Tenshi no Uta: Prayer of the White Wings

The third game and the only one with an english fan patch. Does it live up to the hype of the first 2 games? nope. Is it good on its own? only a little bit.

First of all, I found the world incredibly disappointing because it lacked the celtic atmosphere and worldbuilding that the first two games had that made it feel magical. This world is a very generic rpg world. Speaking of generic, it feels like everything this game does is a typical rpg trope with no love put into them. None of the characters feel like people. The romance feels like its barely there. There's barely any dialogue to help make the characters feel real. As someone who greatly enjoyed the first one for its world and the second one for its characters, I felt extremely disappointed. This game was made by wolf team instead of riot who did the first 2 games so it makes sense it feels different. But god it feels like a shell of TnU. Generic rpg with the tenshi no uta name.

The combat system is the typical jrpg AMID of the time but has a parley system where you can talk with monsters to buy items and get exp similar to shin megami tensei but not nearly as intricate. In fact it feels almost tacked on with how so many monsters just refuse to speak to you at all. There's a parley level that you need to keep up to talk to higher level monsters but you only gain 1 or 2 parley exp from talking to monsters. And the time it takes to talk to them takes longer than killing them. Feels like a waste of time.

Speaking of the battle system, the balancing in this game is so odd. I can't even say it makes me mad it just puzzles me. Enemies always deal very little damage with attacks but cast spells that do a bunch of damage. Sometimes theres 7 caster enemies in 1 encounter that can obliterate you in 1 turn if youre unlucky. The exp distribution is odd cause small fry monsters give the same exp as big damage dealing monsters. So an encounter with 3 big monsters despite being way harder, gives less exp than an encounter with 6 or 7 little guys. Your characters and enemies also miss attacks so often where sometimes I went a turn where no hits of mine or theirs connected. Furthermore, the game discourages any sort of strategy other than dealing the most damage asap. at the end of the game when everyone has the best weapons (of which you get all of them through main plot) theres no reason to use spells cause you deal more damage with regular attacks even if its a spellcaster character. At least there's no penalty for running cause if you fail you just start the fight as normal and dont lose a turn. Bosses are also way easier than regular encounters. I dont really know why the game is like this the music is fine, the Motoi Sakuraba tracks are neat I think. But I really didn't enjoy most of the town themes.

All in all, disappointing experience as a fan of the first 2 games but it's probably fine if you dont have high enough expectations. I'm glad it at least kept the memo section in the menu to keep track of where your next objective is. I hope someone translates 1 and 2 someday cause it'd be a shame if the only game most people can play is the worst one.