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 3×3 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.
