Every pixel looks like it was born from a comic. This is by design. The JRPG was born there, and the developer is graphing that aesthetic onto an isometric world with a hybrid between 2-D and 3-D assets. The overworld and battle backgrounds are 2-D paintings, for example, but the characters traveling and fighting through them are 3-D. When they're in a dungeon, 3-D characters walk through isometric levels that look, somehow, flat and multidimensional at the same time.
The result isn't incongruous. They look like they belong together, as if someone took a straw, blew air into some a comic page and brought the drawings into another dimension. And that's more or less what happened, minus the magic straw. Everyone in Battle Chasers: Nightwar began as a sketch drawn by a renowned comic artist.
The 25 minutes of Battle Chasers: Nightwar that Airship showed Polygon gave off a constant reminder of the team's ability to blend old and new. Overworlds and dungeons are old concepts, but the roaming bands of monsters and the dungeon's traps are examples of modern sensibilities.
Unlike in old-school JRPGs like Dragon Quest, Airship's encounters aren't random. They put walking monsters on the screen, allowing players to identify upcoming battles or run away and avoid fights. Video game staples like environmental traps — a rotating, bladed stick shuffling across a path in a dungeon floor and an old-school spike trap in the floor, for example — add a layer of challenge to the exploration. Those cut both ways, too: Players should avoid them, but they can also lure enemies to them and soften them up before battle.
And because each of the comic characters already has built-in abilities, different dungeons and enemies will play to different characters' strengths, so assembling a party will be part of the strategy.
The battle screens felt like a warm blanket of nostalgia, split between the players' party lined up vertically on the left side of the screen and the enemies on the right. Turn by turn, Airship selected attacks, balanced its use of depleting resources and planned several steps ahead in the battle, thanks to a system that telegraphed its multiturn moves and those of its enemies.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar is, in every respect, precisely the kind of game that you'd expect a group of old-school JRPG fans to make, and it's easy to see it gaining credibility among genre fans. At the same time, the combat system is also somewhat overwhelming. Airship will need to teach players how to survive within the rule book it creates. It'll need to work extra hard at that if it wants to attract newcomers.
It could be a tough sell to those who haven't been steeped in the genre. Though many comic fans will see the attraction of a side story set in Madureira's Battle Chasers universe, JRPGs aren't for everyone. They can be confusing. Airship knows this and hopes to mitigate some of the challenge with simplified systems based on games it loves.
