I want to start with the things I enjoyed about Demonschool, because there is genuinely a lot to enjoy here. The core conceit of the position-focused tactics game is very strong, and the par-based challenges for each of them provide a great incentive to learn the ins and outs of the system. I never got tired of doing the fights, and there were more than a few very compelling challenges among them. I had fun tweaking builds, optimizing strategies, and iterating on challenges to get all the A ranks I could.

The visual design is also consistently stellar. The character portraits are fun and expressive and the each character has a strong visual design that does a lot to clarify their identity. The area visuals are even better; every room is an appealing diorama without ever being obtrusive. The rare cases where the game switches camera angle are very effective at producing drama.

The writing is also pretty good when it works, although I'll echo other complaints I've heard that it's not at all believable as 1999 (they mention vaping numerous times—the first commercial vape was released in 2003!) and that the notional college is very clearly structured as a high school. But I enjoyed many of the gags and I appreciated those of the character quests that had room to breathe.

Which brings me to my first major complaint: there are way too many characters. Even ten playable characters with full S-link quests would feel like quite a full cast, and there are half again as many as that. The result is that the substantial majority of the cast is made up of one-note caricatures with no real arc or chemistry with other characters. It's very clear who the core cast is—Faye, Namako, Knute, and Destin, and to a secondary degree Kestrel and Primrose because you interact with them throughout the game—but even they don't get as much development as they need because they're crowded out by largely trivial and uninteresting interactions with other characters who just, by the relentless logic of space, matter less.

The overstuffing of characters appears in the mechanical space too, especially in conjunction with the unfortunate reality that the player's build options just aren't balanced all that well. Three classes are better than all the others: Brawlers and Phasers because they can hit multiple units at once, and Modifiers because they increase other units' damage outputs (which is of course multiplicative with Brawlers and Phasers). A few other units have some situational use especially in battles where enemies aren't in lines that can be multi-hit; most of them you'd simply never use unless you were forced to. What makes this all the more strange is that Brawlers, Phasers, and Modifiers are the first three classes you get access to, so the arc of the game is endlessly recruiting teammates only for them to be almost universally irrelevant to the core mechanics of the game.

Abilities are similarly spiky in their quality, with those that boost damage forming the tip of the spike and a handful of others near the top while the vast majority are doomed to be unplayed or only slotted in because an ability position is free. The saddest thing is that this doesn't need to be the case; the combat system has so much room for new interesting movement options, mechanics that play with AP, and so on, especially for classes that are weak by the nature of their inability to multihit. But this potential is left untapped.

Finally, the game itself is just too big for what it is. It's dry, which I don't hold against it; dryness is common among text-heavy games, and isn't intrinsically a flaw. But this game runs for so many weeks, and they involve so much walking around the island reading tiny little bits dialog if you're trying to interact with everyone, that it starts to seriously drag about two thirds of the way in. By the end, despite still enjoying the mechanics, I was beyond ready for the game to be over. Which is a sad note to leave it on, because I did really enjoy a lot of it.

Pretty solid satire combine with pretty solid mechanics to make this a pretty solid game! I hit novice with the Medic, the Whale, the Robot, the Streamer, and the Wizard, in that order; of those, the Whale and the Streamer were my solid favorites, and also the easiest by a fair margin. I think that speaks to an issue in the design: diving deep into the mechanics to try to really squeeze every Q you can out of them is often an exercise in frustration, as the fine mechanical details of how the game processes effects highly unclear but also highly important. It really feels like the endgame is missing some sort of unlockable means of testing out builds without running a full match (which can last minutes even at turbo speed), and some classes—the Robot and the Wizard in particular—sorely miss the ability to run through a simulator step-by-step.

The result of this isn't that the game is too hard in and of itself, but rather that the endgame for these characters relies too heavily on items. There are stacks of items you can get for any class that gets you the power (or just the variance) to get into Novice even with a relatively unoptimized build, and once you get into corrupted items you can just go completely haywire. Not to say that's not fun, but it is a bit disappointing to feel like you're pulling the "reroll shop" lever over and over again hoping for the same result as the end to any tricky run.

Even knowing Matsuno's reputation and having played Tactics Advance 1 & 2 as a teen, I was still shocked by how good the writing was in this game. It's a full-fledged and mature political fantasy story, and while there are a few repetitive beats that arise from mechanical pressures—every confrontation with the latest and greatest threat goes much the same way, and the "wow Ramza you were right all along" moments get stale after the third time—it's still miles better than most fantasy games, and easily competitive with the depth of political machinations and character of fantasy novels.

The mechanical core of the game is also extremely solid: the game uses verticality and the economy of motion impressively well for its era, and the job system is an excellent fit for the tactics structure, with each job providing its own distinctive feel and adding important options to the palette of builds the player may want to create. Only two (thief and geomancer) ended up feeling purely like stepping stones to me without much redeeming value in their own abilities; the rest all had their purpose.

The encounter design shows its age a bit more, though. The game doesn't seem to have a great understanding of how to scale up difficulty in interesting ways; many encounters are far too easy, with all randoms and most story missions being almost trivial even on Tactician difficulty. When it does dial up the difficulty, it does so hamfistedly, by making enemies immune-by-fiat to various negative status effects and giving them tremendous speed and damage so that they wipe a bunch of the party with little room for interaction.

While a small amount of this can be interesting as a puzzle, in large doses it constrains the possibility space of the game. What makes a build-centric game like this interesting is that there are a variety of ways to approach the core problems of eliminating enemies and keeping your units alive. But a major section of defensive options is status effects, and making them unavailable closes off the possibility of especially more magic-focused builds. This is particularly painful in the notorious Wiegraf fight in which only Ramza is available. If his build doesn't have enough health—which is to say, if he's a caster—you are simply out of luck.

The excitement of designing builds also peters out in the late game, especially with the deluge of new NPCs with unique jobs in Chapter 4. My non-story units, whose builds are inherently the most interesting because they provide the most flexibility, mostly fell behind in power—all except my Arithmancer who was excellent throughout. And the NPCs, being scaled up to near Ramza's level on recruitment, never had a chance to develop enough JP to really make anything interesting out of them in their own right.

Still, these are quibbles with the design of a game that pioneered this style of three-dimensional tactics, and by and large did an excellent job of it. For all the difficulty was a bumpy road, when it was effectively dialed in I had a marvelous time trying out different team compositions and iterating on strategies. And planning out my characters' builds was lots of fun, even if they were eventually eclipsed by NPCs. I'm glad I finally got around to this game, and that I can now say I've played the full trilogy.