Battle Chasers: Night War review

Set the Wayback Machine for the late 90’s…..

Joe Madureira ( Joe Mad! ) is the new hotness in comic book art. He has just come off of the Age o’ Apocalypse for Marvel. He even starts his own series called Battle Chasers for Wildstorm Comics. Now Battle Chasers is an amazing looking fantasy series that runs only 9 issues in like four years. Yeah this guy was great at art, but beyond horrible with deadlines. 9 issues? Really. Dude you killed me then and even now still thinking about it! Battle Chasers had the chops to be a fun and very pretty fantasy comic, which was a genre really lacking at that time.

Now jump to 2018 (well it came out in 2017 but whateves…) and Battle Chasers is back, but in video game RPG form. I just found a copy and bought it without a second thought.

Battle Chasers: NightWar

Here the group consisting of…. of Garrison the typical broody swordsman, Red Monika the overly busty and scantily clad pirate/rouge, Knolan the old wizard as fantasy is want to have, Gully the little girl with magical gauntlets (that put ogre power to shame) with lost daddy issues, Calibretto a robot/war golem/ not not the Iron Giant, and a monster hunter Alumon with the whole sacred order meets bounty hunter thing happening.

They all happen to crash on a small island due to a sky pirate attack. This leads them into a plot that involves has them stopping the plans of an evil sorceress while trying to also escape the mystery island. You know that old chestnut, the lost in a strange land fighting an awakened evil chestnut.

Along the way they; battle all the creature tropes, visit familiar locales, collect items, gain levels, craft items and fish because that is a thing you do in RPG games (still and way too often for my taste).

Don't forget Red Monika and her two goons, by goons I  mean bewbs

Gameplay

This game is old school turn based RPG, and I love it! You have three characters on one side of the screen facing the monsters on the other side of the screen. You activate in initiative order. You pick your ability and an animation attack happens. There is a magic/mana element for casting spells and using cool abilities. There is a burst meter that charges that allows every character the ability to execute bigger attacks or party buffs. You have status effects that we all know and love; poison, bleed, stun, etc.

The dungeons and locales you explore have a mechanic where you can adjust the difficulty up before entering. This leads to tougher monsters, but better rewards. A fun little change that makes it feel like a bit of Diablo in the dungeons, without it being Diablo.

Now there is a lot of monster design repetition. You fight a slime monster and eventually you fight the same animated slime, but with different abilities and more HP (even WOW, Diablo and current games do this with monsters so it can’t be that bad of a practice if ) This can give the game a bit of a stale feeling, unless you played old school turn based RPGs. This was standard practice back then, so it wasn’t really terrible to see it happen again.

The look of the game is pure Joe Mad!  His comic book art is just so much fun and anime/manga without being anime/manga. I miss this guy’s artwork and wish he had a fire under his butt then and now to produce more stuff.

 

Red Monkia and her out of control bewbs!

The game isn’t super long either, unless you try to attain every character’s ultimate weapon, alternate skin, catch every fish and unlock every monster in the game’s bestiary. You can push through in 20-30 hours to complete it. I went for the unlock everything and it took a little over 40 hours to complete.

Seriously this is a 2018 version of an old school side screen turn based RPG. I love and miss games like this! Plus, it is set in the Battle Chaser comic book world and I didn’t know how much I missed that place. It is sad that Joe Mad! didn’t get more than a handful of issues of this comic book complete. It was a fun read and really pretty to look at. Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a good game. If you loved the comic I would consider this a must play. If you love turn based old school RPGs then this is a must play. If neither of these sound appealing, then this is game is a big pass for you.