Battle Chasers: Nightwar

Battle Chasers: Nightwar, a turn-based RPG based on Joe Madureira’s fantasy comic, boasts a beautiful art style and a serviceable, if repetitive combat system. Unfortunately, its barebones story leaves much to be desired: Nightwar may look and play alright, but the narrative element that could have improved the experience is just not there.

The story follows a group of misfits, led by a girl named Gully, who wears a pair of magical gauntlets from her dead father, who was once a great hero. This puts a target on her back, but fortunately, she has some friends (the swordsman Garrison, the golem Calibretto, the rogue Red Monika, and the wizard Knolan) to protect her. These gauntlets, her father’s story, and his past enemies don’t matter in the slightest, however, as Gully and her friends fall from an airship during the first cutscene and become stranded on an island that has nothing to do with their original quest.

Nightwar tells a standalone story that doesn’t intend to develop any of its main characters. Maybe it’s afraid of changing too much of the source material and upset fans (even though Madureira is credited as both writer and director), maybe the comic itself was never deep to begin with – either way, the fact is that the game never attempts to draw a narrative arc for its central figures, avoiding any moment that could explore their personalities. It presents Gully’s party as they are – their most basic archetypal traits – and leave it at that. This means that, in cutscenes, they always speak in practical, exposition-friendly terms, talking only about where they must go next, which artifact they must acquire, and what monster they must destroy. These characters become interchangeable narrative-wise, never making an individual choice that impacts the story.

It’s not that the plot of Nightwar is unoriginal or that its cast is limited to archetypes (Garrison is the brooding warrior, Red Monika is the sly rogue that uses her good looks to get out of trouble) – even though all these things are true – but that there’s barely any attempt to develop any narrative element at play. Party banter is limited to specific scenes that may unlock when the party rests at an Inn, for example, but even they are few and far between. We see Garrison and Calibretto caring for Gully’s welfare – Garrison in a more aggressive way – or distrusting the eventual new party member. Nightwar could have used many more of these scenes to flesh out these characters, letting them interact with each other in more personal ways.

Take the moment when a villain says to Gully’s party, “There is a shadow in each of you. The good is but a cage for the ambitious darkness within.” This is great, except we don’t buy it: up to this point, there wasn’t any kind of story moment that tested these characters’ morality and resolve. They just kept moving from one dungeon to the next, defeating bandits and monsters. The victory animation during battles, when a couple of birds land on top of Calibretto, manages to say more about the golem’s gentle nature than the game’s main cutscenes combined – even though it’s a bit funny that these birds still land on him when he’s exploring an underground sewer system.

If the story in Nightwar serves just to provide context for the battles, how does the combat system fares? This is a turn-based RPG, where we choose three characters to form our party. The main mechanic here is called “Overcharge”: using basic attacks rewards a character with overcharge points, which are consumed in the place of mana when that character uses a skill. The point of this system is to save mana, which leads to a basic strategic question: is it better to save mana for the next turn or dispatch an enemy outright? It has, however, a major drawback: the process of getting overcharge points extends the duration of battles, as we are encouraged to use simple attacks first, dealing little damage. To counterbalance this, powerful skills also take a while to prepare/cast, while basic attacks are instant: in other words, it’s a combat system designed to be on the slow side anyway. Some skills also get stronger the more overcharge points a character has accrued, making the act of acquiring them first often be the most sensible action.

Nightwar is also fond of status effects: we have bleed, poison, and ignite, which all do the same thing, dealing damage over time, and then we also have arcane sickness and sunder, which make the target weaker to magical and physical damage respectively, and then we have doom, chill, and the list goes on. The good news is that status effects are more indispensable here than in most JRPGs and also easier to handle: most of the basic attack options inflict one of these effects and most of them stack, increasing in potency. Garrison has a simple attack that does little damage but inflicts bleed while acquiring many overcharge points: using this attack twice makes the enemy suffer two bleed wounds per action and leaves the warrior ready to unleash any of his best skills without spending a single point of mana.

This leads to some synergy between the party: Calibretto’s simple attack inflicts sunder, making Garrison deal more damage, while the warrior can apply haste on the golem, making him heal faster. Even so, these characters are mostly confined to their basic roles. Garrison is the damage dealer, Gully and Monika are the tanks – they taunt the enemy and then either try to shield themselves or evade the attack –, while Knolan deals magic damage and Calibretto functions as the healer. They start with these roles and end with them, acquiring just some new moves now and then – moves that serve to make them more useful at their jobs instead of diversifying their function in battle.

Levels matter a lot in Nightwar, increasing much of the damage characters deal or heal, but they rarely get to actually level up. This is almost a thirty-hour game where the level cap is just 30, which shows how character progression is slow. But the issue here is that this encourages us to stick with the same party members until the end of the game, as characters that are left in the bench during a dungeon don’t earn experience and quickly stay behind: it’s either sticking with one party or senseless grinding. In other words, repetition is certain.

There’s also some crafting in the game: we can craft potions, weapons, armor, and create some enchantments. However, as is the case with most games with crafting, the activity is rarely worth the hassle: we usually find better equipment as loot in dungeons or by completing sidequests, while potions are worthless all around, recovering a laughable amount of health points. We should stock up on the one potion that revives a fallen party member and that’s it. Enchantments, however, are much better since they function as permanent upgrades to weapons and armor.

The futility of crafting negatively impacts the exploration part of the game – outside dungeons we move around the world map in a top-down perspective – since the things we stumble upon are usually material for crafting. Dungeons, meanwhile, are randomly generated and we can select their difficulty before entering, which directly impacts the loot we receive. During dungeons, we thankfully can see enemies approaching before battle and can use the opportunity to inflict a status effect on them before the fight begins.

Sidequests are the better part of Nightwar, sometimes offering a more engaging narrative than the main plot. A stand out is the one about a mysterious being living at the bottom of a well, who asks for increasingly more difficult things while warning us they’re not going to give us any reward for the trouble: it’s a whimsical quest that requires a fair bit of backtracking, but justifies it, as we have to feel bothered by the trouble for the payoff to work.

Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a good-looking game that manages to get a lot of the basics right. Unfortunately, the lack of a properly-developed story prevents it from achieving greatness, leaving its combat system and art style to do all the heavy lifting.

June 07, 2022.