Platform: Switch
Publisher: THQ Nordic
Developer: Airship Syndicate
Genre: RPG
Players: 1
Release Date: May 15, 2018
Just over a year into the lifespan of the Nintendo Switch, players have access to some fantastic samples of every popular genre available. That being said, there’s been a notable absence of tentpole turn-based RPGs available in the early Switch line-up, aside from the more action-oriented Xenoblade: Chronicles 2.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar might have beaten the highly anticipated Octopath Traveler to the punch in marking a shift in that trend. Based on a late 90’s comic series by the game’s lead developer, Joe Madureira, Nightwar is fun, well-paced and stocked with both classic flair and modern savvy.
Presentation
In creating a game that continues a fairly well-established story, developer Airship Syndicate has managed to build something that plays fairly well to players completely unfamiliar with the Battle Chasers world. That being said, the game doesn’t try to pretend the original series didn’t exist; there’s very little backtracking or over-explaining, and little time is wasted getting players into the action.
A brief prologue text block sets up the Chasers themselves and predictably puts them in immediate peril. It’s refreshing to see how Nightwar goes the extra mile to not make series veterans feel left out. It is possible to reboot a franchise without pandering to the new crowd, and just enough of the Chasers history is left unexplained to leave die-hard fans connected, but still give new players all they need to enjoy the story.
The game itself is sectioned into three unique models: the overworld, dungeons, and the battle screen. The overworld map is minimally explorable, limiting movement to strict paths as you traverse the game world. It’s from this screen that you’ll enter dungeons and access the features of the game’s main hub town, Harm’s Way.
The overworld does appear as a beautifully detailed map, and keeps movement simple and focused on your team’s goals. However, it does feel a little limiting, breaking up the game’s immersion in a minimal but nonetheless awkward way.
Interactions are based on pre-defined points along the map, but your sprites move fluidly along each path, which sometimes forces you to overshoot, say, the tavern door. This forces a short but nonetheless annoying dance of fiddling yourself into place before you get a button prompt to enter.
You’ll also encounter random enemies along the overworld paths, a throwback to random encounters in classic JRPGs. The battle screen itself is pretty self-evident: you see your own party on one side and enemies on the other, with prompts for combat actions and turn order overlayed.
It’s on this screen that Nightwar’s visual and audio elements really shine. Madureira’s signature artistic style is on full display, beautifully rendered as 3D sprites and backdrops. Animations are fluid and natural; sword strikes and punches feel weighty and satisfying, while magical arts are just a joy to watch. The first time Knolan bats a ball of energy into an enemy with his staff, something really clicks and you realize just how detailed everything is in these battle sequences.
Dungeons are the main feature of exploration in Nightwar, placing characters in winding caverns, city streets and ancient ruins filled with enemies and treasure. These dungeons are nearly as detailed as the battle screen; beautifully rendered and generally well laid-out. What’s more, the isometric camera and impressive detail makes me yearn for an Airship Syndicate-built dungeon crawler in the style of Diablo.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar puts players in control of a rag-tag group of adventurers. To those familiar with the original comic series, the group needs no introduction, but the game does a fair job of getting the gist of each character across while still allowing for the fact that these characters are already fully fleshed-out.
The group revolves, in many ways, around Gully, a young girl in possession of her father’s gauntlets. Interestingly, Gully acts as the group’s tank class, though the team is amusingly brought together specifically to protect her. Calibretto, a war golem built by the wizard Knolan, provides healing and support damage similar to Knolan himself, who specializes in magical damage and protection and mass healing. Garrison provides the bulk of your DPS and physical ailments like bleeding, while Red Monika adds further damage as the unpredictable team rogue.
It’s a well-rounded group, and their dynamic certainly grows as the game progresses. Players get little snippets of the team’s relationships during dialogue, especially during rest periods, so its definitely worth it to take time out to let everyone speak their piece.
Overall, Battle Chasers: Nightwar presents a beautiful mix of 2D and 3D visuals that feels cohesive and true to Madureira’s original series. Fans of the art style present in the Darksiders saga (another product of Madureira’s guiding hand) will be right at home here.
The separation between the flat, structured overworld and the more organic dungeons and battles can be jarring, and it does make the world feel a bit small and segmented. Still, it doesn’t quite break the experience altogether, and over time the basic loop that these three areas make up begins to feel like the natural approach.
Gameplay
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of Battle Chasers: Nightwar is its combat. Airship Syndicate has made an amazing homage to iconic early turn-based games like Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire. It feels lovingly crafted in that early style, and yet somehow specifically modern in its execution.
Present are all of the standby mechanics you’d expect from such a system. Battles are triggered in the overworld or dungeons when an enemy makes contact, and the screen populates with characters facing off against each other. You can view the list of turns (based on each character’s “haste” stat and other factors) and pick actions for each member of your team.
Actions are pretty standard for the most part: each party member can attack or defend, and you’ll need to use each strategically to get the upper hand on timing. Abilities add more variables to the party, but they take additional time to cast, which forces you to re-plan your approach as the turn list shifts.
Adding to the basic actions is a system called “overcharge.” Each character builds overcharge with certain actions, which acts as an extension of mana bars. It’s a useful system, especially when dungeons get long and mana starts to run low, as you can effectively support your lack of mana with carefully built overcharge meters. Adding to this, some abilities are made more devastating by consuming overcharge, making it more powerful as a burst damage feature for big fights.
Fighters also built “burst” meter as they attack and use abilities. Each character’s burst move serves a different purpose relevant to the character’s class: Calibretto heals the party and removes debuffs, Gully can shield her friends, Garrison applies devastating bleed status and high damage, and so on. Burst builds quickly, so there’s no need to save it for big fights. Don’t be shy about letting burst moves loose on dungeon mobs.
Combat aside, Nightwar adds some unique flair to exploration as well. Dungeons contain pretty standard puzzles, traps and prowling enemies, and plenty of loot chests to crack open. However, since you enter dungeons from the overworld, you get an arcade-esque choice of difficulty before entering for the first time. Picking a harder mode for a dungeon provides tougher, more frequent encounters, but yields higher rewards in the form of chests when the dungeon is clear.
Inside dungeons, each character has abilities that grant particular aid while exploring, or offer boons at the start of combat. Calibretto, for instance, can heal the party while outside of combat. Garrison can dash through traps or away from charging enemies, but dashing into mobs grants a turn advantage in combat. Gully can smash walls, and smashing enemies before combat starts stuns them on their first few turns. It’s an elegant system if used properly, but charges of each ability are limited, and dungeons are often so long that they run out long before you get near the final boss.
You’ll find options to heal and resupply are pretty much nonexistent once you enter a dungeon, but you can save and exit to the overworld at any time, and fast-travel pads scattered throughout allow for quick returns to the dungeon entrance. It’s a shame a system wasn’t built in to allow for quick escapes, though. A menu option to “leave dungeon” or even a consumable item like Pokémon’s “Escape Rope” would be a nice option; currently only exiting to the main menu or physically leaving the dungeon returns you to the overworld to head back to the inn.
Performance on the Switch, in particular, is large as expected. The game looks crisp and vibrant in both handheld and docked modes, and load times are blessedly shorter than they could have been for the content you get on the other side of them. Framerate drops are fairly rare but do happen when enemies get a little too crowded on the screen, or effects in battle get a little too zealous. All in all, though, the experience is on par with that of the earlier PC or console releases, and the handheld aspect once again makes the Switch version a very attractive option.
Final Thoughts
With all that Nightwar has to offer, it calls into sharp contrast everything apparently missing. The constant shift between overworld, dungeon, and battle feels a little disjointed, almost as if the team had more ambitious plans for the world but couldn’t quite get everything in. Dungeons are fun but feel a bit too long at times, though the combat is so satisfying it’s hard to complain.
Character progression, crafting, and items feel well-paced for the difficulty curve, and very rarely do you feel under- or over-powered for very long. There’s plenty of shops and unique features in town to explore, but not so much that you feel burdened by side ventures. It’s an impressive feat of balance; one that feels like a sharp turn away from modern collect-and-craft fests in the RPG space.
Time and again, Joe Madureira and company prove that they really have a handle on some of the classics. It’s worth knowing that many of the developers at Airship Syndicate are a part of the original team at Vigil responsible for Darksiders. That series rather famously took queues from action RPGs like The Legend of Zelda and Diablo, creating a peculiar sort of “greatest hits” of time-tested game mechanics.
It’s nice to see Battle Chasers: Nightwar apparently continuing that tradition. What appears to be a fairly on-the-nose nod to 90’s comics and video games belies a lovingly crafted, genuinely engaging blend of exploration and strategic combat that stands well enough on its own, but is made all the richer for its heritage.
Review Copy Provided by Evolve.
