Upcoming Game: Nostalgia

Nostalgia - A Fresh Take on DS RPGs

Also known as Winds of Nostalgio in Japan, Another fresh new RPG coming to the DS developed by Matrix Software (Final Fantasy III and IV DS, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years), Nostalgia is an RPG said to be created by “veterans” of designers from various development crews. The crews includes staff key members behind great RPG classics, such as Sakura Taisen, Grandia, and Tengai Makyo.

Set in the 19th steampunk century, the player will take control of the main character Eddy, supposedly a son of the legendary English adventurers, and Eddy, with his airship crews; sets off London and takes on an adventure across the globe. The interesting recurring theme that will be present in this game is the use of airships, where Eddy, our ain character, will travel across the globe with a completely customizable aircraft that can also come into play during battles, as the addition of fighting using the normal cast of characters.

Real World Locations and Time Settings

As opposed to many RPG series that created its own world different than our own, Nostalgia took place in our world, the world we live in. Except it was the 19th century, and the theme of this game is steampunk; which means while we will see the wonders of the world during the time where steam engine reigns, expect to see some complicated machinaries such as computers, robots, and other gadgets that you might not expect to see.

As said earlier, Nostalgia took place in our world during the 19th century, and while our characters are travelling, we will arrive at locations that might be familiar to us. The official site of Nostalgia has lists of the cities we will explore during the course of the game, and those listed on the website might not be all. There might still be some unannounced place to explore.

Until now, here are the cities that we will explore in the game already confirmed:

• London
• New York
• Cairo
• Cape Town
• St. Petersburg
• Amazon Jungle
• Delhi
• Tokyo
• Mt. Ararat

There is still one more, which is the only fictional place announced in-game, which is Tower of Babel. Knowing that Tower of Babel’s location hasn’t been confirmed and verified yet, and yet this game added Tower of Babel, except the tower to be a key element in game.

Images

Gameplay and Graphics

There is actually nothing special about the graphics used for Nostalgia. If you have played the DS remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV, you will see the similarity between this and them–the game is made with the same graphics engine, except that it took to Final Fantasy III super-deformed characters more compared to Final Fantasy IV’s realistic character build. This results in also the same cinematics battle used. The second screenshots above showed us the battle system for Nostalgia–third person-perspective, with the player watching behind the party, with the enemies in-front. The background used is also similar to Final Fantasy III, too. Even the first screenshot showed the attacking phase, where the font used and the camera angle used is similar to Final Fantasy III.

Yet Nostalgia is something new and different. The third screenshot showed the “airship battle” that you will constantly face while playing Nostalgia. Like your main cast of characters, airship–through upgrades and new engines, can level up too while fighting battles. From the screenshots, it seems that through airship battles, our main characters will also be included in the battle in some way, from the look of it, it seems like the main party can be used as supporting characters to defeat your enemies.

From the looks of it, Nostalgia seems to be a unique game, even though the graphics used by Matrix Software just screams Final Fantasy. This game in itself might be pressured by how it must throw away the image of “Final Fantasy remakes” showed by the engine graphics used by Matrix Software. Knowing the interesting choice of settings and interesting addition to normal RPG games, it will be interesting to see how well this game would perform; when it is released later on the US market on September 2009.