The main characters are a pair of orphans turned do-gooders. Prier is the older sister who is thought of as obnoxious by most of the rest of the town. She flies off the handle, doesn't pay attention to what she's doing and talks back. Her younger brother, Colette, I swear I thought was a girl for a while. Something about the way they draw boys in anime. He's the sweet, smart one. Together they work with their teacher Colette to roam the nearby areas and take out zombies and other creepy crawlies.
The "roaming the town" part of this is a very simple RPG. You move left or right in a straight line and talk to people you come near. Most people have one-line comments for you. Often they are a bit inappropriate, as when 80-something men start propositioning Prier. This game is rated "T" for "Teen" so they're assuming anyone playing this is over 13 and isn't taking that sort of thing too seriously.
Then, when you get in near enemies you head into the battle aspect. This is all done in a turn-based system on a grid. You take your characters one by one and tell them where to move and who to attack. Then when everything is ready, you set them in motion. This gives you lots of time to think about things, to plan what you're going to do and to change your mind. It's much better for many gamers than the frantic button-mashing required in other adventure games.
The ability to use flows of force to take out streams of enemies does add an interesting twist to this all.
Even so, there are several other tactic style games on the market which are much better - more weapon types, more interesting monsters, and perhaps most importantly - better graphics. The graphics here literally could have been done on a N64. In fact I remember a number of N64 games which were better than this here. It's really pretty surprising to see graphics this bad on a PS2 game.
I realize that graphics aren't everything, but there should be some sort of a base level that you're operating from if you're going to stare at the screen for hours at a time.
I'll give this a 3/5 for interesting characters and dialogue, but I just can't recommend playing this given the many other contenders in this genre.
Buy La Pucelle Tactics PS2 from Amazon.com
