[Review] God Wars – The Complete Legend (Nintendo Switch)

God Wars – The Complete Legend
Nintendo Switch

Developed By : Kadokawa Games
Published By : NIS America
Category : Strategy, RPG
Release Date : Sep 4, 2018

God Wars for the Nintendo Switch takes us far back in time, telling the tale of feudal Japan. Three neighboring nations have had a long-lasting conflict between themselves, angering the spirits of Mt. Fuji. In an effort to appease the spirits, one of the nation’s leaders – Tsukuyomi – offers her daughter Sakuya as a sacrifice. Sakuya’s sister Kaguya is forced into exile, living alone away from contact with her family and entire nation. The game picks up thirteen years later. Kaguya is freed from her exile without a single clue as to what has happened the last thirteen years, and sets out to find her mother and some answers to what’s been going on.

What unfolds is a turn-based strategy game that brings just about everything you would expect from the genre. You’ll utilize the games overmap to push forward on your quest, travelling from level to level. Each one presents you with a specific goal, which for the most part is just destroying all of your enemies. Again, combat is turn-based on the grid-like battlefield, and attack order is predetermined by everyone’s speed stat.

The unique piece with God Wars is it’s Job and Skill system. This essentially equates to your class and abilities lists. There are plenty of options, and you can equip two jobs to each character to give them any number of things like healing abilities, attack/defense buffs, and the like. A third job is also accessible, but this ends up being more restrictive based on the character it’s being equipped to. It results in a wide variety of abilities amongst your team on the battlefield, and can come quite in handy by countering debuffs in battle from your enemies.

Unfortunately, that’s just about where the uniquness for this game ends. Graphically, the game is all over the place. In battle your characters are very tiny and not detailed, looking more like chibi’s than anything else. The overmap between levels is reminiscent of the old Final Fantasy games, with a sprite version of Kaguya walking between locations. Cutscenes offer even more variety in the graphics, with most taking the form of a comic book style, and others still being anime style with very minimal actual animation. And yet, with so much variety in how the graphics are presented, there’s surprisingly little variation in how their put to use, resulting in a lot of the game looking very bland and repetitive.

This version, The Complete Legend comes some story expansion to the original God Wars title, adding hundreds of additional hours of gameplay, which you’ll never know how much of it you’ve played since there’s never an option to display exactly how much time you’ve clocked. Yet, it just might be better not knowing. A good portion of the games side quests simply involve you replaying earlier levels with differing enemies.

While it’s fun to play, God Wars isn’t as fulfilling as it could have been. In a mob of SRPG’s, rather than standing out from the crowd, it gets lumped into the mix, it’s voice unable to be heard. It’s a game that, for fans of the genre, it’ll be more than worth picking up and sinking time into. Otherwise, there’s a wide variety of games similar to this one, but a much narrower variety that offer something different and a more fulfilling experience.