GrimGrimoire OnceMore is a remaster of VanillaWare’s GrimGrimoire, which released all the way back in 2007 for the PS2. It follows Lillet Blan, named after a French wine, a new student at the wizarding school Tower of Silver Star. After her first few days, where she learns the ins and outs of summoning creatures and using them in battles, she’s confronted with a dark conspiracy and thrown into a Groundhog Day-style time loop. What ensues is an intriguing adventure that has Lillet solving mysteries and endeavoring not only to take down the great evil but to do so without letting a single one of her friends or teachers die in the process.
Gameplay consists of real-time strategy combat on vertical planes. Your units? Classic fantasy monsters you gradually unlock through the story. These units have general and specific strengths and weaknesses, and it’s from them that strategy in GrimGrimoire is born. Some units are responsible for gathering mana, your principal resource, some are bruisers, and some are utilitarian support monsters. With upgrades, units can take on multiple roles, such as healing or becoming a tactical nuke, but these upgrades are costly and temporary, which adds another layer of strategy to the proceedings.
The game throws a lot at you at once. There are different unit types, grimoires, runes, talismans, and crystals - it can all be a bit overwhelming to take in. Thankfully, the game eases you into the difficulty. But as the game gets more challenging, it also gets more thoughtful about countering your strategies. You’ll learn early on that there are two very effective strategies - to summon giant monsters that can take on entire armies, like dragons, or to summon armies so large that your foe cannot cope.
The enemy will start to employ sleep-inducing grimalkin, which take your dragons out of the equation entirely and make them sitting ducks, or homunculi, whose area-of-effect attacks will wreak havoc on your clustered hordes. This forces you to develop novel, practical strategies that don’t rely on brute force, instead making you think about the strengths and weaknesses of the units you have at your disposal.
Eventually, it clicks. You begin to refine your strategies and get quicker at responding on the fly to new developments. There’s something incredibly satisfying about being confronted with a large group of enemy units and being able to pull off a devastating counterattack. This is accentuated by the remaster’s addition of skill trees, which allow you to focus on which units or general unit types you want to upgrade. Upgrades are bought with coins, which are limited by your progress in the game, but you’re afforded unlimited repsecs, which encourages being flexible with your strategies and fine-tuning your upgrade choices to each individual level. All in all, GrimGrimoire is a brilliant example of a well-tuned combat system that evokes creativity and forces experimentation. When things go wrong, you can see precisely why, and thanks to the handy speedup function, it doesn’t take long until you’re trying again with a more refined angle.
On the flip side, the game’s narrative is thin. The Groundhog Day cycle and various other twists are obvious from the very first hint dropped, and the cutscenes are so short that the game seems to move a mile a minute, despite taking place over 25 days total - the pacing is off, to be sure.
That said, the characters themselves are well-constructed. They are distinctive both in design and personality, and having them all named after alcoholic drinks is a fun element to spot. There’s a surprising amount of depth to them, considering they get reset every five days, and it only takes a few cycles to understand the odd dynamics flying about the school. Opalneria and Advocat are the standouts - being more compelling potential villains than the actual villains of the piece, the evil sorcerer Calvaros and the devil he bargained with.
I appreciate how the narrative plays around with the time loop element. Lillet’s incredibly quick mastery of runes is explained away as her having magical training before attending the school, something the headmaster doesn’t seem to believe, but she gets better at lying as time goes on and she ends up having to explain her skills over and over again, leading to some humorous moments that stick out.
The biggest drawback to the game is that it feels a bit repetitive, and I’m not just talking about the time loop aspect. Each level has the exact same background, featuring the school’s hallways in different arrangements to force your units into bottlenecks or specific routes. It makes sense in-universe but is still a little dull to the eyes. More than this, most levels involve sweeping through the level to destroy the enemy’s runes. The few that don’t have this objective can be cheesed by, yes, destroying the enemy’s runes anyway. Thankfully, the remaster seems to recognise this flaw of the original and adds a large number of Trial stages, which push the combat system to its limits. These behave more like puzzles with particular solutions, requiring a deeper knowledge of the game’s systems and rewarding you with more coins for upgrades. They’re not required to beat the game, but they’re worth exploring purely for the gameplay variety - tackling the main story alone can feel like a chore.
Overall, GrimGrimoire OnceMore is an engaging experience. The battle system is its strongest feature, and is extremely satisfying to play around with. Developing your own personal strategies and comparing them with other players is one of those joyous moments you won’t forget in a hurry. Despite the mediocre storyline and all the repetition you’re forced to endure, the game is well worth checking out if you’re a fan of quirky and unique RTS games.
Score: 3.5/5. A game code was provided by the publisher.