Battle Chasers: Nightwar

Took me 119 hours to 100% the game. Some thoughts: 1. The game is slow: the movement needs to be sped up, and the battle animations need to have a toggle to shorten them significantly. I believe a lot of my time was taken up by battle speed. 2. New Game + is hard: like I have all the abilities and I level up fairly quickly, but the gear drops and the gear I'm able to craft don't keep up with everything. At first I felt like a glass cannon, but as gear becomes more important as the game progresses, I just feel like glass. 3. Completing the bestiary requires 100% the enemy info, not just seeing every enemy. 4. Airships seem to disappear after defeating the High Captain. 5. Completing the fishing is pure luck (I think). Although I did happen to finish it just as I completed the other final achievements. 6. Crimson Garden Riddles: There is a 4th riddle that I haven't seen written in any guide for the game. The riddle starts "What can cause pain." 7. Perk Points: I made sure every character had the same number of perk points, and was missing 140 points worth of skills for each character at the end. 368 being the max per points to activate all perks. 8. The world map is annoying. It is like a child's drawing of the world. There are no markers for anything, so you need to pretty much memorize everything. The only thing is it does have most of the roads. 9. New Game + dungeons: The drops don't make any sense. I'm facing off against level 24 mobs, and the drops from the treasures are level 16 gear (might have been worse). This is what makes being strong in New Game + so difficult. 10. Crafting: It is really important to try to craft the most powerful version of any gear as possible. I didn't know about this until a long time into my first playthrough. 11. Potions are not necessary: Other than revive and group heal (in a pinch), you can leave a dungeon, sleep at the Inn and then go back in if you are running low on Mana or Health. 12. Iron Fortress all day to reset the village shops. (maybe 5-10 minutes to sneak through). 13. Shadow coins should be more useful: other than for perk points, the gear that is available for shadow coins doesn't help late game. Negatives about the game: 1. The game play is slow: worth repeating this fact. 2. The game feels unfinished: 3. Feels like there isn't really a difference between magic damage and physical damage (even though these are things). 4. The cutscenes are mostly just comic-book cut-outs with dialogue. 5. The world map is almost completely useless. 6. Crafting window doesn't tell you how many of your target item you already have. And doesn't tell you how many are created upon crafting. 7. Comparing gear can only be done in the equip window. 8. You cannot see the stats or gear of the characters not in your party. 9. The game can get a bit grindy: repeating dungeons for gold, late game for drops, hunting enemies for crafting ingredients, fishing to fill the list. 10. Indicators don't disappear: in the dungeons after you've completed an event, it doesn't remove the indicator (even if the event is one time only). Same for shrines. 11. Gully is the only party member able to get hidden treasures. There are some other semi-hidden treasures but you don't really need special dungeon skills to reach those. 12. Using stealth in dungeons doesn't always work. The hitbox to enter a battle is easy to hit when trying to slip past enemies meaning you need to waste time to get the timing right, but the amount of time for stealth is very limited. 13. The world feels empty: there is only one town with only a handful of shops. Most of the map is empty except where enemy encounters randomly pop-up (they are shown on the map, but reset location after rests, finishing dungeons, etc.). Positives: 1. Graphics and animations look great. 2. The gameplay is generally fun: Turn-based combat while trying to manage complimentary skills, maximizing damage, and avoiding strong enemy hits. 3. Gear and levels have meanings: leveling up, applying perk points, and getting better gear all balance to somewhat of a degree to increase your effectiveness. 4. Dungeons are varied with fun random elements (for the most part). 5. Variety of enemies is decent for the size of the game. Summary: I recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of turn-based RPGs. But get it on sale. If you are good at these games it should probably take you 40 hours less to 100% than it took me.

On paper this was a Perfect game for me. In reality the repetitiveness and grind required to move forward is way too boring and cumbersome. Some design decisions too, like a regular mob in a dungeon way stronger than a Boss (looking at you Hangman)? Ridiculous. Loot is basically nonexistent and almost always not strong enough to be good enough for next dungeon/area. difficulty spikes are also straight out of your ass. There is a great game in there but some design choices stop it from shining. Would refund if I could.

Battle Chasers has solid graphics and a charming art style, but unfortunately that’s where the positives end for me. Despite its good presentation, the game is incredibly boring. I’ve played for around eight hours, and the entire time I felt like I was just wandering in circles with no real objective or motivation to keep going. The pacing is slow, the progression feels empty, and nothing in the gameplay encouraged me to push forward. Instead of feeling engaged, I just felt tired of doing the same thing over and over again. I didn’t enjoy it at all, and I can’t recommend it.

I tried to play this game, got to a certain point, couldn't stand the grinding anymore, quit, forgot why I quit years later, tried again, got to same point, got sick of grinding again, quit. Grinding does not equal content. It's sad because the game has a lot of great qualities like the voice acting, world, character designs, art, music, but it's all meaningless if playing feels like a chore. If they scaled the game differently so that you wouldn't need to grind, it'd be much shorter but SO much better.

[b] It really pains me to not recommend it. [/b] [h2] The good : [/h2] [list] [*] lots of spells and perks for each character which make a good foundation for theorycrafting and team-building. [*] very nice polish all around, with features I didn't expect for a game of that scale. [*] game is pretty, sound is good. [/list] [h2] The bad : [/h2] [list] [*] Game difficulty swings from incredibly punishing early on to a walk in the park for most of the remaining playthrough with occasional one-turn lose encounters. [*] Game difficulty modifier might as well not exist. Anything that is average or below is easy, but up to pretty late in the playthrough, anything above is too hard. [*] This game uses consumables as a cheat-way to regulate difficulty. You have mana which you'll always feel the urge to save up until you get a refill and realize you could've been less picky about spending it, and you also have potions that can range from utter ♥♥♥♥ to completely game breaking (stocking on resurrection potions can make you practically immortal for as long as enemies don't use big AOE moves). [*] Battle encounters are not thought-out : you get overwhelmed by useless fights and sometimes, you'll take aggro of only a part of the pack of enemies which will trivialize the fight whereas other times, an uninvited enemy will join a pack and make an already challenging enemy impossible to defeat. [*] Enemy design is mostly boring : you rarely have to adapt any part of your gameplan depending on what you're facing, making fights braindead slop even more than they already are. [*] Crafting gear is meaningless, you'll only ever be able to craft meaningless lower level gear. Which is a shame because the system is deeply implemented into the gameplay loop. [*] Loot is random. You can get handed a holy grail for one of your characters or have it be limited to a character you don't play and have to keep on using gear that are 6 whole tiers under leveled. [*] Benched characters do not get a share of experience. So when you are forced to take out someone from the party to give place for a character that is required to make progress in the story, you'll likely never see him ever again because leveling up that guy will be a long chore and we've already established that combat is rarely interesting (disclaimer : I do really enjoy turned-based combat, usually). [*] Story is anecdotical : basically bad guys want to summon an evil force, we stop them, period [*] Character interaction : not any better. Most nights at the tavern which'll trigger dialogs are summed up by [person a] : "i'm worried about X", [person b] : "trust them", [person a] : "okay". End of interaction [*] Dungeon exploration is tedious. Sometimes simply walking on pressures plates and skipping through dialogs/animations then doing some straight line walking will take up 5 minutes of your time for no reason (i.e. the mana dungeon). [/list] [h2] Conclusion : [/h2] I only pursued in desperate hope to find out if it'll get any better but story simply ended and I did not get the slightest want to come back and finish side contents (I did beat all of beast-master's hunts though fyi). It is not an un-enjoyable game, I just believe it failed at what it tried to do in so many regards that I can't give a thumbs up.

This is an American take on a JRPG and is inspired by a late 90s comic book. Gameplay features: 1) It uses a randomised tile set for each dungeon, so each trip to the boss is different. However, some tile sets are more common than others so you'll soon remember where the treasure chests are. The world map doesn't change it's layout. 2) You have to take 3 of the possible 6 party members into combat as you'll generally be taking on 1-3 enemies in a fight. In the event there are 4 or more foes, they get split into equal waves so you won't be overwhelmed. Your max character level is 30. 3) The skills come in two types: zero mana cost, basic attacks with no casting time (instant) and generate temporary mana. Premium attacks that cost mana and have a casting time ranging from very quick to very slow. All skills can be modified with Perks. These come in two different character specific sets; cost 2 to 20 points each. You may acquire up to 200 perk points in total for any character and spend up to 100 points in either set. 4) The fishing mini game is annoying to complete, as the different fish have different spawn rates. There are 5 tiers of rarity (white, green, blue, purple, orange) along with the different dungeon associations. e.g. a Rainbow sub is a purple tier fish, associated with the Junktown dungeon. 5) The bestiary requires 3+ kills of a given foe to display all their stats & abilities. Possible loot is displayed once it has been acquired, not before. Completing kill challenges will award stat buffs.

we need a sequel and a prequel and make this world justs larger and larger

Battle Chasers Nightwar executes well on some of it's RPG mechanics and has good environmental design but lacks pretty much everything else. This game isn't frustrating but it is very boring. Pros • [b]Combat is fair and enemies scale well throughout the game. [/b] Combat usually felt at about the same level of difficulty throughout the game and when do enter a new area the diffculty spike was very manageable. • [b]Crafting and perks are mostly well done.[/b] Crafting is very accessible as it is easy to obtain recipes and the mats dropped by mobs almost always give you something that you need. You can also add mats over what a recipe calls for to craft higher quality items or craft items at a lower success rate if you are missing some mats. Very flexible and fun to use. • [b]Good dungeon environmental design[/b]. Levels look fantastic • [b]Good progression systems.[/b] You level up fairly consistently and the game adjusts exp gained based on the level difference between the party and the enemies being faced. Negatives • [b]Hardly any story and what is there is not well written.[/b] You get tiny story bits every 2-3 hours of gameplay and those are maybe 3 minute bits at most. What is there isn't particularly high quality either, it's hard to feel anything for the characters or the story. • [b]Re-use of the same enemy sub-types multiple times.[/b] You will fight the same enemies with slight variations throughout most of the game, which is very off putting. • [b]Combat is repetitive, lacks depth, and is easy.[/b] Even going through a dungeon 1st try on legendary difficulty I never felt that I had to use all the tools at my disposal. • [b]Perks and combat abilities do not have enough diversity.[/b] Many of the perks in the game are repeats with higher values of lower level perks. There are only a few unique perks that don't do something like buff one of your basic stats or up the damage of a specific attack. • [b]Stats are over-simplified.[/b] A good example is that attack power influences healing output of a character, because there's no intelligence or wisdom stat. There are no dex, int, wis, ect. Every other stat in the game like stamina, m def, def, haste, evade do one thing and one thing only. Gear and leveling up in essence are pretty much done for you, no thinking required. • [b] Game crashes if you have any Bluetooth device connected [/b] This is probably the smallest issue I list but it's absolutely unacceptable. This game crashes on startup or in the game if you have a Bluetooth device connected. Extremely annoying, especially if you have a wireless controller than you then have to plug in. I personally don't feel this game is worth the time unless you have time to waste and want to turn your brain off. Even then at $30 there are better alternatives in that niche. I wanted to like this game but the more I kept playing the more I realized I was forcing myself to play and was incredibly bored.

100% Completion A hidden gem among JRPGs Cool style, variational dungeons, memorable characters Really looking forward to the second part