What's nice about this whole system of various elemental schools is that they all employ a basic rock/paper/scissors thing. A strength in one part begets a weakness in another and thus a balance -- no matter how powerful the enemy you summon (though the dragons obviously kick ass) -- is struck; Glamour beats Necromancy beats Sorcery beats Alchemy, and all the elements are weak to the element before them. That's not to say each discipline doesn't have their own strengths; summoning a dragon with sorcery is a great way to put huge hurt on enemies and their defenses, but there's always a counter to every unit. The dragons? They can be put to sleep with a simple little kitty, spawned from the same pool that generated the dragons.

All of this -- and even more subtlety, we're sure -- is taught though each new iteration of the original few days of schooling, but all end in the same way: everyone, teacher and student alike is killed as the original owner of the tower the school resides in, is released. With each new loop back through time, though, Lillet picks up more knowledge and, for some reason, retains all the books she gains by way of her teachers, allowing her to summon all the different creatures to counter the ménages of the tower.

What's truly interesting about the story, though, is that with each pass though the same days, Lillet learns more about everyone involved, and what seems like a clear-cut path of suspects becomes an increasingly more complex version of whodunit. It really is a cool idea, and Vanillaware, by way of NIS America's translation and localization efforts, seems to have crafted an intoxicating hybrid of real-time strategy (though everything pauses while you highlight a servant or level up your bases to create new ones) with temporal narrative and absolutely gorgeous 2D art.

Actually, we should probably lavish a bit more praise on what we've seen so far, art-wise. Though the actual battles are fairly pedestrian in terms of 2D detail (don't misunderstand, though, we're not knocking all the unit or spawn point artwork), the 2D portraits of the main players in the game, and they do include other students, are absolutely gorgeous and look static until you realize they all breathe a little. In the more obvious (and welcome) examples this means heaving breasts, but it can be some thing as a chest cravat billowing slightly.

We're sure we'll say this in the review text too, but too often there's been an effort to rope the mouse/keyboard-designed PC real-time strategy games into a console space. It's never worked to the same degree, but with GrimGrimoire, we've actually seen it work, and really work, in a way that feels like a console experience. Once you've gotten the gist of the controls (though, yes, we're still accidentally highlighting other characters when we mean to just clear things off and observe even 10 hours in), the game plays exactly like an RTS on a console should. It's just weird that it took so long for the right approach to materialize.

Luckily, though, Vanillaware and NIS America seem to have nailed the concept handily. We're not sure how much more of the story there is to tell beyond what we've played (and the fact that we played way more than we normally would have for a normal preview should tell you how good the game is), plus the limited setting of the tower being, thus far, the first and only setting for the battles is a little worrisome, but the game has its hooks in us. The 2D art was the first draw, but this really does feel right now like the first RTS that actually feels like a console game, and for fans of the genre, that may well be all they need to hear.