I've started playing Jeanne d'Arc on the PSP as an experiment. I grew up loving to play on Game Boy Color, Advance, and Nintendo DS, but I had never put my hands on PlayStation's portable console. In 2025, I wanted to leave my Nintendo fan-boyism aside while also playing a tactical RPG, a genre I probably last played on the DS in Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift.
I normally avoid tactical RPGs because they tend to be long, slow, and repetitive. I barely finished Unicorn Overlord's demo because I hate spending several minutes setting up units only to later make a minor misplay that forces me to restart a long combat. I'm more of a Slay the Spire and Hades guy. But this time, I was also ok with being a little bored with a game if I thought I'd feel accomplished at the end.
In this attempt to detach myself from this self-imposed "I hate TRPGs" label, I decided that Jeanne d'Arc was worth a try.
But I was skeptical. Jeanne d'Arc has an 87 Metacritic score and ranks as the 11th-best reviewed PSP game ever, but it never got a sequel or remake. The game was only ported to PS4 and PS5 in July 2024, 17 years after its Western release. If it was that good, how did it not become a franchise like Tactics Ogre or Disgaea?
Apparently, Jeanne d'Arc didn't drive enough sales. It placed 190th on Japan's best-selling games list of 2006, behind other TRPGs like Disgaea 2 (100th) and Super Robot Taisen MX Portable (166th). Its developer, Level-5, ended up making other more successful franchises like Professor Layton, Ni No Kuni, and Inazuma Eleven.
What still makes Jeanne d'Arc a gem is how it mixes things up just when it's about to get boring.
Breaking the cycle
The game starts off slow with a few tutorial battles, which is fine. It's easy to learn its rock-paper-scissors triangle of weaknesses in Stella, Luna, and Sol spirits. As characters join your roster, you also learn more about their specific roles, like being a healer, a mage, or a situational pick for certain battles.
Still, I expected Jeanne d'Arc to fall into the boring TRPG cycle: check the battlefield, place your units, move them around, and kill all the monsters. While this is the core of the game, the shifting objectives and varied maps kept it from getting stale.
In most battles, you're expected to wipe the board. That’s standard and nearly unavoidable in tactical RPGs. But a few times, Jeanne d'Arc forces you to flee the battle without letting any characters die, like getting into the boats at the end of the canal in the "Barging into Paris" story quest. Other times, it lets you ignore all the trash mobs and focus on killing a specific enemy, like defeating Slinker in the "Brother Richard" mission. The most interesting tasks, though, come in the side quests—which I almost skipped because I usually avoid them. In Castle Vilneaux, I had to lure two powerful pet-dragons back into their owner’s cage without killing them or letting my team get wiped, and they had devastating area spells. In another quest, I fought 10 waves of increasingly tougher enemies in a single map in a colosseum.
Maps that add depth
The objective diversity in Jeanne d'Arc gets even better with the map diversity. No map was solved from the beginning.
In Langles Tunnel, I was stuck in a sewer with a massive golem barreling toward me. I couldn’t escape or outrun it, so the only solution was to buff up beforehand and carefully position my units so the golem wouldn’t crush my backline. In Raillemont, I had to use the elusive rogue Colet to build bridges across split rooftops to reach a boss, all while my team was scattered across the area. Essentially, Jeanne d'Arc constantly forced me to use different units to solve different maps, and that ended up being fun while also rewarding me with great gear to help in the main story.
Even standard “kill all enemies” maps change things up with their layout. Some maps are wide open fields, but others are filled with pillars and walls that block ranged attacks, chokepoints that only two characters can pass through at once, or branching paths that force you to split your party to deal with multiple threats at once.
These map and objective changes are what kept Jeanne d'Arc from ever getting boring, something I didn’t expect from a standalone TRPG. And while those are the two biggest reasons it breaks the genre’s usual cycle, it also features great character flexibility. Your characters’ skills are items you can equip and swap out before each mission.
You can also think of Jeanne d'Arc as anime and play it for the plot. A big part of the game's story is made of anime cutscenes, which impressed me for a 2006 game. You can watch the story on YouTube if you want.
Jeanne d'Arc, a game I thought I'd never enjoy, became one that I played for over 30 hours during several weeks, and that made me want to play more tactical RPGs. Please drop a comment with some of your best recommendations for similar TRPGs!
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