Despite its solid storyline, Magna Carta fumbles like Jack Tripper the moment any of the characters actually speak. With the exception of Calintz himself, the voice acting in Tears of Blood is absolutely horrendous. Ill-timed, badly-acted, and poorly cast, it's the worst example of videogame vocals since Last Alert in the TurboGrafix days. Granted, the sound team does try to hide this hiccup with a nice collection of musical tunes of the wind and string variety, but nothing can save your ears from the eventual speech-driven horrors that await them.Given the game's strong points in its presentation and visuals, you'd think that the bad audio could be overlooked... especially if the gameplay mechanics stood out above everything else. Unfortunately, the poorly-executed battle system doesn't stand out at all and runs into too many problems for its own good.
Here's the battle system... good luck.
To its credit, Magna Carta does try some interesting things with its concept. Sort of like a cross between Shadow Hearts's Judgment Wheel and the Deathblows from Xenogears, Tears of Blood employs a turn-based battle system that requires you to push the appropriate face buttons in succession. Three successful presses means a hit for your Trinity Circle and a hit on the enemy, and how well you time your sequence determines how much of an imitative boost you'll get. It's kind of neat in theory, but in practice it's way too complicated to be enjoyable for anyone but the most forgiving of RPG fans, and it gets worse the more you realize you have to keep up with.To start, you'll have to command three characters at once. But instead of being able to swap between members while the AI controls the remaining two (ala Star Ocean), players can only manipulate one fighter at a time -- effectively rendering that unused pair useless until their next turn. What's more, is that getting to that next turn can take forever when facing off against multiple enemies because of a lame initiative slider that almost always guarantees that your enemy will strike first before your next opportunity. That factor alone makes the battles drag on for much longer than they have to
Elemental Chi plays a key role in every battle.
Combat is further complicated by the fact that characters can only use attacks if the area they're inhabiting is blessed with a certain kind of Chi (there are eight types, with complementary and opposing effects for all). This means that if you use an attack too much it'll drain the entire chi of that type from the area and take away your offense until it regenerates. This can make the battles drag on even more, but at least party members can switch fighting styles so that they can drain chi of other types while they wait. There's also a whole Talisman and Lantern sub-strategy that players can use to power up area chi to higher levels, but like the combat system itself, it can get tedious and overly complicated.
