Battle Chasers: Nightwar

Another overlooked indie gem. Graphics are beautiful and have excellent animations. Dungeons look great and are atmospheric. JRPG-esque game mechanics but with western RPG flavor (higher character customization, for example) and great combat. Sound, music & voice acting are also top notch. Story is decent for a dungeon crawler, it's just mostly there and serves its purpose - it's not anything special but it doesn't offend your intelligence either. Useful crafting and enchanting system. Perk trees that offer real choices. Ignore reviewers who slander the game because of grinding. You can leisurely complete Battle Chasers without any grind whatsoever and even if you do grind unique encounters and equipment for powerful bonuses, it's not a "huge grind" by any stretch of imagination, compared to other JRPGs. If you like turn-based RPGs, give this a chance, you won't regret it.

The game starts off slowly and it's very easy to fall into what feels like a grind trap. This is in part due to how they have handled dungeon difficulty: if you complete the first dungeon on the hardest difficulty you will have the level and gear to start the second dungeon on the hardest difficulty. But if you do the first dungeon on an easier difficulty, you will be under-leveled and under-geared for the second dungeon on the hardest difficulty. There's no need for the game to be a grind, but you need to commit to a difficulty and a party of 3 characters. The visuals and audio are great. Combat is fun and there's plenty of character-combos to think about. The story is nothing special but good enough to keep things engaging in this genre. My biggest gripe is that parts of the game encourage you to revisit dungeons (e.g. side quests) while other parts of the game discourage you (e.g. crafting materials from a given dungeon becoming obsolete faster than you can gather enough to craft anything). That is one area the game could have done with more tuning, though my experience may have just been caused by the fact that I chose 3 characters and ignored the rest, thereby speeding through the game at a faster pace.

Let me start by saying, turn based rpgs are some of my favorite games out there. Everything from Final Fantasy to Darkest Dungeon. And while even those games can get a bit grindy at times, they never reach the absolute pit of boredom that Battle Chasers lives in. It's a slog of a game to play and it's a shame because it's obviously a gorgeous looking game with inpired direction. It's a shame it's nigh unfinishable due to how tedious the gameplay is.

+ Deep, Intuitive Combat System Battle Chasers' combat system does an excellent job easing players into its combat system. You're able to retool the heroes to take on the challenges the game introduces. There are some difficulty spikes but I got a solid 30 hours The game also has an easily accessable game manual that crams all the details you'd want to know into 10 pages. + Creature Designs/Animations/Sound Fx You couldn't ask for a better way to present this game's combat system. These gorgeous 3d models are brought to life by the tight animations and excellent sound design. From the humble basic attacks to the not-so-humble ultimate bursts, there's great audio/visual feedback that keeps this system engaging. + World Building This game's story and character development is pretty weak, but its backed up by its great setting and soundtrack. Every environment and dungeon has an interesting story behind it. The devs encourage you to explore every nook in their well realized dungeons by providing stat bonuses for complete sets of lore drops. + Soundtrack The world map has a soothing, melancholic track that paints a forlorn, derelict land. Battle + dungeon tracks are tense and atmospheric; There's a great variety of these to fit a multitude of scenarios. + Relatively bug-free (as of version.23731) Experienced a single bug that forced a restart. A pretty good track record in this day and age. = Story / Chracter Development This story provides just enough drive and urgency to get you to every dungeon. Thats all it needed to be. The characters get introduced but none of them really change in meaningful ways in the course of the game. Had no expectations so this is not a ding in my book. - Grind / Backtracking As nice as the battles are, it would've been nice to have some kind of fast battle or auto battle feature in this game for backtracking dungeons and grinding. - No Catchup XP If there's a catchup mechanic, it doesn't happen when heroes are out of your party. I stuck with the starting part and didn't bother with the rest of the cast partly to avoid an uneven XP distribution.

The game has a lot to like if you're into old school turn based RPG's. The art is nice, the sound assets are okay and the story is your usual fantasy stuff. The main problem I had with the game was the weird difficulty spikes they placed in the game to pad out the length. You breeze through the first third of the game and that was great but then I reached a dungeon where the enemy levels jumped up sharply and I was forced to back to lower level dungeons I already comleted and farm till I could fight with out getting annihilated. This happened with two other dungeons in the game and is a bit jarring since up till that point you're managing to be on par or higher than most of the enemies. If you don't mind a lot of redoing old dungeons and grinding then this game is a very fun RPG.