Ahh, the Agarest series. One of the worst marketing experiences I’ve ever had when it comes to what was promised and what the game is actually about. Agarest 1 was basically one of the earliest games I played that was about fanservice that wasn’t straight up porn, though the ads and marketing really pushed the fleshy side of the game more then the 100+ hour RPG side of it. My experience with the series only got more positive as I played through the later ones, the first game sapped any motivation I had to play it. Multiple times.

It’ll be a while before the entire series is here. The first game is stupid long and I have a hard time sitting down and devoting any real time to it, and because of save game bonuses you have to play the first three in order. Mariage, the final game, doesn’t have that limit because it was on the PSP, not the main consoles.

Agarest 1 and Zero are strategy RPGs, while Mariage and 2 are turn based.

Record of Agarest War

Where do I even start with this? I don’t like Agarest 1. It’s a pretty good example of a bad RPG to me. It tries to do a lot of interesting things, but fails at pretty much all of them. I’m going to basically go through a list of why I don’t like the game, so if you don’t want to hear that you can safely ignore this entry. Zero streamlines basically the entire experience and has a bonus mode that tells the cliff notes version of this games plot, so skipping this is honestly something I would recommend. I’m going to focus on fanservice, then story, and finally the thing you will be doing for the majority of the 100+ hours, gameplay.

I’m going to start with the first thing you would likely hear about the game, it’s fanservice. It’s weak and awkward attempts at being sexy. The positive? The character designs are nice. Lots of different looking men for those who like them, and the women are varied and have very… interesting outfits. Like the first girl you can marry in gen 1 is basically wearing like 10 belts and leggings and nothing else.The cgs of the characters though, just don’t work. This might be me, but the coloring makes the attempts at lewd fall flat when it might work, and a lot of the other attempts are just to tame to care. It does a lot of the standard anime cliches of the time, like phallic eating or splashing water on clothes to make them see through. Except instead of see through, it’s more like awkwardly stained. The few times it might work, there’s some detail that kills it like the resident pervert being in the shot.

A bit more detail is needed for the above. Each of the girls in the game get 1-2 cgs scenes during the course of the adventure that are the attempts to lewd them. These all start with the girls saying misleading things or moaning, or both. Then the image shows you what is actually happening. This could work, but probably is going to be disappointing more often then not. The faces and coloring just don’t work, and what the girls are actually doing is rarely the erotic part of the act. The faces are especially bad during the marriage stuff. At the end of each gen, you get to marry 1 of 3 girls and get a bridal gown cg and then a them naked except for blanket on bed cg. The gown is nice, the bed is awkward. It’s mostly the faces for me, but most of the girls just don’t pull of sexy here, but it’s really the best the game has. There’s the five hot spring cgs to, but I don’t know. They just feel to tame. Like the girls you want to see are shoved to the back and the loli’s are up front enough to kill it for me. Especially Plum who is a literal toddler in body shape because of her race. I can enjoy a well done loli, but toddlercon is way to much for me.

So yeah, the game just doesn’t have the art to pull of lewd, nor the writing. It gets close at times but not ever good. And this is what the game was sold on in the west. The bed cgs were basically the core of its advertising, even though that stuff makes up like 1/30 of the game. Probably less.

Next is the story. Which is a really cool idea. Due to heroic life choices, Leonhardt dies saving a young elf. In comes Dyshana, a person with the ability to revive Leo with a contract that will guarantee a young death for his children as they are used for Dyshana’s purposes. He agrees since he’s not having kids dead either way, and he wants to help the elf girl. Soon after he reunites with the elf, and with her godling body guard begins the actual main story of game. A five continental war story of light vs darkness. This goes into the backstory that most of Agarest uses, but basically 6 light gods and 6 dark gods duked it out, and now humans are dealing with the aftermath of the light ones being mostly dead and the dark ones kinda coming back.

Each generation focuses on the hero and his returning party as he eventually finds the darkness of that generation, with a b plot with crafting an artifact to break another artifact starting in gen 3 and running to the end. The hero gets an army, takes out the darkness, chooses a bride from one of three girls he met and sorta fell for, all four die, next gen. Gen 4 and 5 are a bit different in the starting context but still play out the same for the most part. The issue comes in how empty each generation actually feels. Names are thrown out with no context, wars are fought without you seeing almost any soldiers, and while you are told things are happening you have to fight 2-4 more battles before the next story beat. You are given choices that might mean something, but who knows? There’s an alignment system that is actually important, but what is chaos and what is light? Why is going to the lake first dark but the fortress light? Why does a 100+ hour RPG need a step by step walkthrough to get the true ending?

Basically the story’s issues are it’s pacing and connections. It depends on the specific generation how bad the issues are, but generally the story is very slow with to much wait time between stuff happening. It tries to fill the gap with heroine events but sadly the girls just don’t fit in well with the war setting and really don’t work with the atmosphere of the story. The romance and the actual plot don’t mix well, but the game has little else to use. No real world lore is really taught outside of shocking moment kind of stuff, and nothing really matters when you just don’t know anybody anywhere. For a grand war epic, none of the war’s felt real or that the hero could do anything but win. I did like part’s of gen 3 and 4, but that’s mostly because Thoma(gen 3 hero) had some cool speeches and Duran(4’s) was probably the most human of the protag’s do to hating his place in life of being a sacrifice for a great grandfather he never met. The rest of the plot was either simple good vs evil, or felt to distant to care about. The actual overall plot is cool, but it takes 100 hours to get it in a plot dump just before what is usually the final boss. The plot is reactionary to your choices and how long you take to do certain things, but since most people who play Agarest use the true end guide you get the best result every time and never see how bad things can actually get. The game’s to long for that kind of system.

I guess I should actually talk about the romance stuff for a bit, as it segways into some gameplay stuff as well. Every generation the hero gets 3 girls to choose from to make the next kid. Who you choose only decides stats and color palette for the next hero, the mother is never mentioned. The mother is never mentioned in any Agarest game outside of Mariage. It’s a big sticking point to me that such a big part of the game’s marketing and uniqueness amounts to a hair color and armor color. Phantasy Star 3 did a better job of the same concept and that was from 10+ years before Agarest! Anyway, the romance is for the most part, standard stuff though it’s all very far apart and lacking in general. The game does a decent job of having all the heroines standout enough in personality, though they tend to follow archetypes. You have the fanservice aggressive one, the serious one who is usually a soldier, and the tsundere/in denial girl. Gen 5 lets you marry the nine females who haven’t been candidates to that point, though it mostly just changes a cg or two at the end and nothing else. 7 of those options are basically the last hero’s moms as far as raising him. Anyway, the main point to the girls is the kid they produce, and based on their love score the kid gets different abilities, weapon choices, stat growths, and attack options.

So the gameplay of Agarest, if it was just about the mechanics, is fine. Interesting in fact. You get a bunch of different weapon types with different ranges on the SRPG combat grid. A bunch of equippable moves based on the character themselves and their weapon which form combos based on grouping moves together. Each character gets three ultimate and four passives that change up how each feel, while having different stat costs in its point buy system to let you build people in a variety of certain ways. Almost every normal monster is recruit able via the capture mechanic with their own weapon group, passives and attack options. Each character has a set of squares based on their facing they connect to, and anyone they are connected to gets to be used on anyone’s turn that is also connected and they can combo together. Describing it like that, Agarest sounds like it should be fun.

If you only fought like 1/50 of the fights you have to to beat the game, it would be a great game. And if the winning method wasn’t boring, but necessary. You see, you need to play on hard mode. Most of the endgame is hard mode only. A lot of the unlockables are there(they aren’t. They are true end only, but you don’t need hard mode for cgs, just achievements. I screwed this up), since instead of seeing a cg unlocking it you need to get a book from the titles list(basically kill x things or collect x items for a reward). Hard mode is basically designed around either dlc items to be fair, or NG+. Even then, you need to do this stupid thing to win against bosses, and even some normal enemies to get overkill items later on. The setup is simple, connect all your characters based on their squares. Let one die. Revive. Repeat until you get enough SP to use your best ultimate with your whole team. Use ultimates. Win. Normal fights at end game are literally rocket tag, where normal enemies one shot you, but you need your entire team to maybe overkill one of them for an item to craft a slightly better sword. After you kill that one, your AP(which limits your attack pool for the turn) is empty and your people are out of place do to moving to actually hit the thing you targeted.

So the game sets up the idea of building your characters, but really you get one speed person, one luck person for stealing(Winfield or Noah since their ultimates do rare steals which are separate from the skill steal), and go full attack or magic for the rest of your party. Half the game’s cast is built with the idea that doing both is a good idea, but the reality? Magic Knight is worthless. Hp is basically pointless, and defense doesn’t matter. Immunity is the only way to survive. Or spacing out the party so the boss can’t one shot everyone but you can still reach revival items around. This is the only game I can think of where the lowest tier revival item is the best one because of how the game actually works(low HP triggers the best damage passives in the game).

Let me elaborate on 100% for a bit. Because seeing images doesn’t unlock them, you only need 1 playthrough instead of 3. You only need to see the true end and not the law or chaos endings. This is good. You need to play on hard mode, which is like the poster child for spend money to not have a bad time. Thankfully the PC version comes with a few dlc’s for free that make that part of the game manageable. Then end mode hits and you need to grind a bunch to get the equipment and stats needed to even attempt the bosses that ramp up fast. Thankfully that part of the game is just boss rushes. Then you need to craft everything that wasn’t dropped. With a crafting system that uses old weapons, breaking weapons into parts, monster drops and monster drop only weapons. That has a failure chance on every craft to make the basic healing item instead of your endgame sword. That part’s just a pain because it basically requires saving between every 1-3 forges. It also adds nothing. Crafting can take hours. It’s a good thing Agarest has a solid wiki with basically everything so that you don’t have to blind crafting stuff.

So why did I play this if I hate it so much? The series as a whole is one of the more insidious when it comes to dlc and difficulty. I mentioned above that without the free dlc, hard mode’s start is basically impossible. That holds true for Zero and 2 as well. Plus, in order to get the full endgame content in those two, you need saves from the previous game or NG+, and I don’t like either of those games enough to NG+ them. Zero is better then Agarest 1 if only because it’s shorter. 2 is, if I remember right, an okay turn based RPG with some decent fanservice. So if I want to replay those without cheating, I need an Agarest 1 save. It just makes things easier long term.

PS3 Save for Agarest 1

Steam save for Agarest 1

The PS 3 save is really just because I still have it. It has all titles and cgs unlocked at end game.

The steam version has everything unlocked, a save to before picking a wife at each gen, and save 1 is ripe to get the all weapons an all items achievements/titles and then get the all titles achievement. Both saves are goof for Going into Zero in their respective consoles.

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 2/10 Story: 4/10

Completion: What it took-

Following a true end guide is really all you need. Then you do some title clean up and you are done. Reaching the final true boss and filling the item list is more a checklist thing that takes a long time then a challenge.

Agarest Zero

Story-5

Agarest Zero is a prequel story to Agarest 1, telling the story of Leo’s sword and of the villains rise and fall of power that leads to the events of Agarest 1. The first generation of Agarest Zero is not this prequel. It’s kind of barely anything at all.

So the two games start the same. Hero finds girl getting attacked by forces of darkness, steps in and is killed. Girl brings them back to life, chaining them to the events of the story. Unlike 1, Zero does give the hero the option of not dying, but he’s the soldier so he gladly gives his life to the cause when it comes up. Also unlike 1, the girl who revives is a lot more active in the plot. Mimel gains amnesia for reviving Sieghart and that ruins the plans of the forces of light who were going to use her to awaken Calinou, the Larva of Blacksmithing to create weapons to defeat the forces of darkness. A physical key was also needed, so off your party goes to get the ingredients while hoping Mimel regains her power and memories. So basically, gather items to craft a thing for Calinou, which is the entire plot of Generation 4 of Agarest 1. They even have one of the heroines deal with a betrayal in her village(again, one of gen 4’s few plot points), which is also the only non find item story event to happen until the end of Gen 1 and the only plot important heroine event. There is some setup for when the story gets going, but really Gen 1 could almost be summarized(or removed) and I feel like you wouldn’t miss anything.

Then gen 2 hits, and it’s finally an actual story. It gets dark and finally feels like a war story of heroes and gods, for the first time in the series for me. It sets up Summerill, the villain of Agarest 1. Reveals where he got his army, where Leo’s sword comes from, and why neutral is the true route in Agarest 1. Thanks to using more cutscenes using the units instead of the talking portraits you get some actual action and can see some of the brutality of the enemy. Compared to Agarest 1, Zero actually feels like a war story with villains worth hating. Maybe it’s because of the smaller and more focused cast, but the main group feels more alive as well. Like there is a less feeling of everyone speaking for the sake of getting their face on the screen then in 1.

One new edition is vacation time. At points in the story you can go to a town and see events with the characters on a point system. These are way to short to do anything meaningful with, and are really just to adjust affection levels and unlock a few side things. It’s a bit closer to what I wish the series had more of, less dungeon and more romance. That’s not what Agarest really is, but it is what sold me on the series in the first place.

So is Zero worth playing without playing 1? Sure. Zero actually has a NG+(or save transfer from 1) mode called Digest mode where the game is on the highest difficulty, but you get Agarest 1’s main plot beats and bosses that unlock as you progress through Zero. So outside of the heroine events and good/dark endings, Zero contains all the important things from 1, letting Zero’s plot get its pay off without people needing to invest in the hundred hour RPG that is Agarest 1. Honestly I doubt I’ll ever touch Agarest 1 again now that I have a save ready to go right into Digest mode. Not that I replay things often in the first place, but still… I don’t want to play 1 ever again and Zero makes that easy.

Just to be specific, the only things Zero is missing from 1 is the heroine events from gen 5, the light/dark endings, the non first girl marriage events from each generation, and the ending is kind of removed/changed. There’s actually more story in the heroes of previous generations and their wives talking to gen 5’s cast at each continent as you go back to fight the Gods. It kind of evens out content wise.

Gameplay-4

Honestly, it’s the small changes that make Zero better then 1. Having an actual character creation process, a tutorial, and a proper bestiary go a long way to make the game feel more inviting. Animated character art makes the scenes feel less bland, and having a more focused cast makes the plot more connected.

A few other interesting decisions are making dungeons node based instead of actual dungeons, which makes grinding nodes faster and has a way lower chance of you getting to a boss fight with next to no health or items but making dungeons take longer. Making breaking an item take longer. Not letting you smith or create skills until you progress a bit into the game, but you can buy the books to make those things right away. A big one is that the free dlc and import stuff is way weaker then the stuff the original game gave you, so the two games starts feel very different. Zero actually has battles take a bit, but enemies do no damage until around the halfway point cause the armor is so good, while in 1 enemies do fine but you kill them in one hit with the 2 or 3 characters with good weapons.

Resources also feel less in Zero, mainly gold and TP needed to keep up with crafting weapons so you actually need to pick and choose for a while on what you make. Also, the cgs in Zero take a while to start showing up at all. It takes around 4-5 hours of playing to finally get your first cg, compared to the 2-3 in the first hour in the original game. It’s shorter overall but the game can feel more wall like with waiting for things to happen or getting resources.

Also, I did the monster weapons in this game as kind of a sendoff after everything else was done, man that was annoying. It’s the same nonsense from crafting weapons where you need to go grab these two to make this thing then another monster to make this final one to get a single weapon. Around 20 monster weapons can only be gotten via fusing other monsters to trade the finished product, and around half of those monsters need other fused monsters to be able to make. There’s 50+ weapons just for monsters, that can only be gotten from trading monsters in. The only thing that’s better then the crafting system is the lack of a fail to fuse mechanic, which is still the stupidest idea the series has.

Lewd-4

The cgs are actually a big change to, as the artist figured out how to make horny cgs with this art style. A big change is the way cgs are handled. Just like in Agarest 1, each heroine gets a single cg event and their bridal cg and not much else. Unlike the first game, Zero has each of their event cgs have three versions. Basically the more the heroine likes you, the less clothes or more barely clothed bodies will be in the cg. I think the first heroine cgs from both games gives the best impression, since they are basically the same event. Both are massages being given by another heroine, but one’s fails to be lewd at all despite the one getting massaged being topless. The angle and look of the skin just doesn’t give a lewd vibe at all. It doesn’t help that the elf in 1 is actively angry in that cg, while the girl in Zero is feeling good and has given up resisting the pleasure of the massage of the other girl. Also Zero just shows more skin at better angles and isn’t as half assed when it comes to this stuff. There is less of it, but the quality just feels higher so I think it works.

It also includes basically the entire cg set from the first game. I think it has every single one. Even the ones added to later releases like Noah’s top falling off.

Verdict

While I think Zero is the better game, it’s still bad. Shorter doesn’t fix all the issues and honestly the end game just dragged on and on. Crafting felt far more painful to. This might have actually been my own fault in how I played this in basically quota’s, but the game was a chore.

After the main game ended nothing else was really fun or interesting. I had all the cgs and I wasn’t going to reread Agarest 1 again. I also hate all the jokey dialogue in the Boundary Plane endgame area. The series tries to hard to be serious outside the sexy stuff for slapstick to work well outside of the ecchi. Ecchi’s better though. Actual story is better, though I wish more happened in gen 1 that wasn’t an item search.

PC save for Agarest -Generations of War Zero-

U.S. PS3 save for Agarest Zero

Saves to each vacation point and to the generation split, and one to end game. These go in order to earliest to end game. The first save is the actual 100%, full picture book aka bestiary, item list, and cgs. Plus the replay galleries.

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 4/10 Story: 5/10

Completion:

Titles are the real killer, as you have to go around and refind enemies to get kill counts and drop counts. Crafting is a huge pain to, as basically every mid game recipe requires the early elemental weapons you can’t buy. It’s really hard to explain exactly how annoying crafting is in this game. It’s a huge part in why I don’t care for these systems.

Anyway, use a save from 1 and play in the hardest difficulty. Follow a true end guide to get everything, then farm titles. You actually need all weapons and items to get all the cgs, except monster weapons and active skills which I grabbed anyway. Also got everyone to level 50 for all movesets possible.

Agarest 2

Agarest Mariage

The PSP game, which is probably the most true to what I wanted from the Agarest series. Unlike the other three games, this one actually admits who the mom is in the second generation and even has content after you pick the wife in gen 1 to hammer in the relationship. It only has those two generations, but even those little changes made if feel like who I picked meant something instead of just being a palette swap with stat changes.

As for the game itself, it’s a turn based RPG with role based combat. Similar to like a job system, your party of always four characters is split into four combat roles. Attacker, Supporter, Healer and Defender with every character learning slightly different moves within any role. The system is very important, because even in the easiest difficulty this is probably the most difficult Agarest game. Unlike the others which just needed a silly strategy and ended up being pretty easy once you know the rules, this one limits character growth to such a degree every boss ends up being part puzzle and part actual roadblock where you need to actually look at your tools. Then the next boss will destroy that strategy so you need a new one. When the portable throw away game is probably your best designed, I think your studio might have a problem.

So the story is also a bit different. Instead of the protag dying and getting the whole promised soul thing, the passing on of souls is something that’s been happening for generations, with main character 1 just being the newest hero in the line. With all the sacrifices and issues killing one man and three women every twenty years brings. That’s not to say the game is serious, its often more a comedy with drama at points, as it is technically just a story about the lineage of hero’s killing the demon lord. It just has some interesting dark topics that hang at the back of the story, and the NG+ dungeon even gives you some snippets of past hero’s and their girls. Up to at least 500 existed according to the numbering in the dungeon.

Fanservice wise, this blows the rest of the series out of the water. A lot of that is the change in design, going for a more moe large breasted girls instead of the high fantasy designs the rest of the game’s have. Just like in two, the girls wobble and jiggle all over the place and the game even has the usual massage minigame that all PSP/Vita ecchi games basically required. The only weak point the game has here is that you can’t marry any of the side heroines at the end(gen 2 has its own three maidens instead, though you do get a harem option), and the number of cgs is pretty low do to the length of the game and number of characters.

Honestly, Mariage(yes, it is misspelled on purpose) is the best of the series and the fact its the last game we got over here is fine by me. The entire series only improved with each game honestly.

PC save for Agarest Mariage

Save 1 has every cg and ending unlocked, all cosmetic panty armor owned. Saves 2-4 are set up for endings, honeymoons and general scenes with the girls, allowing you to see the full relationship without the game’s main story getting in the way. Included is a file with a better description of what each save is for.

Gameplay: 7/10 Eroticness: 7/10 Story: 6/10

Completion: What it took-

Unlike the other games, you need to see each cg to get it in the gallery, along with the endings. So 4 endings per gender means 8 runs minimum. Plus both ending versions don’t get put into the gallery, so I need a save that can get either true or normal ending and any of the girls for each gender.

This was a grind. After the first run you have the stats to rush through the game, but you also will want to do the bonus dungeon each run. Doing that skips the need to grind affection for the girl of your choice on that run. The bonus dungeon, even when you know exactly where to go, is a slog being the longest dungeon in the game. After that it was thinking saves through.