chain chronicle..... nice game but dat energy cost....

Seeegaaaaaaa

Another good anime style game for tablet, Chain Chronicle was developed by sega and just got recently released in english. It's an RPG with semi tower defense with strategy gameplay, it has really nice art which remind me of atelier series. I got it from australia region appstore.

Lets start with the world map, its the easiest part to explain.

Remind me of some RPG from PSP game.

World map is all about town and roads, some road will be "blocked" by enemies so you need to fight them first, luckily you just need to do this 1 time and once you kill them the road will open (so far i haven't see any road who got "blocked" again). Town/village is the place to start your quest from story, free, event and character quest, story quest is self explanatory, free quest is your daily quest, event is also self explanatory, character quest is probably 1 thing that i like about this game.

character art is beautiful in this game.

There are a lot of character in this game, and to get it you need to recruit them by drawing cards. You have 3 kind of money but only 2 of them is use to draw cards, Arcana is easy to get but give you normal cards while Prysma is slightly hard to get but it will always give you a character with 3 star rarity or above. What i like here is how they give each character their own story, they are not just "there" for your game, their story serve as side quest that you can do at any time, when you finish the quest, it will give you reward like a new ability (for that char) or prysma, and once you open their story, it will stay there even if you discard them so no need to keep them forever. I can see that this will diminish once you have the majority of them but I'm sure it will take some time considering there are hundreds of them and not considering the new updates in the future.

Dat energy cost.... sigh

All town/village has the same layout when you enter them, It's simple but it serve its purpose, Tavern is used to draw the cards that require prysma, each big town has their own tavern and different set of character to draw so don't spend everything in 1 town. On the right you can see the quest list, main is the story quest, free is daily and repeatable, below that is the character quest which still grey out because i haven't got her yet. All quest has progress mark as you can see, if its 3 marks that mean you need to do it 3 times, so if you see the pic above i need 27 energy total to finish my main quest.

Everything is done in chibi size

Battle is a mixed of tower defense and real time strategy, combine it then simplified it and you got chain chronicle battle system, here is the breakdown about the battle.

1. Every battle has wave, boss tend to appear on last wave, clear all wave to finish the battle.

2. Auto battle is in the game but not recommend it when you're up against boss unless your party is full with OP char. you can fast forward the game, combine it with auto battle and you will finish the whole thing in less than a minute.

3. You can tap and hold your char to move to different place but only on the  3x3 box on the right side, each box can only hold 1 person. You can tap and hold your char to the enemy to manually engage them (by default your char only attack when the enemy is in their range)

4. you can see your char class by the color, red is warrior they have high attack power but low on defense. Blue is defender they are the same as red but more into defense than offense, they also received less damage from range and melee enemy tend to attack them first if you engage them. Green is healer, they heal that's about it, they will stop heal and attack if they are near enemy. Yellow is archer, they deal high damage but die pretty quick on melee, they deal minimal damage against armored/shielded enemy. Purple is mage, they are the same as archer but focus on magic.

5. Every round you will play a (quick) slot game that will give you mana (those circle thingy below the enemy), it can only hold 8 mana total and its gone once your battle is over. Mana has 5 color, and each color represent the class mana so if you want to use warrior (red) skill, red mana is required to do so, some class also need more than 1 mana in order to execute their skill. on boss, pirika (your fairy) will give you 1 mana of random color every certain time, just remember that you need to tap him to get the mana.

6. You will lose the battle if the enemy reach the far right side (that blue greenish area), it doesn't matter what kind of enemy, just 1 enemy on that place and you lost.

7. When your char die, it will be replace by 1 of your sub, you can only have 2 subs of your choice, all of that is manageable outside combat in your party status, char that die will revive at the end of combat with no penalty whatsoever.

8. You can only have 4 people in battle (and 2 subs), the fifth character is "guest" they are the char from other people who play this game, you can choose which one to take before the battle. Only char that set as "leader" will be shown when choosing the guest.

As the usual this type of this game, you can upgrade your char by using other char card + normal money. you can also upgrade your weapon with weapon card, it has 50% chance of success and more if you put more weapon card when you enhance it, all char has 40 level limit and can go further if you upgrade them using their own card regardless of level. Weapon can be evolve too which increase the limit on how many times they can be upgraded.

There is a lot of character to get, from the normal to weird one.

Chain Chronicle for me is really a good game, the gameplay is simple but fun, main story (so far) got me interested to keep going, character story is a big plus thanks to that i always hope to draw a new char, art design is really nice especially if you are into anime stuff, difficulty is pretty forgiving and if you lucky you can get pretty OP guest to choose in battle, normal money and arcana is not hard to get, prysma on the other hand is limited since you only get it as end reward from certain quest. My only gripe in this game is the energy cost for each quest, I'm at level 12 by the time i type this, i have 46 energy and right now I've seen an enemy that cost me 10 energy just to engage them, my main quest require 9 energy and i need to do it 3 times to finish it, there is stamina fruit that give you full energy but that's the usual real money stuff. Aside from that, i can recommend this to you guys, its easy to play and english anime style game for tablet is pretty rare, and its free too so i don't see why not?