For example, putting a fighter in the front row will allow them to dash forward with a melee attack and hit the front row of an enemy group. Put them in the middle, however, and they'll have to switch to a ranged stance, relegated to just lobbing a rock at an enemy. Stick them in the back and some characters will be more or less useless. By the same token, though, sticking a mage in the front row is just plain stupid, since they work best from a ranged attack position and are vulnerable to physical attacks.

To keep things interesting, however, we couldn't just slot nine fighters, mages and clerics in a party. Instead, parties are grouped into rooms that have pre-set configurations, limiting the placement and numbers of characters that can go in a given room. It's actually a very, very cool system and offers a level of strategy that we really didn't expect. Rather than being overwhelming, though, the number of choices is liberating, and we spent a good hour just messing around with the randomly created layouts of the rooms. Furthermore, in a Item World-like system that we're sure will suck a bazillion hours out of us, you can dive into a room with the Investigate command, and clearing out enemies there will build up currency for that room, allowing you to customize things further by forcibly leveling up the characters in that room.

Just having hired troops and room configurations isn't enough, though. Those groups must be summoned in battle, and depending on the level of the fighters in place, cash has to be paid. Sure, it means you'll have more troops on the battlefield, but the spoils will be less. We, of course, enlisted a few good men and women, mostly just to see how the whole system worked, but once we learned to do things like put clerics in the back row so they'd heal the whole party every turn (if they're in the middle, they can only heal one character at a time), we were hooked.

Gig's powers go beyond just wrecking stuff and saying "shit" all the time. During battles you can use something called Gig Edicts to do everything from getting all of your party to hold hands and move in unison (useful if you've already moved a character that turn but want to keep them in the fight elsewhere on the field) to pickpocket enemies. In fact, you can choose to fight or pickpocket just about anyone in the game -- including shopkeepers and townsfolk in any of the myriad villages on the map. Using the Edicts in slightly different ways can have benefits too; holding hands with a shopkeeper might help you get a discount, but if you throw down and fight them (and win), the goods they offer will get better.

The sheer amount of crap you can do in the game that we haven't seen yet is what keeps us wanting to play more. If you haven't seen the trailers of the game yet, we definitely recommend scrolling up and clicking the Movies link. Stuff like merging characters or gaining 1000 levels instantly is stuff we can't wait to try out, and the sheer hilarity of Gig's dialogue means we're more than eager to experience more of the story (which, right now, is little more than just trying to destroy the World Eaters and save the day).

Soul Nomad already feels like one of the best localizations we've ever seen from NIS America. The voice acting is every bit as good (if not better) than the stuff in the Disgaea games, and we can only imagine how much fun it must be for the localization. Their rendition of Gig is absolutely hilarious, and the sheer what's-he-gonna-say-next aspect should be more than enough to keep us playing. Should we uncover more fun, we'll make sure you know about it.