Chroma Quaternion (Android)
Jul. 1st, 2024 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn this world, people (“Springizens”) are born from the magical springs and the Quadeities assign them “roles”, which determine their path in life and their special abilities. The four countries each experience a different season year-round, and through the Saison Order they each worship one of the four Quadeities. Ark is an Evil Hunter (which means he hunts evil, not that he’s a hunter who is evil), and that means he can work as a priest and teacher in a small town. But something happens to the Spring Deity and earthquakes start happening, and he (and his giant fluffy dog) ends up escorting the local rebellious princess and her maidservant around to try to figure out what’s going on.
The systems and setup are a lot of the standards for recent EXE-Create games (Miden Tower onwards). You get lots of weapons with random bonuses on them. Instead of combining them, you can put them in the “recycle pot” and turn them into rings that keep the special powers, and then sacrifice weapons to strengthen those rings. Interestingly, all characters can use the same single weapon type, but most use different armors.
The battle system is also very familiar, with the 3x3 grid setup for skill areas and “follow” attacks in battles. You heal to full after every battle, and there’s no MP, just skill cooldowns. (And the autobattle can be set to freely use skills, because why not?) There are lots of skill sets associated with each role that you can learn for each character, though most of them are variants on the usual “damage on an area, inflict status effect, inflict stat up/down, heal an area, summon a helper” selection. Enemies have weaknesses to various elements and physical damage types, but hitting weak points honestly isn’t terribly important to strategy. The noteworthy new thing is they cribbed from Bravely Default and you can “Act Skip” up to three turns and bank them for later usage in combos; which occasionally makes some abilities stronger but mostly you have to keep track of when the enemies bank turns so you can use an “Act Breaker” before you get smashed.
Maidam Curie is back, running the arena again. There are three daily “Missions” from her that get you IAP currency, which you can also get from the daily lottery and randomly after battles. As usual, that currency can be spent on reward doublers, a few powerful equipment pieces, keys to storehouses scattered through the game, the key to the bonus dungeon, and a powerful weapons lottery. None of it is super-necessary, but I appreciate that a little patience will open the bonus dungeon without having to pay more. (There’s also a multi-dungeon postgame quest that she gives you, full of overpowered bonus bosses. I only did part of it, but even doing part of it made the postgame final dungeon laughably easy.)
I’ll admit, the fact that you have to do the first dungeon twice—even though it’s short and fast, and you can turn off the encounters the second time—put me on guard. But I was worried for nothing, as there are actually some pretty clever dungeon designs and decent variety. Like most games of this style, it zips along at a pleasant pace and if you need to grind (or want to, because every 20 levels you need “refine” your roles to keep upgrading them) there are shrines at the beginning of each dungeon to let you auto-summon battles or change the encounter rate.
They get credit for “gameplay and story integration,” in that everything in the world revolves around Roles: You need to acquire certain roles for plot reasons, but then you can equip them and use the skills related to them or not, as you see fit. The plot revolves around the Quadeities having their roles stolen, because these rules even apply to the gods. And Ark, the main character, has a mystery role that no one understands, which figures into his place in the story and also unlocks as his best role at the end.
SPOILERS:
In addition to the four Quadeities, there was a fifth deity named Exterminincta who was created by the main villain, a human in the previous version of the world who had a role that allowed him to steal other roles. She wiped out humanity, so the Quadeities forced her into reincarnation and re-created the world of Springizens. That human managed to survive and was secretly manipulating the Saison Order to steal the roles of the four Quadeities and eventually revive Exterminincta to wipe out the Springizens, too. The two children who keep recurring are the reincarnation of the fifth deity...but so are Ark and his dog, who were the incarnation of Exterminincta’s “good heart”. In the good ending, all four of them merge to re-create a kind Exterminincta, and everyone’s memory of Ark is erased, but he’s reborn as a baby two years later. In the True Ending, all five of them are able to keep their separate existences, so Exterminincta joins the two children as pop stars and Ark goes back to being a teacher.
Overall: This was solid. Like many games in this style, it probably had too many systems—there were definitely too many roles and the back-and-forth to unlock and refine them was annoying. But the plot was solid, the translation was good, the difficulty was well-managed, and the dungeons were varied enough to be interested. This goes on the “recommended” list.
The systems and setup are a lot of the standards for recent EXE-Create games (Miden Tower onwards). You get lots of weapons with random bonuses on them. Instead of combining them, you can put them in the “recycle pot” and turn them into rings that keep the special powers, and then sacrifice weapons to strengthen those rings. Interestingly, all characters can use the same single weapon type, but most use different armors.
The battle system is also very familiar, with the 3x3 grid setup for skill areas and “follow” attacks in battles. You heal to full after every battle, and there’s no MP, just skill cooldowns. (And the autobattle can be set to freely use skills, because why not?) There are lots of skill sets associated with each role that you can learn for each character, though most of them are variants on the usual “damage on an area, inflict status effect, inflict stat up/down, heal an area, summon a helper” selection. Enemies have weaknesses to various elements and physical damage types, but hitting weak points honestly isn’t terribly important to strategy. The noteworthy new thing is they cribbed from Bravely Default and you can “Act Skip” up to three turns and bank them for later usage in combos; which occasionally makes some abilities stronger but mostly you have to keep track of when the enemies bank turns so you can use an “Act Breaker” before you get smashed.
Maidam Curie is back, running the arena again. There are three daily “Missions” from her that get you IAP currency, which you can also get from the daily lottery and randomly after battles. As usual, that currency can be spent on reward doublers, a few powerful equipment pieces, keys to storehouses scattered through the game, the key to the bonus dungeon, and a powerful weapons lottery. None of it is super-necessary, but I appreciate that a little patience will open the bonus dungeon without having to pay more. (There’s also a multi-dungeon postgame quest that she gives you, full of overpowered bonus bosses. I only did part of it, but even doing part of it made the postgame final dungeon laughably easy.)
I’ll admit, the fact that you have to do the first dungeon twice—even though it’s short and fast, and you can turn off the encounters the second time—put me on guard. But I was worried for nothing, as there are actually some pretty clever dungeon designs and decent variety. Like most games of this style, it zips along at a pleasant pace and if you need to grind (or want to, because every 20 levels you need “refine” your roles to keep upgrading them) there are shrines at the beginning of each dungeon to let you auto-summon battles or change the encounter rate.
They get credit for “gameplay and story integration,” in that everything in the world revolves around Roles: You need to acquire certain roles for plot reasons, but then you can equip them and use the skills related to them or not, as you see fit. The plot revolves around the Quadeities having their roles stolen, because these rules even apply to the gods. And Ark, the main character, has a mystery role that no one understands, which figures into his place in the story and also unlocks as his best role at the end.
SPOILERS:
In addition to the four Quadeities, there was a fifth deity named Exterminincta who was created by the main villain, a human in the previous version of the world who had a role that allowed him to steal other roles. She wiped out humanity, so the Quadeities forced her into reincarnation and re-created the world of Springizens. That human managed to survive and was secretly manipulating the Saison Order to steal the roles of the four Quadeities and eventually revive Exterminincta to wipe out the Springizens, too. The two children who keep recurring are the reincarnation of the fifth deity...but so are Ark and his dog, who were the incarnation of Exterminincta’s “good heart”. In the good ending, all four of them merge to re-create a kind Exterminincta, and everyone’s memory of Ark is erased, but he’s reborn as a baby two years later. In the True Ending, all five of them are able to keep their separate existences, so Exterminincta joins the two children as pop stars and Ark goes back to being a teacher.
Overall: This was solid. Like many games in this style, it probably had too many systems—there were definitely too many roles and the back-and-forth to unlock and refine them was annoying. But the plot was solid, the translation was good, the difficulty was well-managed, and the dungeons were varied enough to be interested. This goes on the “recommended” list.
