When a guru like Joe Madureira, one of the most talented artists and cartoonists of the last twenty years, chooses to beat new roads, reinventing himself as a help game designer and asking his fans a hand on Kickstarter, you can not remain indifferent.
Skeptics will say that you do not become a game designer from day to day, and that between making comics and making video games goes the same as making ice cream and winning a Nobel Prize, while the enthusiasts will prophesy sublime artistic products that approach two media that have already been touched several times in their story.
From our side, while worshiping the dad’s trait, among other things, of the art design of the two Darksiders, we suspended the judgment and anticipated Battle Chasers Nightwar before judging.
Welcome Board
The early moments in the company of Battle Chasers Nightwar are contrasting, and they contain torment and ecstasy: at an animated introductory scene of excellent quality, the work of the Texas Powerhouse Animation studio, author of the recent series devoted to Castlevania broadcast by Netflix, follows a prolonged initial loading, which does not allow us to optimize the console version (we have tried Sony on a PS4 Slim).
If we talk about the technical section in the dedicated section, we can anticipate that the aesthetic is wonderful: the product developed by Airship Syndicate is graced by one of the most inspired artistic direction of this unbelievable 2017, especially thanks to the unmistakable stretch of Joe Madureira not only.
The narrative incipit casts the player in medias res, after a short textual preamble: our five heroes, flying to an island that is supposed to be rich in mana, are attacked and attacked by pirates of the air, and forced to a landing luck on the island below.
Gully, the daughter of the legendary Aramus adventurer around whom she is turning, is looking for her father, of which only a couple of gloves are protected by magic properties.
It is not alone in this journey: four intrepid companions, very different from each other but tied by a deep friendship, side by side in her travels around the world, and each of them offers her contribution to the cause.
Caliber (the favorite of the cartoon fans, so much to include in the Indivisible venture, another title financed by Kickstarter) is Gully’s bodyguard, and while being a war golem, she shows her feelings of sincere affection that are entirely human; his healing skills will prove to be fundamental to the survival of the group.
Garrison is the typical hard swordsman like granite, daring for danger and apparently burbero, but with a tender heart: it is characterized by its power of attack.
Gully, the protagonist of the story, is sweet but determined at the same time, is not afraid to get dirty while recovering his father and knows how to make it very useful in combat thanks to the power to create protective barriers.
There is then the old man (but do not tell him!) Knolan, wise and irreverent magician, forgiving some physical weakness with spells of great power, and Red Monika, procace thief with long tongue and very sharp knives.
This varied team will eventually join Alumon, the only unusual character with respect to the comic, included in the game when he reaches the respective Kickstarter goal on him. We prefer not to reveal anything but, of course, once he enters, he will no longer be out of your party.
If the interweaving itself is nothing special, with a cursed island on which very unclear things happen and some fantasy cliches too much in the plot, it is the charisma and the trait (character as well as artistic) of the characters to make the main story gratifying, with the discreet psychological development of the characters and, above all, an excellent (widespread) dubbing in English, which greatly enhances the characterization of each of the protagonists.
When Japan and the West meet
Battle Chasers Nightwar, while being developed in Texas by an American team, is the perfect match between western dungeon crawler dungeons with isometric view, such as Diablo, Torchlight and Path of Exile, and the all-Japanese love for the fight system shift, not unlike that of many sacred monsters that have written the history of JRPG.
