Time Break Chronicles

This game is absolute fire. Its jrpg gameplay ELECTRICALLY AMPLIFIED. its SICK. Its my GAME OF THE YEAR. No seriously fam no cap, I don't know why no one thought to make a rougelite hyperfocusing on turned based combat with 100s of unlockable characters. What an autistic dev, thx fam. WAGMI

Is good

Pretty good, but could use some improvements.

Learning curve 6/10: While the in-game instructions are pretty good, they're incomplete. There's occasionally mechanic quirks that it doesn't explain completely. You'll be spending some time figuring out how abilities are best used and how to build an effective party.

Combat 8/10: This is the main gameplay component. Each combat will require you to pay attention; the game leans hard into damage types, status effects, and chaining reactions, While the complexity ramps up reasonably, the difficulty scaling of Elite fights needs some work, particularly in the early game. For some fights you're going to wipe and have to come back with a different party. Characters can be set to auto, but it's not like you'd see in classic Final Fantasy where you put it on auto and it just attacks constantly; instead a character set to auto is run with an AI. The combat speed can be toggled on the fly between 1x, 2x, 3x, and 4x.

Story (English) 3/10: The story exists, the spelling is fine, and the grammar is about 95%+ correct. Character dialogue is occasionally a little stilted. It's not complex, and seems to be mostly of incidental.

Rougelite 6/10: It doesn't detract too much, but includes some annoying components. Maps (except for special missions) are similar to games like FTL, with branching paths with random encounters and points of interest, and are randomized every time you go for a run. You can back out if the paths look too annoying, but there's no consistency from run to run. If you do a run and hit a wall, you can't rebuild your party to try again and expect to find the same encounters. Special missions are fixed though, and you get several you can run after finishing each chapter's main mission. Those, at least, let you come back and expect the same fights in the same order.

Rougelike mode: Not doing it, not interested. It's an optional game mode, recommended for those who have completed the campaign mode.

Variety 7/10: The enemies in each area tend to be a bit limited in variety, but they do mostly change from act to act. The backgrounds are unique in their style and presentation, but not very interesting. The main point of variety is the 100 characters, and while they do slot into roles (tank, healer, etc), characters in the same role have mostly different abilities - for example, the Cleric, Medic, Angel, Healbot, and Priest are all healers, but each functions very differently from the others,

Music 2/10: The music is easily the weakest part of the game. It needs more variety and more energy. It's all kinda samey and just there, tangentially, some of the sfx for abilities are irritating. Hopefully somebody will mod in a way to import music files at some point.

Overall: As I understand it, the dev team is like 2 or 3 people. There's a Discord for people who use it, I believe. It's clearly inspired by the classic (and best) Final Fantasy games, but has modern mechanics and a paper-thin plot instead of an expansive world with lots of NPCs and an interesting story. If you miss FFRK in particular, you should like this game. I do recommend after a while just turning off the music and putting something else on.

I have contained Infinity, I should move on to other games.

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Unless...

I bought this back in Oct 2023 when it was on sale but held off playing until it developed more. I've been keeping an eye on it for these past 3 years so with the final act just releasing and 1.0 not too far off, I decided it's the right time to start it up. So far it's been everything I hoped and knew it would be, super glad it didn't get abandoned along the way. Can't wait to see all the different characters!