who was died (murdered even! Well, maybe... I have a really bad attention span and not all the dialogue is spoken. That's a killer), and now he's decided that the only way to avenge him is by following his path of victory through the gladiator games of a country that's definitely NOT Rome. He's accompanied by Usus, his 'wise-old mentor'™ that never has anything interesting to say and Ludo, his best friend that will inevitably betray him. These traits are not the fault of the characters, so please don't blame them for their hackneyed relationships. I haven't played the other campaign featuring Ursula, the amazon warrior, but I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that she's fighting to free her people from slavery or oppression, or to avenge her executed father. I know, I know, it feels like I'm stretching it, but I'm willing to go out on a limb for this one.

Story issues aside though, the gameplay contained herein is pretty stellar, for the most part. You travel from town to town and fight in tournaments with the intention of becoming the best/most famous warrior in all the lands (I'm starting to think that there isn't a single sentence in this game that wasn't plagiarized from some other source). Regardless, the way it's executed is actually pretty fun. Though I'm sure the specter of plot will rear its ugly head sometime soon, there's been none to really speak of right now. Undoubtedly the "world threatening evil" will pop out like Punxsatawney Phil on a cold winter's day, but for now... ignorance is bliss. In the meantime, Gladius stays true to its heritage and the simple intention is to mess up all the competition and acquire that coveted trophy/crown/laurel for yourself.

Normally I am not a proponent of giant men... but here we are.

And you've got the tools to do it with too! The game works on a pretty simply rock-paper-scissors system that so many releases recently have become fond of. Your heavier gladiators, like Centurions, cut bloody swathes through your standard medium sized Legionnaires, while the Legionnaires will do about the same to the lighter Secutors and Bandits, who have no problem dancing around Centurions and their ilk and stabbing them in the back for hefty damage. It's all very simple, but that's the name of the game when it comes to Gladius-style combat. All this is augmented with your standard SRPG abilities to raise damage or bolster your troops morale.

Workhorse as it might seem, Gladius does bring a few things to the table. There's the ever-present love of the crowd, which provides you with benefits based on how thoroughly you trash your opponent and, yet another function cribbed from another source, the swing meter. The swing meter decides your critical hits. You're given a small range in which to press buttons in order to do more damage to your ill-fated enemy. You might recognize it from your favorite copy of Tiger Woods or Mario Toadstool Tour, or not. Golf's so boring to play in real life I can't imagine myself even feigning a slight interest in wanting to sort of attempt to play it, even to check my sources. Maybe that's just me though. Either way, it's the first time I've ever seen it in a strategy RPG and it's a welcome change from the ubiquitous Final Fantasy Tactics mentality of '95% means you succeed one of out of three times' and, aside from the bars that require you to button mash like crazy, it's a pretty unobtrusive way to put some interactivity in an otherwise point-and-click genre. They're both simple changes but like I said, Gladius is a simple game.

Some of you might regard this simplicity as a detraction, but every other SRPG I've played (all from Japan, ah ha!) are so moronically complicated that you need a degree and two calculators just to work out some of the formulas they bring to the table. There's a 336k FAQ on GameFAQs devoted entirely to the mechanics of a Final Fantasy Tactic battles. What the hell?! The 'creativity' of the new Final Fantasy Tactics for GBA, namely the judges, is what KILLED it. Similarly, one might say that when Gladius tries to get inventive is when it's at its very worst. You know how most strategy games made a big deal about different battle objectives when it only had like, two anyway? Kill all the guys, or just kill this guy. Gladius is different, as it has a host of other battle types that are all equal in their level of annoyance, regardless of difficulty. These special types range from the Point Battle, which is so mind bogglingly easy you'll tend to find yourself with points in excess of SEVENTEEN TIMES your opponents, I'm not shitting you. On the other hand, some of the missions that require you to break more barrels are logically unbeatable due to your enemies close proximity to said barrels while you're like, on another planet. And this planet's name? Planet NO BARRELS! So thanks for that little gem LucasArts. We're blessed by whatever god governs videogames, because these don't comprise anything near the majority of the battles. They're merely a slight annoyance instead of a game crushing flaw.

"Why everyone always look at Valens funny?"

What gets close though, to ruining it for me is the brain crushing cut-scenes. As I've mentioned before, the story is pretty mundane, and the writing is bearable but the cut-scene animation on the otherwise well-modelled characters make them look like they all have a serious case of Tourette's going on and Valens has the worst lazy eye in the history of gaming, so I guess it's good that they're employing the unsung heroes of physiological diseases. Still, I think they could've shelled out a bit more like, oh, say... FIVE DOLLARS to hire some bums off the street. Why hire bums? Because I think the homeless, even the crazy homeless are likely to have better voice acting credentials than the people that slapped this together. My ear may be untrained, but it sounds to me like they just threw a person in a studio, handed them their lines (in no particular order) and gave them fifteen minutes to get them down. Almost every review I've read said it features at least 'average' voice acting, and some places went so far as to laude it! Laude WHAT?! How about we praise the fact that their inflection changes sometimes in the MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE. The speech itself isn't entirely useless, but the way its slapped together sounds like crap. I found myself thinking that I could do a better job with the female voices, to say nothing of the males. I must admit, though, that I have a certain soft spot for the hearty chuckle belted out by your run of the mill Centurion as he wails on the lesser classes.

As far as flaws go, Gladius's are few and far between, provided you're the type that can bear playing what boils down to basically the same game over a period of 50+ hours. If you're a SRPG fan then you know you will, and you'll thank LucasArts for the privilege of it! Gladius might not be king of the hill, but it does what it does with more than enough style to be worth picking up. It doesn't have the giant robots or giant robot sized shotguns found in other, more Eastern games, but it's got a hell of a lot of heart (and a box full of Cliff's Notes, is my guess).

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Est. 2003