Time Break Chronicles

One of my favorite games

One of the most frustrating games I've ever played - Unclear ability wordings, abilities that don't work the way they say they should, too much is based on random chance, Normal mode feels really punishing at times and a breeze at others, some characters have no synergy with their own moves and some characters can practically solo an entire run with no other characters if that was a thing. If you like building around a theme, this is not what you need to do to win, you just need a team of mismatched characters that you painstakingly put together for an hour with relics and everything only to lose because you got a distortion that screws up your main source of damage or healing, or one of the many overtuned random fights that are harder than a boss battle. For an example of an ability working in a way that is at best unintuitive, The ability Ritual says you do 1x Focus damage to a target and then you "heal your party based on that amount". What actually happens is you do 1x Focus damage reduced by the opponents discipline, and then ignoring any damage buffs from other abilities, ONLY the damage done by base Ritual with no skill buffs calculated, is counted, and then that bit is SPREAD AMONGST YOUR PARTY, not healed that much each, which makes it garbage, even at max level which triples the healing. 3x almost nothing is still not much of anything. One might think that it healed each party member an amount equal to 3x the damage dealt including damage from other skills that buff the spell, but no, the combat log shows those skill buffs it as separate damage and they aren't calculated. The devs have added too many characters and so many things don't work in an intuitive way at best, or just don't work correctly at worst. It's in 'early access' but like at a certain point stop adding new things and fix what you have. The issue I mentioned here has been discussed multiple times in the discord but never addressed.

I bought this game on sale for under $8, and expected to get about 10 hours of enjoyment before getting bored. Its so good. There's a ridiculous amount of things to do in the game. I'm on the (current) final act (with one more in development) and there's a whole other game mode which i haven't really interacted with at all. Well worth the $$, this is one of the games i kinda regret getting on sale because of how much I want to support the dev's continued work.

If you enjoy turn-based combat and crafting builds then this game punches far above its weight class—just don't a proper story. The core gameplay involves pitting six party members against increasingly infuriating (in a good way) enemy encounters. Your overpowered spellcaster can and will be thwarted by a slasher that kills them before they even get a turn, or perhaps a mage that reflects spell damage AND casts the same spell back at your team. What's truly impressive is that each of the 100 characters has a distinct playstyle which can be further molded with relics. Chronicle Mode is your "story" mode where you have persistent town upgrades, characters, and relics which you'll bring into randomized runs through 6 acts. There are generic/boss relics and every character also has two unique relics which can be unlocked for unlimited duplication by completing themed missions for that character (e.g. copy 7 unique skills with the mimic). Singularity Mode is a roguelike mode where each run is separate and you're simply unlocking more stuff that can randomly appear in future runs. You can get tons of playtime between both modes, though the vast majority of mine was spent in Chronicle Mode. My main minor complaint is that early battles can be a bit a slog without upgrades or the vast pool of characters and relics to choose from. Once the game opens up, you can start crafting truly crazy setups that you'd be hard-pressed to find in any other turn-based game that's not Siralim Ultimate. ----- As an example for how flexible builds are in this game... You have a Rune Scribe whose main gimmick is inscribing runes that combine an effect (damage or healing) with a trigger condition (attacking, dodging, getting hit, turn start) which is already interesting at baseline. You can build around these runes by equipping relics that augment healing or damage. One spicier setup is giving her a relic that makes Sonic damage shred defense along with relics to boost her overall damage output, then you apply a rune that adds Sonic damage on attack to a party member that attacks often for some pretty absurd damage. However, this character also has a Spellshield that she gets at the start of the turn (or manually applies to others). You can build around this by equipping a relic that boosts stats when blocking damage along with other relics to boost her defense / Focus (magic) stat. In combat, you can apply a rune that heals when hit then position her front and center to block damage and heal around her whenever she's hit. Or you could run a different tank and apply the same rune / spellshield to them. She also has a passive which adds her Wisdom (MP) stat to her magic hits. The problem is that she doesn't really have offensive magic outside of a dispel. Well, you can equip a relic that adds MP cost to magic hits while also granting an offensive spell and suddenly she's a pretty strong spellcaster. Now you can add more relics to augment her magic damage and/or grant some better spells to turn her into a powerful mage with built-in survivability (her spellshield) and support (her runes). My criticism here is that there are only four relic slots that you're trying to fit stats, granted skills, and multiplicative boosts into. Some characters already boost their main stat up to the soft cap (twice the base value) with all the skills they really need so you can use all their relic slots for multiplicative boosts / utility, while others might have an interesting mix that's a lot harder to mold into something crazy with only four relics. Some relics are also too good to pass up within each archetype. This is a very minor nitpick, however, considering the game has 100 characters that are pretty much all interesting as a baseline. You don't just have a fire mage. You have a fire mage that builds up stacks by casting spells, explodes for tons of damage based on these stacks when he dies, then revives himself when any enemy is downed. tl;dr the characters and builds in this game with 100 characters are somehow more interesting than many other turn-based games with a fraction of the roster size

Best. Game. Ever.

Game appears to have been abandoned

Amazing game already. If the devs don't add anything else, I would still recommend if you like turn based RPGs and rogue lites. Already loads of content and is an absolute blast to play!