Alvastia Chronicles (Xbox One)

Many Japanese role-playing games feature a small band of heroes rising up to try and save their world, but with the stakes so dire, you would think there would be more people willing to chip in and lend a hand. That is where Alvastia Chronicles comes in, this particular group of adventurers not just recruiting incredibly capable warriors but anyone who’s willing to lend their strength to the cause. Be they the simple elf guard at the front of a humble village, a chef who can provide useful treats, or a penguin who was hanging out in a cave for some reason, Alvastia Chronicles is about a world banding together to save itself.

 

Despite the appeal being that there are over 100 companions to recruit for your party, the story focuses mostly on a set of four characters who serve as the main commanders of these forces. The game begins with a young man named Alan and his sister Elmia growing fed up with the constant threat of monster attacks on their world, and that desire to make a change ends up lighting a fire in the hearts of people they come across in their journey, some citizens immediately pledging their power to the pair while others might need help or expect something from the player before they’ll join. Some are as simple as bringing the right items or doing a basic quest like delivering a message while other prospective party members will first want you to be a certain level or have recruited other characters, the game designed so that you can’t get every party member before you reach the first of the game’s two endings.

 

The other key characters and the only other members of your party who really guide the action while members of it are Raine the orcish woman who hopes to find a cure for the terrible disease her brother and others in her home village have while Gil is a far less serious character who bounces off her well with his premise. Gill is an elf who seems to be head over heels for most any woman, recognizing the beauty in all of them and providing some amusing moments as he creatively compliments any he meets during the adventure. Raine is a frequent object of his affection and their dynamic is cute enough, but it does get old and predictable over time, although not as much as other jokes told repeatedly during the adventure. Elmia is a priestess who holds a special power to repel monsters with her prayers while Alan is her protector, and due to the psychological trauma of a monster attack during his youth, Alan can’t speak in what at first seems like an attempt to lean into the cliche of RPG protagonists being silent. However, Alan does want to speak and participate in conversations and often writes down his thoughts or relies on others to interpret his miming, but while these two would have been a fine pair of leads, the game constantly tells the same joke that these siblings might have a romantic interest in each other. Even if such unfortunate implications don’t bug you at first, the repeated joke formula grows irritating, and vital plot moments tend to be surrounded by the same predictable jokes that wear down your interest in the main band of four heroes.

While the premise of over 100 fighters on your team might sound daunting at first, it’s actually more manageable than you might be lead to believe by the game bombarding you with long tutorial messages and a plethora of systems that aren’t as complex as they seem. When you enter a turn-based battle either as a story encounter with a boss or as a random event where you fight generic fantasy monsters while exploring, you will only be controlling a set of 12 characters. Three of those characters are Alan, Raine, and Gil, each one of them having a set of three companions you can set to assist that specific character. Elmia is present as well during fights, but she mostly hangs out in the back and will provide buffs as she pleases and can build up power to grant you a special turn where you can unleash your most powerful attacks.

 

For the most part the focus is on the three leader characters, Alan, Raine, and Gil being the ones who you equip new gear to and whose stats can be increased with upgrade items. The companions you assign to each of the leaders will attack in tandem with their leader character, but every companion has their own set of skills they can call on instead. You can only use one attack or ability per turn for each grouping of four party members, so it’s almost like you’re customizing a set of three characters rather than truly commanding a little army. Many potential companions are of a similar stripe such as characters who can be classified as dancers, berserkers, clerics, and other classes, but the abilities they learn and their individual strengths might be a bit different to set them apart. A few story characters can join your group as well although usually after they’ve played their roles like being the leader of a village or even an enemy switching to your side, and there are some off the wall ideas found like being able to recruit living furniture and household pets, there even being a cat named Garfield who can tag along.

 

The abilities the party members bring to the table can be as simple as an elemental magic spell or the option to strike multiple times with that character rather than attacking as a group, but there are some abilities that can be incredibly strong. Bards eventually get the ability to instantly boost all of the stats of your party members, and status effects like paralysis can impact many enemies and make it more likely you’ll deal heavy damage while taking barely any blows yourself. You have healing options both in characters with such skills and items you can gather, but when a battle is over your team will be completely healed regardless of what state they were in at the end of the fight. Abilities work in a similar manner where they all have a set amount of uses per battle and are refreshed after, but a good party composition can mean you’ll get to execute some of the extremely powerful abilities multiple times.  Many battles, even the climactic fights with the game’s strongest bosses, can be easily trivialized by a party composition that doesn’t take too much effort to put together, and there are even more systems in place to make your party too strong for their own good.

One such system is the strategy room where you can stick characters you aren’t using in battle to provide passive buffs to the party’s stats instead. Individual companions can be leveled up with green orbs that are given out often and with every new member added to the team, the orbs allowing you to alter your party members so they’re as strong as someone twice their level. On top of all these boons you also have the fact that Alvastia Chronicles was originally a mobile game with the ability to use real money to purchase incredibly strong items and equipment. Even if you avoid doing so intentionally, some optional areas of the game like city treasuries or Butler’s tower require you to spend the special currency if you want to see that content and sometimes you might bumble into an incredibly powerful weapon or form of crafting material without realizing. You get the premium currency at a slow and steady rate with a batch of 10 coming every few monster fights so the game is urging you to spend it, but even if you ignore it to the best of your ability the systems at play aren’t balanced well once you’ve started to get a decent party going. Very few foes can stand against a team with some thought put into its composition, even bosses folding in a few turns and struggling to leave a mark that sticks on your heroes.

 

There are a lot of optional tasks to complete like recruiting everyone possible, fighting in the various battle arenas, or doing the post-game story that wraps up some loose ends, but while it is rewarding to constantly get new party members who you can swap in along the adventure, doing anything too involved to earn them hardly feels worth the effort. You’ll likely have developed an already all-too-powerful party before you can start to get the really strong members on your team, so their boost in competency isn’t felt too much. Some of the higher leveled sidequests can be quite hard mostly because you need to be the right level for them despite being able to access them before you are, but strategy rarely proves to be the deciding factor in overcoming those trials, and with Alvastia being a fairly plain world to explore, it’s hard to get motivated to do anything that really requires going off the beaten path.

THE VERDICT: Recruiting a huge and varied party can make Alvastia Chronicles a bit entertaining, but the game loses its luster early once you’ve got enough power to easily conquer most any foe and the story’s attempts at heartfelt moments or interesting developments are hurt by the focus constantly shifting to rehashed jokes. If Alvastia Chronicles was a cakewalk attached to a compelling story or kept its generic but groan-worthy writing while having a compelling party construction system it would have some sort of hook, but instead its multitude of systems come together to make battles too easy to entertain while the story undermines its better moments with repetitive and uncomfortable humor.

 

And so, I give Alvastia Chronicles for Xbox One…

A BAD rating. While I’d definitely recommend toning down certain implications in the story’s writing at least to get the joke telling away from leaning on the same premises time and time again, the real problem with Alvastia Chronicles is its difficulty balance, and it’s not surprising it is the big issue. With so many potential party members you either risk making them pointless by making them too weak or unexciting if they’re all mediocre, so the game gives you some impressive abilities to unlock that end up making most fights fairly easy to win no matter the foe. Ideas like the strategy room are nice in that they keep the unused recruits from being benchwarmers, but they also add to a rapidly climbing party strength that doesn’t require much extra effort to achieve great heights. The game practically wants you to trivialize its battle system by way of being able to buy weapons and upgrades you shouldn’t have at that point in the game with the special currency, but even after the console release meant retooling it away from its money-hungry mobile game design, the game is already fairly easy without piling on such boons. With the player’s team healing completely after each battle and abilities having limited uses an approach more similar to Cosmic Star Heroine could benefit the title where each battle is meant to require some form of strategy, but the random battles here are frequent and help your power inflate before you reach the foes that could have demanded some sort of tactical approach if you weren’t so overpowered.

 

Alvastia Chronicles isn’t a doomed template for a game even though it gets a lot wrong both in its writing and its battle structure. It’s an indulgent game, greedily hedonistic in efforts to squeeze every laugh out of a joke concept or providing far too many means to make the player feel powerful without that strength having meaningful context. The boast of over 100 companions is just part of wanting to overwhelm the player with more than they thought they could ask for, but a role-playing game with turn-based battles needs all of its content to have some enjoyable substance to it or else it feels hollow. While this may be one of the few RPGs where you can get such an impressive stable of companions to help save the world, Alvastia Chronicles makes the task so straightforward it feels like all of that extra help was far too much overkill.