[Review] Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent - Nintendo Switch

[Review] Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent – Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Acquire
Published By: PQube
Categories: SRPG
Release Date: 12.09.22

Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent is a lighthearted mix between strategy RPG and anime inspired visual novel by Acquire, the team that co-developed Octopath Traveler.

I think the single greatest aspect of this game is the entire high school aspect. It’s by far my favorite aspect of the gameplay and something that I sunk quite a few hours into. The game takes place at Obsidian High, which serves as your base of operations. In this area, there’s a staff room where you can recruit students who will become your party members.

You’re basically just creating characters. There are ten races to choose from and for each one, you pick a gender and create a name. Then their stats and traits are randomly generated. Once you have a character that you like, you can register them for classes and mess around with their equipment and items. You have a lot of control over your party, you can make five copies of the same Elf until you get one with the stats and traits that you really want and then build them up.

The only downside is that there’s literally no connection to the characters that you recruit. The only characters that have any importance are the ones that are part of the story, the ones you make are literal throwaway characters.

In the base, you can also do other things such as enhance weapons and characters and access the shop. This area is basically where 90 percent of the RPG elements take place and where most of the fun is. Unfortunately, I didn’t really care too much for the rest of the gameplay. The battles themselves really felt like an idle game where you would summon your characters and then just plot a course to the end of the map, occasionally pressing X along the way in order to boost your characters.

There isn’t much to it really. In many of the early battles, all I had to do was pick a location where the objective was and my party would slowly make their way to it. They would auto battle all the enemies on their way there and do other tasks on their own like opening chests. When you’re in a battle, there isn’t really that much for you to do, you can really let the AI do the entire battle for you if you really wanted to and had enough health to do so.

The only good thing about the battles themselves is that you can do previous battles over and over as many times as you’d like in order to train your characters or to collect more gold, SP, and items. But after a while, it will become a tedious grind.

The controls can also be a nightmare when you’re battling. There were many times where it was really difficult to move around the map or to figure out what I had to do because the button layout was either not what I was used to or just outright confusing. It took me a significant amount of time to get to a point where I didn’t look like a fool trying to go from one place to another.

Other than the RPG elements at the base, there were two other aspects that I enjoyed, the first of which was the graphics. For the most part, the game looks really good both in and out of battle. When you’re not in battle and you’re doing your visual novel style cutscenes, you’re treated with really well-designed character artwork and fantastic backgrounds. While you’re battling, the visuals are more on the charming side with 2D character cutouts and a tiny map that’s full of color.

The other aspect that I really liked as the voice acting. Of course the audio is in Japanese only, but it’s a really nice touch and adds a lot to the immersion of the game when paired with the visuals.

It would be very easy to say that this is a very good game based on what’s been said so far, but there are a few other areas that I had concerns with. Even though the story isn’t trying to be taken too seriously, it’s fairly lackluster. There were also a handful of long loading screens, a lot of repetitiveness after the first hour, and a price tag that doesn’t fully justify the passive nature of the battles.

For me, the game was fun to look at, I loved many of the characters, and I had a blast with the school aspect of the game. But the rest of the gameplay just didn’t really speak to me and the $40 price tag might turn away a lot of people. In its current state, I think it’s a good game that will offer you a decent amount of fun but it will be hit or miss for a lot of people.