The DioField Chronicle

2024-05-04
I went in really wanting the 6-7 out of 10 scores to be wrong. "Hey, maybe it'll be one of those games where it's so complicated that people don't like it." Sadly the opposite is true. DioField Chronicle is mostly just a boring game. It has a semi-interesting story, with an admittedly great central character who is kind of a piece of shit, and a whole lot, I mean a whole lot, of the same fight over and over and over.

When you jump in you're greeted to a very generic narrator telling you of a very generic fantasy world. There was peace but NOW there's WAR. Ok cool. After that you're thrown into the combat where you'll spend the bulk of your time playing. It's a weird RTS-ish thing where you control a group of four and face off against groups of enemies. Enemies have little aggro circles so you can control who you're facing. They use intermittent abilities that hit hard but have well telegraphed cones or circles representing the area they'll attack that visually fills in over time conveying how much time you have before the move goes off. Combat becomes a pretty interactive dance of moving your characters so they are 1) not being backstabbed 2) are backstabbing the enemies 3) aren't getting hit by previously mentioned moves and 4) are hitting enemies with their own moves.

Now that sounds boring on its own and it is. There are some wrinkles thrown in such as equipment you can unlock to change the stats of your characters. Different equipment gives different abilities and different abilities do different types of attacks: AOEs, single target, backstab, heal, etc. The problem is 1) none of the abilities hit that hard or are that interesting. And 2), maybe more importantly, abilities are tied to a resource that doesn't regenerate on its own. You get it either by consuming potions (3 per match), using battlefield abilities (a couple a match), or orbs dropped by dead enemies (finite per match). That means you end up conserving your abilities which means most of the time you're just moving your guys around and auto-attacking. It's dull as shit. And that's the whole game until you get to the veeeery end which gives you an item that regenerates that resource on each attack. Hell, I turned this game on the lowest difficulty and I still found it tedious after the first hour.

Like I said the story is pretty bland. The one thing that does spice it up is the central character, Andrias, is this Machiavellian bastard. Everything he does is so manipulative and cunning and planned out. And he pairs this with an utter single-mindedness that leaves no room for other characters emotions. It's amazing to play a a JRPG where the main character is the antithesis to your Tidus' or Vaan's. Gah and the ending is pretty great culmination of his whole arc. It's a shame then that the overall plot and the rest of the characters is pretty humdrum.

So sadly the reviews were right. This game is really not worth your time. Maybe watch a Let's Play to see the story and Andrias' arc sped up.