Indivisible

Indivisible is a platforming game with an RPG active battle system, with some Metroidvania aspects. The graphical style takes heavy influence from anime, and looks beautiful in game or in cutscenes.

You play as Ajna, whose village gets raided and her Father killed. As he is dying, he wants to explain your true heritage, but doesn't have time to. Ajna is then on a quest for vengeance. She discovers she has a weird ability where people beam into her head as they join her party; the first being her father's killer Dhar. Characters don't have much reason for joining you, but then they seem to have no choice when they become one with Ajna. This feature might be a way of explaining how loads of characters can navigate the tricky environment; if they are a passenger in Ajna's head, then only she needs to do the navigation.

The next character you meet is Razmi, who is a weird witch with a tiger skin as clothing. She has a morbid outlook and says some very creepy things. I expected there to only be several characters, but there's loads that you find across the story, then some are found by completing optional sidequests. There's a great range of personalities and fighting styles.

Ajna wants to help people but is very belligerent and rushes into decisions. This becomes a major part of the story, discovering Ajna's heritage and personal growth.

Some of the voice acting sounds familiar, maybe I am thinking it is a similar tone to the Tales series. The main dialogue is voice acted but there's the casual chats with NPCs which aren't.

The main part of the game is platforming, and there's plenty of abilities that are slowly introduced across the game. The initial abilities rely on wall jumping or using your axe to hook into the wall which gives you one extra jump. Abilities like the axe can be used once but the allowance resets when your feet touch the floor. The platforming can be quite fussy; with platforms sometimes requiring a precise landing on the apex of your jump - any earlier and you won't make it. The momentum often feels inconsistent, like sometimes moving/dashing then jumping will only get you a short distance, but you try again and seem to cover more distance. It's important in a platforming game to feel like any failure is your fault and I felt the game wasn't quite right in that regard. Related to the momentum, but more of a visual annoyance is that you can slide a ridiculous distance if there's no place to stand.

Other abilities involve a spear which you can throw but I don't really recall using it since you already have a bow. Later on the spear is used as a pogo stick that can travel over spiked surfaces, or can spring you from the ground. The bow is initially used for hitting switches but then you get a magical ability that can cover spiked walls with flowers to make them safe to wall jump (although some surfaces cannot be covered even if they look the same visually), then there's another ability which seems to turn enemies to wood which turns them into temporary platforms.

The range of abilities is good but I often got confused how to activate each one, or sometimes I would forget what was available to me. You press X for the Axe, but if you want to heavy slam the ground with an axe it is “down and Y”. Y is to throw the spear but “up/down and X” activated the other spear abilities. In some areas, I thought even the game designers forgot about the abilities because you might see what looks like a tricky section, but you could just spring up to the ceiling, hook in your spear then travel across without touching the ground.

With a lot of RPGs, the number of battles can be too frequent but the time to battle can be quite short, so I often wonder why they don't make the battles infrequent, but make them harder. I think Indivisible goes for this approach. Enemies often take a lot of attacks to take them down but there is often enough time to the next one. Enemies are always visible in the environment, which often gives you a chance of either bypassing them completely by leaping over them, or can get the drop on enemies by initiating the battle with an offensive attack like swinging your axe. This does a small amount of damage, but then gives you the first attack which is a huge advantage.

When you have 4 or more characters in your roster, you choose a party of 4 for the combat. Each character is assigned to the controller face buttons X,Y,A, and B. As time goes by, your attack slots are filled. You press the character's button to attack, or hold to block when the enemy is attacking. When attacking, you can press different directions to choose attacks. Each character has a different style, so you have to remember the directions to press. There is a dedicated button to trigger all character blocks but it drains your power bar. Some enemies can attack multiple, or all your characters, so it is a convenient button for that scenario. If you time your block, you can negate damage and even be rewarded with a small amount of health restoration. When enemies are blocking, you need to attack Up then Attack down to remove the guard, but not everyone has a suitable attack. For example, the character "Ginseng"'s Up move is a healing one. It can be hard to remember the directional attacks especially if you like switching up your party for the variety.

Another way the battles are streamlined is that there's no weapon/armour upgrades, no items, and you auto heal between battles.

The only real upgrade system is when you collect the red gems which are in often hard-to-reach places, and may require you to return later to collect them. After collecting a certain amount, you can improve your attack or defence. Attack gives your characters another attack slot so you can attack more times. It applies to the full party rather than applying to a specific character.

The boss battles can be quite interesting because you often alternate between platforming and battles. So after a short battle, the boss may run off and you might need to stun him and initiate the battle again.

The save points are frequent, but there's no quick travel between them.

There's a point where the game makes out it is a point of no return, and you have to climb a mountain with some really tough platforming sections. Then when you reach what you think will be the ending (and I thought it would be a great time for the game to end), you have to revisit all the areas but can now reach new areas within. It's here where the game does feel more like a Metroidvania rather than a straight-up platformer. However, it still involves backtracking through a lot of previously visited areas and is not clear where to go. I managed to find the desired destination, but it felt like pure chance. Maybe an icon on the map would have been the best option here.

Once you have cleared the 3 areas, you have to go back up the mountain once again. After going through the previous climb, you then have even more challenges to double the length. Then some of the challenges get a bit ridiculous and rely a bit on trial and error. I felt really bored by this point and felt it was dragging with a large difficulty spike.

I felt the game seemed a very "7 out of 10", but then because I didn't enjoy the final part, I'd have to give it a 6 instead.

I played the prototype a long while back, I had very high hopes for this game due to it's very unique battle system and the awesome artstyle. I finally played the full game recently and while I really liked it at first, I progressively began to like it less and less until I just had to quit.

The gameplay is a somewhat unique blend between a Turn-Based RPG, an Action RPG, a Fighting Game, and a Metroidvania. (Thought he battle system is partially taken from another game, Valkyrie Profile [ヴァルキリープロファイル]) At first it's very fun and refreshing and it had the potential to be something truly engaging, but the battle system dragged down by the lack of depth, boiling down to simple button mashing due to the lack of certain RPG essentials like Items or spells. The game is full to the brim with party members, having about 20 of them, but only very few of them are truly ever useful, the rest being either weak or gimmicky. Because of this I always try to skip as many fights as possible, usually using overworld abiltiies to jump right past enemies.

The story is an important part of any RPG, but Indivisible's feels insanely rushed and has one of the most inconsistent tones i've ever seen in a videogame, second only to Sonic Forces. Events that should be sad or epic are brushed off with terrible attempts at EarthBound [Mother 2 ギーグの逆襲] style "quirky humor" that simply doesn't fit the overall tone and so many characters are introduced so fast, making it near impossible to care for them. Razmi is great though, her dialogues actually got me a few laughs.

The platforming/progression is easily the best part for me, and is honestly the only thing that would keep me playing. There's tons of well designed, challenging obstacles and discovering new areas can get very satisfying, although, gaining new abilities happens very espontaneously and feels stupidly convenient in the story. (Like a certain part where a character teaches you a new ability that you could've learned before, but it only teaches you now because gameplay demands it)

Overall, this game is painfully average and can be decently fun if you have low expectations. I'd only recommend it if you really like indie metroidvanias, otherwise, it's pure style over substance.