Agarest: Generations of War

I went in expecting a throwaway JRPG port and came out three hours later still theorycrafting which bride to pick at the end of Generation 1. That tension between "is this actually clever?" and "am I just grinding again?" never fully resolves, but it pulls you back anyway. The core loop is a grid-based tactical SRPG where you move party members across a battlefield and chain them together through what the game calls Extended Areas - position allies correctly and you unlock combination attacks that multiply your action points and damage output. Getting Leonhardt's AP to snowball past 9 per turn by the end of Generation 1 by stacking the Energy Willpower and overlapping extended zones feels genuinely satisfying in a spreadsheet-optimizer way. Extra Skills, Special Arts, and Over Kills add further layers to what looks at first like a simple turn-based scrap. The alchemy system can forge powerful new weapons - or misfire into a Smithing Accident and produce something useless, which is either charming or infuriating depending on your mood. The headline mechanic is Soul Breed: across five full generations of story, each led by a different male protagonist starting with Leonhardt, you build affinity with three female party members and marry one at the end of each generation's arc. Your choice, and the strength of that relationship, directly shapes the next protagonist's stat growth, class tendencies, and even appearance. Romance a rogue-type and your son wields daggers and wears red armor; choose a different race and inherited traits shift accordingly. It sounds gimmicky but it creates genuine multi-playthrough incentive - you will not see every character build in a single run, and the horoscope system lets you peek at a child's projected attributes before committing. That is exactly the kind of long-tail decision-making that keeps me in a game past the hundred-hour mark. Here is where I have to be straight with you, though. The battle count is punishing. Each of the five generations packs 60 to 80 unavoidable fights, and dungeon crawls pile on more on top of that. Most battles take ten minutes or longer. The story delivery is pure visual novel - static 2D portraits sliding across a screen with all-Japanese voice acting and English subtitles - and the between-battle pacing is slow enough that the plot can feel like a distant reward for surviving the grind. The dating-sim segments sit in an awkward middle ground: not explicit enough to feel bold, not tame enough to feel comfortable, and reviewers across the board have flagged this tonal confusion. The tutorial also leaves a lot unexplained; community-written guides on Steam fill gaps the game itself never does. For the right player - someone who has 100-plus hours to sink, tolerates or enjoys grinding for stat optimization, and wants a SRPG with a structural hook that most of the genre never attempts - this is a quietly interesting package. Steam users sit at 71% positive across well over 1,600 reviews, which accurately reflects a game that genuinely delivers for its target audience while doing almost nothing to court anyone outside it. If you bounced off Disgaea because the grind felt unmoored from consequence, Soul Breed gives that grind meaning. If you bounced off Disgaea because it was just too long, no pep talk from me will fix that here. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Unsupported. Playable on Linux with some workarounds. Based on 34 ProtonDB community reports.

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