Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia: 50 clicks before you get to a battle

I picked up Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia partly because their new game, Brigandine Abyss is releasing this month and I had somehow completely missed this revival of the old PlayStation game when it released back in 2020. On paper, it sounded like exactly the sort of thing I should enjoy: six nations fighting over an entire continent, a huge roster of Rune Knights, armies of monsters, tactical hex-based battles and enough character art to make the whole thing look far more expensive than I expected.

And visually, Runersia is immediately eye-catching. The character artwork and designs are top notch, everyone is distinctive, the presentation is lavish, and having all this dialogue fully voiced gives the enormous cast far more presence than a game like this strictly needed. Even before you understand who everyone is, the artwork does a tremendous amount of work selling the idea that these are six actual nations with their own histories, personalities and conflicts.

Unfortunately, someone apparently decided that reviving a game from the PlayStation era also meant dragging every fucking design habit that should have stayed there into 2020.

Twenty years of UI design apparently never happened:

So much of actually operating Runersia feels archaic. There are menus inside menus, confirmations for minor actions, little animations for everything, banners constantly appearing, sound effects announcing things I have already watched happen and repetitive pieces of admin that somehow require far more input than the decision itself deserves.

Equipment is one of the easiest examples. There is a recommended equipment function, so the game already has a way to automatically decide what it thinks a unit should wear. Great. Now go through your army and press that button on every fucking unit individually.

Why?

If I want the recommended equipment, let me apply it to an army. Let me select multiple characters. Give me a management screen designed around the fact that this is a strategy RPG with a massive roster. Runersia instead repeatedly makes me perform the same mundane operation character by character, unit by unit and menu by menu.

That friction infects practically everything. Some animation plays, a banner appears, you acknowledge something, another screen opens, you select the next person and repeat it. Each interruption only wastes a little time, but an entire campaign is made up of thousands of these little interactions. Eventually it stops feeling like flavour and starts feeling like the interface itself is fighting you.

Did nobody actually sit down and play an entire campaign while paying attention to how much pointless input they were demanding from the player? UI/UX designers, hello?

Managing an army should involve decisions. Runersia far too often gives you repetitive admin instead.

Complexity cosplaying as depth:

Runersia is spectacular at looking complicated.

You have six nations. More than a hundred Rune Knights. Loads of monsters. Classes. Equipment. Elements. Terrain. Mana. Quests. Bases scattered across an entire continent. Tactical battles involving multiple commanders and their monster armies. On the surface, this thing looks enormous.

Spend some time with it and much of that apparent complexity starts collapsing.

The continental strategy layer is painfully thin. There is no meaningful diplomacy, political manoeuvring or relationship management between these supposedly distinct nations. You're not negotiating borders, forming temporary alliances or reacting to another country becoming too dangerous. Territories don't create much strategic identity through resources, infrastructure or local advantages either. For the most part, the six nations are differently illustrated opponents waiting for you to eventually remove them from the map.

Territory mainly matters because of where it sits and how many borders you need to defend. You move knights around, summon monsters, attack neighbouring bases and send spare people on quests. That's your grand continental war.

Plenty of strategy and SRPG games had already shown long before 2020 how much more could be done with faction relationships, army management, map control and battlefield deployment. Runersia didn't need to copy any particular game, but it had decades of design evolution available to learn from and somehow retained an astonishing amount of friction while doing very little to deepen the systems underneath it.

The tactical combat follows the same pattern. There is a large pile of mechanics, but the situations you're using them in rarely justify how cumbersome controlling the whole army becomes.

Now manually walk the entire army over there:

A typical battle lets you bring three Rune Knights, each commanding their own monsters. That can easily mean controlling ten to fifteen individual units.

That sounds brilliant until the battle begins and you realise that the first few turns are often dedicated to one of the most exhilarating tactical manoeuvres ever devised:

walking forward.

Select unit. Move unit. Select another unit. Move that unit. Select the next one. Move it. Again. Again. Again.

You can have this huge fantasy army with different monsters, classes, elements, spells and tactical roles, yet spend the opening several turns simply transporting everyone towards the place where the actual fighting is going to happen.

Where is the proper pre-deployment system? Where are useful formation tools? If positioning matters, let me arrange the fucking army before the battle. Making me manually move fifteen units across empty hexes adds time without adding an interesting decision.

This is one of Runersia's biggest recurring problems. The amount of input keeps exceeding the amount of strategy behind it.

Once the armies finally meet, there are enough systems to make the combat look intimidating. Terrain matters. Elemental affinities matter. Positioning matters. Units have different roles, monsters develop over time and losing a veteran monster can actually hurt. There are good ideas here.

The actual battles just aren't deep enough to support the amount of manual control they demand. Once I understood the basic priorities, the spectacle of commanding this enormous army wore off surprisingly quickly. I wasn't constantly adapting to new tactical problems. I was repeating variations of the same handful of sensible actions while manually shepherding a crowd of units around the map.

For a game so determined to make me control every individual piece, I expected far more from what those pieces could actually accomplish together.

One hundred characters, three seats:

The enormous roster has a similar problem.

Having more than a hundred named Rune Knights sounds incredible. Every nation is packed with characters, many of whom have excellent designs and full voice acting. It gives the impression that you're managing an actual country full of commanders with different roles in the wider war.

Then battles allow three Rune Knights.

Three.

Obviously you need defenders elsewhere and you can rotate different people around, but once I had established the groups I actually wanted fighting, a huge portion of the roster became spare bodies for the quest system.

And quests are barely anything. You select a character, send them away, wait and receive some gear or another reward. Your enormous pool of beautifully designed characters spends a significant part of the campaign functioning as an automated loot retrieval service.

There was so much room to make a roster this size actually matter. Different commanders could have been useful as governors, trainers, scouts, administrators or specialists tied to different territories and strategic functions. Even a much simpler system would have helped give the spare characters some purpose beyond disappearing into the quest menu until they return with another item.

Instead: send bloke on quest, receive loot.

The game keeps presenting scale without finding enough meaningful uses for it.

More units should not mean more clicking:

This is where I kept thinking about Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga.

It came out after Runersia, so this isn't some accusation that Runersia should have copied a game that didn't exist yet. It's simply a very useful comparison for how much better large-scale tactical control can feel when the designer understands that streamlining input and reducing strategy are not the same thing.

Symphony of War lets you manage plenty of individual characters while organising them into squads. Formation, unit composition, classes and equipment all feed into how those squads actually perform, so there is plenty to think about without needing to personally march every bastard across the battlefield one at a time.

Reducing fifteen repetitive movement commands into one meaningful squad movement doesn't suddenly make the game brainless. The decision was where the unit should go and how it should be composed in the first place. Once that choice is made, forcing extra clicks on top adds nothing.

Runersia keeps falling into that trap.

The same applies to equipment. The same applies to army management. The same applies to quests. There is so much clicking for the sake of clicking, and far too often the game seems to treat manual labour as proof that the player is doing something strategic.

Six nations with nothing to say to each other:

The story doesn't rescue any of this either.

The artwork gives the characters far more personality than the writing does. The actual dialogue and story are mostly generic anime fantasy material, perfectly functional but nothing I found particularly memorable. Characters explain their ideals, countries have their respective themes and everyone gets plenty of dialogue, but very little of it stuck with me.

More importantly, the narrative presentation makes the lack of actual politics even stranger.

You've gone to all this trouble creating six nations with rulers, knights, histories and competing identities, yet once the campaign starts they mainly exist as targets. The world gives you the appearance of a complicated continental conflict while the game systems offer almost nothing to make those relationships interesting.

There are no shifting alliances, temporary deals or political pressures changing how you approach another country. You conquer them because that's what you're here to do.

That also weakens the supposed replayability. Different rulers and conversations are one thing, but by the end of my first campaign I had already had more than enough of the actual conquest underneath them.

The problems show themselves early:

The most damning thing about Runersia is that I didn't need to finish the campaign to work any of this out.

Its problems became obvious surprisingly early. The menus were already irritating. Battles were already wasting turns on empty movement. The strategy layer was already revealing how little there was underneath it. The quest system was already mindless. The huge roster was already becoming something I had to administer more than something generating interesting choices.

I kept playing partly because I had bought the bloody thing and wanted to finish at least one campaign. Call it buyer's remorse with a victory condition.

As the campaign continued, there was no hidden layer waiting to suddenly justify all that friction. My country became bigger, my armies became stronger, there were more characters and territory to manage, and the amount of administration kept growing while the tension moved in the opposite direction.

Eventually I was simply forcing myself towards the end.