Other forms of progression come from stat boosting items and a familiar equipment upgrade/synthesis system (seen in many other EXE Create titles). This brings some level of customization to each of your characters, though in general you’ll find yourself spending the majority of these points on your two party members with magic-friendly stats. Magic attacks may be learned in one of four elemental schools (fire, water, earth, and wind) by using special currency gained after each battle. Unfortunately, building the meter is slow, and you can easily play through the entire game without ever bothering to use the system.Ĭharacter progression unfolds through basic experience gains, with character-specific abilities unlocked by leveling up.
THE SISTERS PARTY OF THE YEAR SWITCH REVIEW FULL
A simple limit-break system, which requires multiple characters to fill a “unison” gauge, allows powerful attacks to be used back to back by each member of your party who has a full meter. Player abilities may alter party or enemy battle stats, inflict status effects, and inflict elemental damage, but no other form of nuance is present. In Liege Dragon, the player lines up their four heroes in a straight line, first person perspective, fighting enemies in basic, no-frills, turn-based combat. The grid-based combat systems seen in many of their titles, whether they be 2×2 or 3×3, bring a wealth of depth to their games, which simply cannot be matched by Liege’s Dragon’s stringently traditional approach. Unfortunately for Liege Dragon, the best innovations to come out of EXE Create’s continuous improvement / publication cycle comes down to gameplay. The question is, are these modern updates enough to elevate the game to the same heights as EXE Create’s most successful outings? Gameplay What we are left with is a game that looks as polished as games developed in 2020, but with a core gameplay rooted deeply in the past. Liege Dragon brings forward a game from deep in the EXE Create archives, one of their earliest turn-based RPGs, and modernizes the graphics, systems, and sound to be more in line with more recent releases.
Liege Dragon, which hit the Switch this fall, takes a step back from that common lineage to deliver something different. At the same time, each release also builds on those systems, bringing little innovations and refinements that have built over time to take you from the shakier entries of years past (such as Asdivine Hearts or Fernz Gate) to the much more impressive titles of today, like Miden Tower. Each new EXE Create release builds on the games that came before, using the same graphics engine, menus, combat systems, dungeon design, and more.
THE SISTERS PARTY OF THE YEAR SWITCH REVIEW .EXE
EXE Create, the developer most people think of when they think ‘KEMCO,’ churns out RPGs like candy, releasing 3-4 new games each year. One of the most interesting aspects of reviewing numerous KEMCO-published RPGs is watching as their development partners continually refine their game systems.