This was announced at a Sony Direct (one of the 2 Sony Directs that were actually kinda okay). I was pretty curious about it, it looked like a fairly unique kind of strategy game that kind of reminded me of an old PC game I used to play called Cannon Fodder, but with an RPG twist. Looked interesting enough so I grabbed it at launch!

I actually never really noticed that this was developed by Lancarse, the same company that also released Monark early this year, an RPG I did not like. I don’t think this would’ve influenced my decision to get this though.

So let’s check this one out!

Developer: Lancarse
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: September 22, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Real-time Strategy RPG

Review

The story is pretty weak overall. A lot of it is just told by a narrator and you don’t get to directly see a bunch of it. You start up in a group of 3 people aiming to be mercenaries, who happen to help out someone who is in direct contact with a Duke, and you join their group as mercenaries to presumably help with problems on the island of DioField. It happens to be beset by attacks from the Empire (from the neighbouring continent), but with internal strife as well between different factions. Some that are loyal to the king, some that want democracy rather than monarchy, some that support different king candidates to be the king’s successor since the king is sick. While your mercenary group, the Blue Foxes, starts out as basically nobodies, they eventually end up taking care of major issues and becoming major players in the politics of DioField.

Like, it’s not a bad premise or anything, it’s very politically-focused and some interesting things happen… You just don’t get to see any of that or really be all that involved in it. You pretty much hear from the narrator, then become clean-up crew for the latest problem. Andrias, your main character, is a bit of a manipulative guy that tries very hard to get his own desired outcome (for reasons that are explained in basically the last 20 seconds of the game). I’d say the biggest problem is that most of the characters are either useless, or boring. There’s one character I liked. Waltaquin is just this beautiful noble lady who really likes killing shit, she was fun and brought at least some personality to the otherwise very dry dialogue, for some of the game. Maybe if other characters displayed emotion other than “mad” and “I’m boring” I could’ve liked the story a bit more. Also, I did predict the ending about halfway through, but I feel it happened too quickly. Like, there could’ve been an extra chapter there, instead of a “bang, done” situation, and no epilogue at all.

Graphically I don’t really have much to say. I wonder if the non-Switch versions look a bit better, because overall this looked like something that would’ve been pretty good on the PS3… Not so much for Switch. Very flat-looking, the lighting is basically nothing. Some of the character designs are pretty nice though. In battle it does look pretty good, though of course everything is far from the camera so it makes sense. I like the board game style it goes for, with the environments being on top of some wooden platform of sorts. As far as performance, the Switch handled it fine, not seeing any drops outside of a few cinematic attack animations, and some parts have a LOT of texture pop-in (very noticeable in the summon animation for Coeurl). So all I’m thinking is that the non-Switch versions probably/hopefully look better, but the performance on Switch is fine where it matters, which is in combat.

So combat! This is technically a real-time strategy game, where you control a squad of up to 4 characters. You can select one character, or all 4, or a range. You can move the cursor around and either choose a point on the map or an enemy to order your characters to either attack or just go to a spot. Units do automatically attack if an enemy attacks them, or, in the case of magic users and archers, they have a small radius in front of them they’ll automatically attack if an enemy enters.  You can pause time both to select uniques and to give orders to use special attacks. These have a specific range so positioning is important, and then there’s cooldown depending on the attack. Attacking enemies from the back deals more damage, and, while your special attacks happens instantly, enemies get some loading time, which gives you time to either move out of the way, or use a skill of your own that stuns, disables or kills the attacker.

So it does SOUND like a strategy game, but it kinda isn’t. You move your characters freely on a map, there’s technically positional advantages you can get if you set up a pincer attack or something, and it works in real time like a Starcraft kinda game… But it’s missing elements to be something like an actual strategy game. Namely, enemies don’t move strategically, and come in preset waves (so more enemies only come when you finish killing the current ones). There’s 3 possible behaviors for enemies: patrolling a set path, not moving, or targetting you. There’s not really “strategy” as most battles consist of you just going from enemy encounter to enemy encounter. As soon as an enemy targets you, you’re stuck being targeted, so at that point, might as well not really care about movement unless you need to reposition for special attacks, and just worry about keeping your guys safe. There’s occasions where splitting up your squad helps, but generally, just go in on the enemies, group by group.

So combat is a matter of EP management, reacting when big attacks are coming, occasional positioning (since sometimes a patrolling enemy might jump in to attack, or another set of enemies that were targeting you from further away are getting close to you), and just making sure your team doesn’t die. Also, each character can have an adjutant equipped, which is just one of your non-active party members. These give you access to their weapons’ special attacks, and also gives you the ability to switch out your active member to use the backup member instead (can be useful if you feel the need for more ranged units).

There’s 4 classes of characters, which are then separated by weapons. There’s the soldiers with daggers or sword and shield or axe (one of each daggers and axe, 2 that use sword and shield). There’s cavaliers that either ride horses or wyverns (2 of each). There’s magic users that use either wands or staves (2 of each). And there’s the long-range units that either use bows or crossbows (2 of each). Characters are a set class and weapon, and their skills in battle are determined by which weapon they have equipped. So 2 wand users will have the same attacks if they have the same wand. They have different utilities in battle, though I found that having 3 frontliners and 1 backliner was pretty much optimal. Since you get adjutants, you do have access to all sorts of useful skills, so if you’re worried about a class not having a stun attack, just put an adjutant that does to that character.

Battles have a few rewards when you win. There’s SP, which unlock power-ups for classes. Specifically they’re for powering up special attacks, with effects like reducing EP cost, increasing power, or adding status effects. Then there’s Jade, which is used to power up your summons. You can equip 2 summons, and when you gain enough TP from killing stuff or getting blue orbs that drop from enemies when you kill them, you can summon them (they cost from 1 to 3 TP, generally most battles will give you 4-5 TP). Jade is used to power up the summons, with similar kinds of effects to SP on skills. Then there’s gold and some other metal you can get, those are used to develop weapons, which just adds them to buy at the store. Also, just progressing the story and doing side-missions also powers up your base, so you can get more stuff in the store (in addition to the weapons you develop), and allow you do go further in the different types of upgrades.

Leveling is fairly straightforward. You beat missions, you get EXP. I think you get a bit extra for units that get actual kills but I might be wrong. Only active members and adjutants get EXP though (with adjutants getting less), so anyone not actively in your party doesn’t level up. You can replay old missions if you really want to grind someone, though the grind is pretty heavy considering you need lots of EXP to level. A level gets you some standard stat increases and some points to put into skills. Each character gets a few skills that are basically passive upgrades. They can be things like more damage, more defense, power-ups under certain conditions (like more damage during cooldown). These costs 1, 3 or 10 points each, with some having multiple levels.

And that’s about it. The game flow is fairly simple. Do a mission, go back to base, power up your characters with the rewards you got, talk to characters to get sidequests or extra rewards, sometimes pay money to upgrade a facility, maybe replay old levels to get rewards you missed (there’s always side objectives in quests like not letting units die, doing it under 6 minutes and finding the treasure chest).

One weird thing in this game is the big blue glowing treasure chest in the base. It does nothing. It does give you the “early purchase” DLC bonus which is a dagger that gets useless very fast and an accessory that increases EXP gain until level 15, afterwards it’s just… there… glowing… why? Another weird decision is that new characters that join are around the same level as your highest level character, so characters that you mainly use as adjutants (or not at all) end up being under-leveled compared to the new characters you’re bringing in, so you just end up replacing them with newer characters as you progress. I had this happen with even frontline character once or twice, where a new character was just so much better (sometimes because of stats rather than levels) it was just not worth keeping the old one around.

Then beating the game just unlocks new game+, but replaying that, even in hard mode, is just way too easy since you start with way over-leveled characters.

Overall

I actually liked this, but I don’t think it was in the way that was quite intended. Rather than enjoying it as the strategy game it was planned to be, I played it more as a regular console-style RPG and that worked for me. The strategy aspect is very underdeveloped, so it just ends up being a normal JRPG with just a different combat system. It’s pretty fun, though rather easy once you figure out the attacking and movement.

It could do better story-wise, or have a nicer presentation, but the gameplay is fun enough, if lacking in depth to be able to do what was probably the intention. It would definitely gain from CPU-controlled enemies doing… things.

Overall, I give it a mild recommendation. I liked it, but I think it’s a hard sale for most. Marketing it as a strategy game is a mistake.