Battle Chasers: Nightwar (2017)

Battle Chasers is a very special kind of game. Because it shouldn't have been a game at all. The franchise started as a comics by two brothers in '98, but albeit the art and character design were fantastic, authors couldn't keep up with the pace, and pace is very important for comics. So, the story got interrupted for almost 15 years. It's really a miracle this game got released at all, really.
The battle system is a classical JRPG 3x3 turn based style. The dungeons are more of a rogue like nature, though, generated from discrete blocks. The main battle mechanic is called "overcharge", and it allows regular attacks to generate temporary mana supply. This is useful since mana is quite limited and is not replenished easily. So, your characters end up alternating between regular attacks that generate mana and powerful spells that consume it. Other than that, there's a lot of "status play" involved, which reminded me of Darkest Dungeon mechanics. Character affected by one ailment may take increased damage from another type of ailment: eg "sundered" character is susceptible to bleeding.
What I really liked is there are no trash characters like in Final Fantasy or Persona series. I liked design of all of them, and have used all of them extensively.
All enemies are visible on both the world map and inside dungeons, so there are no random encounters. Nice "quality of life" improvement is that fights are optional if your party outlevels the enemy.
The drops are a mix of randomly generated and unique-but-autoleveled stuff, with the common green/blue/purple rarity system.

Most unfortunate part is that the storyline is just a huge filler. W40K fans wouldn't be bothered by that, of course, but others will.
I liked how artifacts you buy for boss tokens are real game-changers. Gives you good reasons to hunt those extra bosses, instead of just grinding.
Sidequests are fun, although not very intuitive sometimes. At one point you have lo light 11 torches, using flint, which is a random drop. I have up after lighting 10 of them and running out of flint, thinking that probably I'm doing something wrong. No, you just have to grind more flint.
Another quest asks you to find a specific skull. On the other side of the area there's a roaming unique executioner, so it's quite obvious he's the own that drops it. But no. The skull is actually randomly dropped in a dungeon. I had to do the dungeon 3 times until I finally got it. I ended up completing almost everything there is to the game, and enjoyed every bit of it. Well, maybe except some of the random stuff you have to do in order to get the ultimate weapons. Had to complete the same dungeon 6 times for that. But compared to some other JRPGs, this is basically nothing. Probably one of the games I enjoyed the most this year.

Hunting for the ultimate weapons was fun, but the only problem I have with them really is that they don't possess any unique abilities. Just weapons with the strongest stats. Even some non-unique weapons were more interesting.

I've been wanting to play this one for a while. What initially drove me to it was the art style. I'm a huge fan of the character and environment designs from the Darksiders. The handpainted style of the characters and environments are high quality and truly feels handmade.

I believe this was the best aspect of the game for me. The visuals and the sound presentation are excellent. The handpainted character assets and the detailed environments are a joy to look at. The soundtrack is catchy as well, feels fresh. Quite reminiscent of Darren Korb's work on the Super Giant Games. The sound design is crunchy as well. This comes to the forefront combined with the screen shake and visual effects in the turn-based combat.

Where this game fell flat for me was with the balancing of the combat. I don't at this time feel like it's worth my time playing any further on the game. I played a couple of hours and acquired all the team members. But the combat system and balancing just didn't do it for me.

This is a game inspired by the old-school JRPGs. Slow and deliberate turn-based combat. I consider JRPGs to be one of my favorite genres, therefore having pretty high expectations on this modern, western take. Maybe this is entirely my preference but I did feel that the pacing of the game ruined it for me.

I like a good story and character development early and throughout the game. I feel like in this case though, there is dungeon upon dungeon-crawling events and almost zero to non dilaogue and story exposition in between. I felt like I was just mostly walking around doing random stuff for random reasons with no weight to them. The characters have potential but there's no real arch exposition for the first 10 hours. I didn't feel like I particularly liked any of the characters or made any emotional connection to them.

Perhaps this is the intention of the developers. To focus mainly on combat and dungeon crawling. And I can be a fan of that too as long as the combat is engaging and rewarding. Again the balancing decisions of this game just didn't quite do it for me. The turn-based combat, at first crunchy and satisfying due to the visual and sound effects, quickly became painstakingly slow and repetitive. This is something that I can usually overlook, but then there's the problem of not really being able to efficiently power level at any point of the game due to the implemented mechanic of lowering the exp-gain from what is considered "under-leveled" enemies. This combined with the repetitive and slow fighting just feels annoying at best.

There are way too many enemies scattered, and way too much dungeon crawling for the rate of how slow (and boring) the turn-based combat quickly becomes. There are just not enough interesting abilities to develop varied and interesting strategies. Mostly a combination of 2 or 3 abilities per character just gets through everything. Then all there is left to it is making sure you're high enough level. There are some interesting mechanics integrated though. Like building up mana by using regular attacks and the supercharge bar. However, in a general sense, I feel like it falls away due to poor integration.

I played until I was critically under-leveled for the dungeon that I needed to finish to progress. And this happened even tho I painstakingly tried to power-level several times early game. Just didn't feel worth it to continue with an uninteresting story and cast that didn't have much potential to develop in an interesting manner. In my opinion.

So there are positives here, the game's got a nice perks mechanic, it's enemies vary from types making even slimes annoying in later stages, every main character plays different than the other, you can choose the difficulty of the dungeon you're going, good looking, innovates on little things from most RPGs.

So the cons... When the game is generic, it's SUPER GENERIC, when it is not trying too much it's not trying at all, you can get to a grind block even if you play the story and every enemy, game uses % which make a single level the difference between dying in a dungeon and breezing through it. The story seeming like something new, but has a pitiful twist with a cliff hanger and mostly feels generic.

The combat seemed good, but it's only the variety of stages that keeps you going, since the enemies after stage 3 will be recycle and repurposed. Voice acting varies from great to trash, when you find the best comp you won't use the others in any circumstance, the world is way too small. Lots of questions, especially the first one in the story, is not answered and completely forgotten.

Beautiful game with an entertaining combat system, but plagued by stutters, unbalanced game leveling and difficulty curve and too much focus on repetition.

PROS:

• Visually beautiful, from the hand crafted maps to the randm generated dungeons
• Nice combat animations and special abilities
• Good soundtrack and atmospheric ambient sound
• Multiple characters to choose that increase replay value
• Lots of secret item and quests to discover
• Wide variety of enviroments ranging from frozen lands to halloween themed cemeterys
• Relaxing fishing mini-game

CONS:

• Huge stutters on worldmap on high-end hardware
• Character flickering on worldmap traveling
• Combat animations have no speed-up or skip option
• Characters not in party gain no XP
• Party management only before entering a dungeon or at main hub inn
• Some quests are hidden in dungeons that rely on random event spawn
• Legendary weapon material gathering is reliant on random encounters
• Special vendor items are disappointing
• Cheesy and predictable story
• Main protagonist voice is cringe worthy

Bugs can be fixed and so can game leveling issues. What remains is a great game worth the asking price.