Forgottenlor checks out Battle Chasers: Nightwar to find out if the beautiful animated game is also a beautiful game.
More information.Battle Chasers: Nightwar is an interesting marriage of an obscure fantasy comic book with the sort of gameplay one sees in early Final Fantasy games. Since JRPGsand comics are character driven, it seems at first glance to be a good fit. Battle Chasers disposes of the anime style art and child like characters of Japanese RPGsin favor of a hand drawn and painted comic book style which appeals to players like me, who play JRPGsdespite their art direction. And even though the game has procedural dungeons, crafting, and random loot, it is in many ways a nostalgic game.
I've never been one to put all too much value on presentation, but Battle Chasers really stands out here. Whether one finds the comic book style appealing or not, its well executed. The characters run across beautifully hand painted backgrounds. Story segments are presented in scenes that actually look like they could come from the pages of comic book, and both the character models and monsters are skillfully brought to life. Also the animations are dramatic and memorable. Even after you've seen Gully's quakefist or Red Monika's assassination attacks 100 times, they still look good. The game's cut scenes also look like frames of a comic book. Since World of Warcraft we've seen a lot of comic style art, but few games actually seem to even come close to the quality of artwork of a modern comic book or graphic novel. Battlechasers presents some of the best comic book style art I've seen in a computer game.
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