A Futile Chase

Battle Chasers: Nightwar has the main cast of the comics traveling by airship, when they're attacked by sky pirates and crash land. In the course of finding each other, they figure out there's a) a lot of mana on this island, which is apparently in short supply in the rest of the world, and b) dangerous forces mining it as part of a larger scheme to unleash some terrible horror upon the world. They team up with a guy they meet along the way (hiding a dark backstory, naturally), to try and stop the ancient evil, you know the deal.

Confession: I didn't beat the game. I got to what I think is the penultimate boss, and I could not get past her. The last time I tried, I got her to ~17,000 hit points (she starts ~37,000), and she used some damage shield that also lets her steal your health to replenish hers. By the time my party was dead, she was back to 28,000 hit points. I said nuts to that, and here we are.

It's a turn-based RPG, your party on one side of the battlefield, enemies on the other. I appreciate that the game shows the order characters will perform their actions via a list along the left side of the screen. When you're trying to choose between one of your Skills, if there's a delay before it happens, the screen will show you how soon the Skill will go into effect. So if you're torn between two healing spells - say, an individual spell and a group spell - and one won't go off until after the enemy's next attack, you know that and can plan accordingly.

And it does seem like that sort of planning is necessary, which was not great news for me. I've never been a "min-max" guy. Rather, I'm "attack, attack, attack, attack, oh that guy's low on health, heal, more attacking". This game feels unforgiving to that approach, so I got stomped, a lot. Especially against bosses. Even once I adjusted to more buffing defenses, preemptive heals, and status effect attacks, I found I usually couldn't beat a boss unless my characters were a level or two higher. Which is the problem with the boss I couldn't beat. She's Level 32, but your characters max out at Level 30. 

When not in battle or roaming a dungeon, you traverse the island like it's a game board. The roads have little dots and those dots may contain places you can look for crafting supplies, or shrines that grant boons, or enemies to fight. Eventually you can unlock warp gate things that will let you jump instantly from one section of the island to another, but you have to reach a warp gate on foot first to activate it.

The central hub of the game is a town called Harm's Way. In a development I found extremely annoying, the game only lets you swap party members at the town inn. Characters not in your party gain no experience from battles you fight. Meaning, I'd pursue a lead to a dungeon, fight my way through, and by the time I got back to the inn, half the party were 4 levels stronger than the other half. If I wanted the weaker half to keep up, I'd have to go back through the previous area and level grind, or else risk adding them in as I journeyed to the next area, where they would be woefully outclassed by the new enemies. I'd essentially be fighting shorthanded. Around level 15, I settled on Calibretto/Gully/Monika (healing/defense/poison) as my squad and let the other 3 rot.

(The game's capped so, once you're a certain number of levels stronger than enemies, you no longer gain experience from defeating them, though they still provide crafting supplies. On the other hand, the game gives you the choice of whether you want to fight those "lesser" enemies, or bypass them, as they're presumably intimidated enough not to willingly pick fights.)

Harm's Way has all the various shops you find in these games. A blacksmith for armor and weapons, an enchanter, a guy that sells potions and will let you use his resources to make your own. I did a little crafting and enchanting. Making flasks of resurrection juice, mostly. But I didn't want to bother, so I generally didn't. Probably a bad idea. Gotta make a special armor that neutralizes all status effects or something, I'm sure.

There's also a creepy guy that will accept special coins you find to buy stuff from him, like books that offer perk points (which you use to improve stats like evasion or critical chance, or the amount of damage an attack does), and a lion-woman who will give you hints about special monsters to "hunt" for special rewards. The targets are sometimes silly-looking - the last one is a chatterbox, dapper gentleman skeleton - but were challenging. Completing the hunts doesn't alter the story, but at least gave me a sense of accomplishment. You can also fish at select spots, and there's a shark-man to sell the fish to, who sometimes gives you the coins the creepy guy wants. But then you have to keep getting better lures and rods or you won't catch anything. Sigh.

I sank about 40 hours into the game before deciding to call it. Was it time well spent? Eh, there were times it was enjoyable, but it's definitely not going to crack my list of favorite RPGs, or my list of favorite PS4 games.