You simply choose the chapter of the story you'd like to see again and can either read Lillet's review or watch/play. Luckily, Grim lets you review any cutscene or battle you want through its main menu bookcase. Each character has their own role in the deadly events to come, and keeping it all straight can be a hassle. Each battle is bookended by cutscenes featuring Lillet and whomever she's involved with at the moment. The story in Grim isn't much clearer itself. It's as confusing and hectic as the text would have you believe. Then giant chimeras show up and spin their hooves that obliterate your forces, and you'll somehow need to whip up a dragon to defend your honor, but you don't have 500 pieces of mana for the dragon, so you'll have to wait and hope that the imps trucking mana back and forth aren't killed by golems before you can get the Chaos Nest up and running. Sounds easy, right? By the end of the game you'll need to hold off advancing unicorns and ferrymen to Hades with flame-shooting gargoyles while your phantoms and skullmages do battle with devils and imps to the north. Attack, build some new forces or move to new crystals - it's up to you. As you move, you'll uncover enemy positions, and from there, you can do what you want with the info. You'll be able to see the crystals on the map even if that area is dark, but you'll never know if the enemy has control of it. See, the map's going to be dark everywhere that you don't have troops. To do this you'll choose a fairy - or all the fairies - by selecting one of 'em and then pressing up on the D-pad and move the attacker(s) to different parts of the map.

What now? Although each level will detail its own win conditions, most are simply to destroy your enemy's runes. For argument's sake, let's say you've harvested a bunch of mana and bought the most fairies you could with the mana. They'll harvest the dough, bring it to the closest rune and you'll have the assets you need to build your army. To harvest mana, you'll need to send workers - the elves in our scenario - to the crystals around the map. To do that, you'll need mana, which is basically money that you can use to create forces.

There's going to be a lot of bad guys out there, and you need to amass an army. You could run out and attack the bad guys with your two fairies, but that'd be dumb. Now, only your fairies are capable of attacking. So lets run you though a simple battle: you start on a large map broken into levels with two elves, two fairies and a Fairy Ring (a rune, or creation point, from the Glamour category). Keeping up so far? This is Grim 101, and I don't want to stick you with the remedial kids in Hogwarts right off the bat. As the game goes on, you'll get new grimoires and unlock new spells in the books you already have. You'll need to use the stronger magic to best whatever your opponent brings to the battlefield - this is where the strategy comes in.

Necromancy is gangbusters against Sorcery, but it's weak as wet toilet paper against Glamour. Each category has a magic it can kick the crap out of and another magic that can kick the crap out of it. See, these magic books exists in a unique relationship. Lillet will need to know the spells from each of the twelve books to best the black cats, dragons and ghosts she'll face in the halls of the school.

There are three grimoires for each category of magic. With each run through the work week, Lillet amasses more grimoires, the books that contain the spells for the aforementioned categories of magic, and becomes a stronger magician who can stand a chance with the big bad guys in the game. What's Lillet to do? Why, fix things Bill Murray-style of course! Doing her best Groundhog Day impression, Lillet keeps on reliving her first five days at the school and trying to make different decisions to keep the archmage and another baddie named Grimlet at bay.

Grimgrimoire wiki