Battle Chasers: Nightwar

A RPG that reminds me much of the SNES era, perhaps not in the graphic style but in the classic turn based combat with menu selections like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasies of that time. I understand that this one is perhaps not revolutionary in that style, but it does have some pretty nice features. For one the buff/debuff indicators are extremely clear and so is the turn ordering, the battles are pretty satisfying and there's definitely different approaches to win the battles.

The game is split into between two modes: the map (world) mode and the dungeons. On the map mode you travel and encounter enemies, but also can grab some crafting resources along the way, while in the dungeon modes are the more challenging areas that you need to complete with a typical boss and story advancement at the end. It doesn't take long before you gather 3 party members, but I found it disappointing that when you finally reach a 4th one, you find that your maximum party size is 3 and that you can't bring everyone along the way. Worst of all, the character that you don't choose is not gaining levels while benching, so you are pretty much committed to the characters you've selected. New abilities are gained when gaining levels and so does perk points, which you can freely switch around as you wish... however the game caps the level at 30 and the last new ability is discovered at level 23 which gives the game a limited feel near the end.

The storyline isn't very exciting and fall into generic cliches, scattered group needs to look for each other and save the world from this evil force, not something that you haven't seen a dozen times but the game does bring some nice touches of humor to keep things interesting. I wouldn't recommend this game for the storyline, it's strength really are in the turn based combat. In classic 90s RPG fashion, gaining levels really help to advance in the game, your characters are that much stronger with just 1 level higher. There's a few instances where the game gets really hard, but just grinding a level or two should do the trick. One exception is the final boss, which I quit the game instead of trying to beat because it was simply too hard (getting killed in one hit isn't exactly my idea of fun). Looking at some guides, you need to get all the legendary gear for your party (including max levels) and have the perfect strategy and get lucky at the same time... yeah I wasn't willing to grind an extra 10 hours just to see the ending (my total playtime 31 hours with a few hours AFK).

For fans of classic JRPGs, this is a game I can recommend. Not a top tier recommendation, but it's fairly good and enjoyable and ticks the right boxes for that nostalgia kick of that style (it still remains my favorite battle format in RPGs, although I haven't played that many during the decade). For a new dev I would say it's a good start, and I'm looking forward to see where they will go from there.