Battle Chasers: Nightwar (Switch) Review

Battle Chasers started off as a comic series twenty years ago. Ending on a cliffhanger long ago, the series lay dormant until the original creator and his game company pitched a Kickstarter to make a game based on the comic. The Kickstarter was a success and Battle Chasers: Nightwar is here, serving as an introduction for new audiences who never read the original series, as well as a continuation for old fans.

From the get-go, you’re slapped in the face with a well-animated intro. While they don’t continue into the game, the art continues to look amazing. Whether it’s just character pictures in a conversation, to the comic book style cutscenes that happen throughout the story parts, it just looks good. Now I haven’t read the original comics that this game continues on from and, if you haven’t already bought this as a Battle Chasers fan then I’ll take a chance that many others haven’t read it either. I can safely reassure you that you can easily hop right in without prior knowledge. The characters all feel pretty familiar if you’ve spent time with fantasy RPGs. In dialogue throughout the game, they are all fleshed out, and even if they’re familiar they’re still pretty good characters.

To make it even easier to jump right into this world, the story starts off with your party having their airship shot down by bandits, crash landing you onto an island and scattering your group. Everything about the situation sounds like a side adventure, or when a TV series has a movie where everything needs to be self-contained so there’s no lasting impact. As you get the band back together you’ll uncover a plot by an evil Necromancer, and of course, you need to stop her. To do this you’re going to need to fight. A lot. It helps that the characters are generally all likable. You start with Tully, the daughter looking for her Father while dealing some damage with her oversized gloves; Calibretto, the well-spoken war mech who helps heal; and Garrison, the Gruff but caring Warrior, handy with a blade and causing status effects on the enemy. There are three other members of the team and they help round out the abilities offered by the party.

Battle Chasers sells itself as an ‘old school turn-based JRPG’, and it’s not wrong. This game is for the unabashed fans of turn-based battles, choosing between normal moves and Mana draining moves. Hitting your enemies with debuffs while buffing your own party, when to heal, when to attack and when to put your guard up. The battle system within this game gets very involved. You have the normal moves that cost you nothing but a turn. If they land successfully you build up ‘overcharge’. You have skills that cost mana to use and do more damage, buff/debuff or heal. The overcharge gets added to your mana points and can help manage a limited amount of mana, or help power up skills that get more powerful the more overcharge you have built up. Early on you’re also introduced to ‘Burst’ moves, which is built up by the party during battles. This can be used for some heavy hitting attacks, stronger healing, and so on. Both the overcharge and burst become essential, along with making the most out of the buffs, debuffs, and status changes. If you’re only lightly into RPGs you may be in for bit of a shock.

There are three different parts to the game: the Overworld, dungeons, and the battles. The Overworld has you taking your merry band of battle chasers around the map. Instead of freely roaming all over the place you’re confined to paths that go throughout the different regions. On these paths are dungeons and other points of interest. The enemies waiting to fight you also show up on the Overworld. They politely wait for you to walk up to them, giving you the option to fight or find another route. These encounters tended to be a mixed bag, usually, it was an enemy that was barely worth the time going through all the animations (when they get too low level you can avoid them entirely). There are the enemies that provide a bit of a fight and if you’re not careful they’ll do some real damage, and then there’s the odd encounter where you’ll be wiped out by a merciless group with high HP. The Overworld part of the game streamlines the world exploration process and keeps the story moving, but it also leaves the world feeling pretty empty.

Next up are the dungeons. Here you get to explore randomised rooms, navigating traps, finding journals, looting and completing tasks to get to the boss fight. The dungeon section is fine, the different environments certainly look nice and there’s plenty of journals/logs to help flesh out the world a bit, as well as provide clues to hidden treasure or extra enemies. When you boil it all down, you’re going from room to room fighting everything you can to level up, hopefully finding some new equipment that is better than what you’ve been stuck with for hours. With the first three dungeons, you can get by mostly with grinding for character levels and overwhelming enemies with sheer force. Then enemies start to really fight back – attacks start doing heavy burn/poison/sunder damage, having the ability to remove status effects and debuffs become vital, and every move needs to be more considered. To my understanding, the Switch version of the game has benefitted from some tweaks that have evened out some difficulty spikes. One previously known spike seemed to be fixed, but when you hit the fourth dungeon the difficulty ramps up fast.

What I found curious was the developers were willing to modernise or streamline certain parts of the game, while leaving in some really clunky and outdated elements. Party management here hasn’t left the 90’s. You can only change party members at the Inn or at the outside of a dungeon, it’s a surprise you aren’t forced to save at the Inn. While there are six characters overall, you can only have three at one time. Now it’s not unreasonable to have to carefully select your party, but only the active team earn experience points and this causes some problems. If you want your team to be in top shape then you need to be regularly juggling different characters. The opportunities for meaningful XP grinding are limited outside of re-doing dungeons on harder difficulties.

There is one location where you can consistently rest your party and refill your health and mana, but to do it you need to hike all the way back to the Tavern/Inn and then back to where you actually needed to go. You have characters that can heal but that skill cannot be used outside of battle, or there is one who has a limited heal skill when wandering around dungeons. After a day one patch, some of Battle Chaser’s technical issues seem to have been cleaned up (or as far as I could test), but loading still remained an ongoing issue. Loading hits almost anywhere you go and it always feels slow. Even when entering some enemy encounters it pops up a loading bar, and when you have a battle that’s slow to get into, then when you win you have to go through the winning animation and music it can make the grinding battles a real drag.

Battle Chasers isn’t a bad game despite all my griping. It feels that is has a very particular audience, and that’s old school JRPG fans who long for a return to turn-based battles. Now there are a lot of battles to be found, or even chased…but this game also leaves out a lot of things that made those old school games memorable; story, interesting side quests and I can go on. But Battle Chasers also makes no allusions that it’s those things. It is going to give you turn-based battles and it achieves this. The game looks and sounds great, the fights force you to stay involved and to juggle a few different mechanics.

It’s not going to be for everyone, but for people who hate the direction modern RPGs are going in will be able to get some old school RPGing.

Rating: 3.5/5