NIS America continues the magic with Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, a game best described as an amalgamation of Shining Force and the Disgaea series. While the game does share some elements with that game series (namely its overall art style), its focus is more on strategy and less on role-playing. For one, there are no weapons, armor or accessories to equip, there's no Dark Assembly to deal with and no geo system to manipulate. And while there's plenty of interesting heroes and classes to make use of, the game is more of a "team" effort. We'll get to that in a minute, but first a little bit of the back story is in order.

While Soul Nomad is about the turbulent history of a world (Prodesta) and the gods that manipulate it for their own glory (or perhaps their own folly), the main focus of the story is a foul mouthed entity called Gig. Gig is pure evil and a force that, in former times, helped destroy the world with colossal entities he created called the World Eaters. As their former master Gig directed their destructive paths, commanding them to burn cities, decimate entire mountains and generally make the populace run in unadulterated terror.

I don't want to unravel the great story in Soul Nomad, but history says that Gig ends up being defeated and sealed inside a sword by a mysteriously powerful woman named Lady Lanya. The sword is put away, hidden inside a village the world has forgotten existed along with several promising children whose unique skills will ultimately save the world. As the game opens players meet Gig, sealed inside the sword and released - only to be connected to a young boy (or girl - your choice) with no name. It is here that the adventure begins and we learn that, although Gig makes Disgaea protagonists like Leharl and Etna look like Christmas Salvation Army bell ringers, there's still a little bit of humanity left in him. That's the real story of Soul Nomad and there's seems to be plenty of twists and turns in the plot that most won't see coming.

While the story is interesting, it's not the marquee feature of Soul Nomad. This game is squad-based strategy cleverly disguised as role-playing. In the game you use dimensional spaces called rooms, which you can store "units in" just like in a real-time strategy game. These squads can be comprised of whatever you like and rooms can hold anywhere from four to nine spaces. Most rooms also have a decor attached to them. Decor in Soul Nomad functions just like armor or weapons does because it gives you various bonuses that are helpful (or even harmful) out on the battlefield. While these rooms have a limited number of permanent decors attached to them, you can also collect or purchase one-time use decors that you can put on before a major battle. These are wonderful because they can provide a lot of useful buffs to all your units, a certain class or a certain position in the room it is attached to.

Rooms are comprised of squares (three to a row maximum) that are either in the front, middle or back and each position affects what attack each unit will use when the time comes. Positioning your units the right way is ultra important - you don't want a mage doing a melee attack when he could be using an amazing wall of fire spell on an entire line of enemies and you wouldn't want your cleric healing one person when he has the potential to heal everyone. Mixing your group up with the right kind of front, middle and rear positions can create an unstoppable force that is hard to kill. The whole point of it is that you decide what formations to put your group in, what room style to use and what decors to equip. It also should be noted that each unit comes equipped with a move for each position in the room, though some only work in the front or middle (like knights who don't tend to have a long range attacks).

Unlike a lot of NIS America's other games, Soul Nomad lets you create units once you have encountered them on the battlefield. There's a nice mix of traditional classes, along with a ton of unique and powerful monsters. These include everything from archers and mages, to griffins and gun toting angels. Not all of these classes are great but there's a good mix depending on what kind of room you are trying to create.

Once you've set up your rooms (which you access on the world map, not unlike Final Fantasy Tactics), you can head out to take on the storyline-driven battles or you can jump into your rooms to upgrade them. Whatever combat you take on, the basic structure is that your main character lands on some type of battlefield featuring different kinds of terrain like grass, mountains, town square, desert, etc. From this battlefield you'll summon the other rooms you have put together in your personal space. Summoning these rooms cost money unless you are in inside a room - in which case it costs nothing. From this point on you'll maneuver your groups around the battlefield, engage the enemy in turn-based fashion and destroy them all. The only requirement is that you destroy all the enemy units and keep the main hero alive.

As you build up momentum you'll be able to use special attacks that do massive amounts of damage. Every group leader has one and depending on what units you have in a group, you get additional power attacks that target a whole group or a leader for quick kills.