Nobody Saves the World (Xbox Series X)

While “nobody saves the world” sounds like the kind of bleak message a hero might receive after failing to thwart an apocalypse at the end of a story, in the 2022 top down action role-playing game Nobody Saves the World, it is actually a hopeful statement because you are Nobody. The character you play as is a mostly featureless character with a plain white body, no eyes in their sockets, and no memories of any life before they wake up in a wooden shack. Despite being literally referred to as a nobody though, this character soon finds they can become many other people, transformation making up a huge part of this game’s activities.

 

Nobody Saves the World takes place in a world where something called the Calamity has caused corruptive fungi to sprout out all over the land, and while the people of the world would usually turn to their reliable wizard Nostramagus to deal with such a threat, he can’t be found. Luckily, he’s left behind a magic wand that you come across, this wand giving the user the ability to become all sorts of different characters and creatures once they have the proper level of training, and so you set off first as a nobody and soon become nearly twenty different beings in your journey to discover what happened to Nostramagus and try to stop the Calamity from ending the world.

 

Initially though there isn’t too much pressure, the Calamity slow acting and the people able to live with some normalcy and because of this it’s fairly easy to find some unusual and silly interactions between characters out in the world as they go on living their lives. An old woman might dive into a dungeon looking for a skull because she thinks it’s the perfect gift for her goth granddaughter, a member of the league of thieves thinks simply getting a good deal on daggers is basically stealing, and despite Danielle the mummy actually being fairly aware of the dire situation from the start, she still can’t communicate with you well since her wrappings cover her mouth. Perhaps the most pronounced character you’ll come in contact with though is Nostramagus’s pupil Randy the Rad who believes he was entitled the wand you’re using to try and save the world. Initially pompous albeit plainly dim, he’s brought to life quite well with some exaggerated facial art and strange vocal noises and while at first the player no doubt delights in his constant suffering as he repeatedly tries to stand in the path of your progress, he actually becomes pitiable eventually and the game wisely seems to realize this, his character able to remain comedic throughout but not a pure punching bag. Interactions with characters are often short and quick so you won’t get to know too many characters well beyond Randy and even his appearances are spread out a fair bit across the experience, but even in a world filled with deadly monsters and a fungus that has begun to infest the populace, there are still more smiles to be found than scowls.

Nobody Saves the World’s star character can’t really do much of anything in their default form, the Nobody form only having a slap that is deliberately pathetic as you’re meant to instead utilize your slowly growing repertoire of alternate selves. Early on you get a few fairly typical ideas for what you might find in an RPG, the ranger and guard giving you a decent archer and knight class you can swap to for easy enough combat, but where Nobody Saves the World really shines is in the less typical forms you acquire. You can become a bodybuilder who hurls giant barbells at foes, a horse who relies on rear leg kicks and trampling, and a rather ghastly mermaid who can fire high-speed bubbles or inflate them until they pop for damage. Some forms like the egg are just for very specific interactions, but the different identities do a good job standing out in the game’s quick and often crowded combat situations as you’ll often find small hordes of monsters sprinting towards you at once looking for a fight. The battle styles can include things like the ghost who focuses more on maintaining a damaging aura while the zombie can infect enemies who rise up as zombies themselves so you’re soon the one bringing a small army to each quick battle, and while there is certainly overlap in the way certain forms fight, it’s still easy to figure out situations where one might be more beneficial since even the game’s ultimate form has a few drawbacks on top of its plentiful perks.

 

The forms all have a single unique attack only they can use but some can learn up to three other abilities and, more importantly, all but the basic attack can eventually be set to other forms. You can start to give characters like the horse long range options by giving it some of the ranger’s arrow firing powers, and since this applies to passive powers as well, you can take something like the rat’s ability to build up poison with its bites and give it to something like the slug whose rapid fire tears can inflict poison quickly and from afar. Mixing and matching these powers to make better fighters is certainly a valid idea for certain areas like the story dungeons, but the game gets a lot more mileage out of these from quests and the demi-dungeons. At points in the game you might encounter things like a man who claims he can kill a rat in a single punch and you need to figure out which mix of abilities might help you debunk that claim as the rat, or in another situation you might find a demi-dungeon where you need to fight your way through it despite the fact both you and all the enemies deal increased damage to the point where every attack is practically a guaranteed one hit kill. That demi-dungeon is certainly more flexible in the ways you can build a form up with shared abilities to overcome it, but there are quests out in the world that ask you to think about the synergy in your vast repertoire to solve a riddle or overcome a situation that make this melding of powers a more compelling part of developing your forms.

 

To unlock new abilities for a form and in turn acquire additional forms though you’ll have to complete form-specific quests. These usually start off just as a way of encouraging you try out their new abilities, the game tracking how many times you used a power and eventually rewarding you with some experience once you’ve used the power enough times. Soon though, these quests will require you to utilize abilities from other forms in tandem with your usual tricks, and since sometimes you might not even have the form with the required ability, the game is able to make sure you return to less useful forms like the turtle later in the adventure to try and level them up some more. There are plenty of demi-dungeons out in the world as well as creatures mulling about out in the open to fight so you can work towards these important tasks for personal progression and this is a smart way to make sure few forms are outright abandoned until you’re late in the game and trying to get them all to their max rating. However, there are a few issues with the system, one being that the quick change wheel for switching forms isn’t customizable. Once you get too many forms for it to display, the wheel will start shoving out forms you haven’t transformed into recently in favor of the new ones. You can transform through the information menu that also lets you do things like customize ability sets and get more details on active quests, so while it’s not impossible to get to the form you want to be no matter the situation, it is a little less convenient.

Something that has a greater effect on the form training process though is the existence of wards. There are four damage types in Nobody Saves the World: blunt, sharp, dark, and light. Each damaging ability falls under one of these umbrellas and when you’re in a dungeon, there are sometimes enemies who have wards active that make them invincible until they’re hit with the right damage type. For the most part a form will focus on one damage type so having powers from other forms is often key to breaking these wards and thankfully every dungeon warns you which wards will be present within, but this does mean sometimes you will be locked into ward-breaking powers rather than focusing on abilities you need to use for quest progress. Unfortunately, a good deal of quests for the forms do involve breaking wards, and it’s often wards they might not have a strong affiliation with. This wouldn’t be so bad if ward quests were some of the first you received and clearing form quests wasn’t necessary for unlocking more of them, but sometimes you might find yourself having cleared out every dungeon you can find with a specific ward type before the ward quest pops up. This means to clear that quest you’d have to dive back in for the express purpose of clearing this quest so you can keep your form growing, and while it can be said at times you are grinding for experience just using characters with certain abilities rather than focusing on pure effective strength, those at least urge you into interesting play styles while ward clearing can lead to straight up repetition whose only purpose is to finish a quest.

 

Luckily much more of the adventure can instead focus on forward progress with many opportunities to train up your different selves more naturally. Enemy monsters do come in an appreciably wide set of shapes with different attack methods even if there’s a big focus on crowds of them rushing towards you, but while your health may seem fairly high at first it actually helps you better survive when you are trying to make some trickier forms work. Bosses are a bit plainer, often just a giant version of a familiar strong monster type who has maybe a new move or two, but there are a few true bosses along the story path. The story mostly focuses on a handful of true dungeons that must be accessed by acquiring stars, these serving as a secondary rewards for completing quests be they form based ones or things like working with the New League of Wizards and other citizens on more structured tasks. There are more stars than you’ll need to access important areas and the many ways to earn them mean you can do things like avoid using forms you don’t like or skip demi-dungeons that might be too difficult, and with even the merchant selling them, you can make your way to the story’s end without miring yourself in potential pitfalls like the ward quests. The merchant does sell much better items though that you buy with the plentiful cash that spills out of defeated enemies and broken objects, things like new passive abilities, repeatable quests that are simple things like grabbing healing items, and upgrades to stats like defense likely more important to the player than a bag of stars they could get other ways.

 

There is also a good range in the kinds of dungeons you enter, be they a giant rotting gourd, a gingerbread house, the belly of a whale, or the interior of a destroyed robot, and even out in the world you can find interesting environments like a cave you need to light up by killing certain monsters or a path of doom filled with claustrophobic encounters one after the other. The dungeon interiors, while having unique visual directions, are mildly randomized though but not to such a degree that it shakes things up too much if you do die and they get shuffled around. Enemies do get stronger in line with your own growth so you can explore different parts of the world with only a few barriers to where you can access until certain story beats happen, and some overworld creatures remain weak so instead of getting pestered by every monster no matter where you go, you have to dive into a den of monsters where you’ll know they’ll be set to be competitive. The battles can be rather simple at times so keeping them from being easy too at least helps the game retain some challenge as you get stronger and stronger but the game could have probably benefited more from more foes who rely on ability strategy over ward protection such as the bomb-filled skull spiders that discourage melee approaches or the one demi-dungeon where enemies release rocket blasts on death that you have to figure out how to account for.

THE VERDICT: Nobody Saves the World has a compelling transformation system where combining the abilities of a creative set of forms makes for unique battle opportunities and different ways to complete the rewarding leveling quests needed to get new personas. Some ideas like the ward system feel like a weak way to limit your expanding skill set, but the ability to constantly make progress on new important unlockables makes every new battle an opportunity and the enemies you encounter put up a good fight even if many monsters rely on charging towards you. With a whimsical world despite the dark threat hanging over it and some clever requests from characters that make you think of your forms more as puzzle tools, Nobody Saves the World remains an exciting journey on seeing what’s next for you to find and for you to utilize as the game’s creativity takes it into some fairly fun directions.

 

And so, I give Nobody Saves the World for Xbox Series X…

A GOOD rating. The ward system isn’t exactly an albatross around the game’s neck, when it’s a new dungeon with some inconvenient wards you can usually just set a certain ability on a character and still use them well enough, but its simplicity in blocking some progress while also being required for form quests makes it more of a negative mark on the game than something that adds a lot with its presence. Enemies like the exploding skulls feel more in line with what Nobody Saves the World should have leaned into more, because when you recognize a pesky foe you can set a wider range of special skills to deal with them or favor a persona that will take care of them more naturally rather than just needing a certain attack type as a sort of key to open up a foe to damage. Nobody Saves the World is much more than those wards though, the customization options you get from developing your different transformations adding up to an increasing list of interesting synergies and a repertoire of different battle types that likely benefit some from the simplicity of many enemies in that you can tackle those charging monsters both with a tiny rat’s bites or with a zombie army and still come out on top. One has to fight more and developing some powerful mixes can be incredibly satisfying, and the ability to always work towards new content with the various form quests is both a smart way to give the player smaller goals along the adventure and to encourage them to better explore the range of powers they’ll acquire. The number of demi-dungeons likely lead to their simpler bosses, many of them having interesting visual designs still that match the game’s general mix of having both things you expect on a fantasy journey and some inventive inclusions.

 

Perhaps instead of the phrase Nobody Saves the World, it might be better said that Anybody Can Save the World, be they a slug, a rat, a bodybuilder, or a magician. Perhaps it could even be said that Everybody Can Save the World considering the cross-pollination going on in terms of the powers being shared across the many forms. This creative mix of various identities for you to assume and customize definitely creates a world worth exploring to its fullest and quests that are mostly satisfying to complete, its many features coming together in a varied adventure that’s easy to get sucked into as you can’t wait to see what you’ll turn into next.