This remake from the 3DS was one that many weren't expecting to get another chance to shine, but it's come to Steam with a brilliant remaster. The world of Alliance Alive has many different environments for you to view, such as a beautiful rain filled realm or a fiery hot volcanic realm, while showing off a fun cast of characters from various walks of life. You won't grow tired of seeing each and every of the main characters, as they're easily the draw with this game. With that said, this game operates on a different axis compared to standard RPGs, in some methods to it's benefit and some to it's detriment. With this review, I'll focus on what I liked, and what I found to be concerns for any potential buyers.


- The artists for this game clearly put in the effort to make this game look spectacular with a charming chibi style, beautiful visuals for each various land you go to, fun enemy design, and impressive attack animations for what was effectively a 3ds game. The music isn't a slouch either, you'll have a great time listening to the music as you explore each area.

- With how the game operates, you have a revolving cast from various parts of the world that are initially all seperated, and for the first third of the game, the main focus is uniting everyone, while also learning what makes each of them tick and what they want. As you play through the early story, you'll see an event from one character's perspective and see in a later chapter a different character's perspective. It's not something I've often seen in RPGs, and I would say that the game does this well. The main part of the game, from Chapters 1 to 33~ are what I would consider the better aspects of the game.

- The game is quite generous when it comes to recovering you after combat. You'll always refresh to your current max HP after combat is over, so long as you're not in a series of battles, i.e "chain battles". Furthermore, status effects are removed at end of combat, so as long as you win or run away, you'll be back to full. No need to worry about buying Revives or Potions since you'll simply recover. Even if a character is knocked out, they will revive back to their current max HP at end of combat, though max HP is lowered each time they're KO'd.

- The game heavily encourages you to put actual thought in how you form your team. If you put everyone in attack, you'd certainly deal decent damage, but you'll find yourself falling apart rather easily. Instead, the game wants you to learn how to make team formations and understand what the combat asks from you. Having a good tank and/or a good healer is paramount to doing well past the first third of the game, as when enemies are dealing more and more damage, the ability to have one character sit and tank aggro while the others shred the enemies is quite nice, and similarly having a healer is important to keep your characters up during tough fights.


- Equipment does feel a little odd, the best way to get items is to pretend the shops don't exist for the most part and simply scavenge the various areas you can go to for good items, such as the later game Water Devil dens where you run in, grab what you can, and leave. The shops are useful later on, but only when you can properly grind money.

- It's hard to place whether I would consider this a positive or a negative. The game has a unique leveling system that I feel isn't explained as well as it could be. If it were explained properly in game, I would argue that this would be a positive, but alas you are mostly left on your own to research this yourself. To put it plainly, you only level up your HP and SP and unlocking new moves. Essentially, you never directly level up your Strength, Agility, etc, but instead simply get tankier, gain the ability to use more special moves, and unlock those special moves.

For those who want an easy way to understand how this works, the game's leveling/awakening system works as follows.

The game wants you to get better abilities/stats as you fight better enemies. For example, a common wolf isn't really a challenge after the first five minutes of the game, so you won't get anything from battling it after a certain point. However, if you were to battle a larger boss wolf, such as the one directly outside the first town at the ledge, you will have a higher chance to level up your HP/SP or get new moves. Namely, it really encourages you to gain moves by battling stronger enemies, such as bosses, and that moves are more easily unlocked when using the "starter" moves, i.e the default one that you can't deselect. Towards the later end of the game, to unlock the "final" skills for a given weapon, the consistent ways to unlock it is to simply find a very strong end-game enemy and spamming the basic attacks until it unlocks. There technically is, certain weapon skills have a higher chance to unlock related higher level skills, i.e: A bow skill that does "All Enemy" attacks have a higher chance to unlock the more damaging variant of the attack, and a weak counter used against a strong enemy may unlock the stronger version of the counter.


- Unfortunately, the game does feel a little rushed towards the last quarter of the game, with many things happening far too quickly, and certain important story elements quickly inserted in without time to simmer. Considering how beautiful the story building had been up to that point, I do unfortunately have to knock a point off for this. I will note that I still found it enjoyable, and it had a lot of very enjoyable ideas that were enhanced in this last chunk of the game, but it is still worth noting that it may concern others, especially as certain story parts aren't fully explored or explained.

- While I do think at the end of the day the "unlocking new attack" version of leveling up is quite interesting, but most of the combat feels unexplained or useless. It isn't told what stats matter for what weapons, and the only attacks that really matter are the strongest AOE attack, and stronger single target attack you have on a non-tank/healer character, and for those the best defense/heal you have. Status Effects you can do feel useless, and boosts/demerits are cute, but not useful unless you're dealing good damage while getting them.


I did enjoy the game, I'd recommend it. It feels like a breath of fresh air and I loved the world it told, and it left a lot of questions that I'd love explored in a new game, but I would warn new buyers to understand that they're in for a unique experience. This game's a work of art, and sometimes not everyone can fully appreciate what the game wants to show.

Occasionally a JRPG comes out that feels like a deliberate attempt to be as "JRPG" as possible, and this is one of those games. The story and characters are very basic and best described as "fine," the art and presentation are a little cheap, and the game technically runs very well. However, it's the mechanics that are a mess, and the bulk of the game's content, and I want to explain how annoying this game is to actually play.

Combat itself is a pretty basic round-based combat system. Nothing really to remark on fundamentally. But let's discuss what you can actually do besides use equipped items to buff/heal, and that's arts. Arts are every spell and attack, from free ones to the most expensive. There is no "attack" or "defend" option, just arts. Using them is just clicking on them, but how they work is a mess. Someone on Steam edited their characters' stats to test out what they actually do, and it turns out, every art works off different stats, with absolutely no in-game mention of this. The result is some very frustrating outcomes, like the guy who starts with a bow and has high agility but is terrible with bows, for example, that would lead the average person to just keep using bows with him, having no luck, and assuming he just sucks or bows suck. You can guess some things accurately, but others are a mystery, meaning 95% of people who have ever played this game have played it "wrong." What about learning arts? Seems entirely based on RNG and fighting the strongest monsters you can; it's nice to be less of a mess than SaGa Frontier, which is sort of feels like, but also sort of lame when the game just refuses to let a character learn something simple for hours on end and there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, and spells are mostly purchased, but frustratingly it's one spell here, one there, two over here, and so it's hard to look at all your options and make an informed choice.

How about leveling? Well, you can't--there are no levels. Stats are locked in from the beginning of the game for each character. All you can increase is HP and SP (SP is used for arts), and this is, again, RNG, though it seems to improve against tougher enemies, while also having a built-in limiter to plateau them against any specific enemy strength. So grinding in this game ultimately is sort of required but also frustratingly unrewarding and just stops working after a while, until you go to the next area.

Then there are talents. You earn talent points from every fight, and you spend them on talents; most talents pertain to making arts cheaper to use or learning them faster or leveling them up. But there are several other useful talents as well, like cheaper prices at stores. What's annoying about talents is that it further locks you into your playstyle; after you've unlocked multiple talents and arts with swords, you're just punishing yourself if you dare try to change. There's no real reason for this besides "it's a thing you do in RPGs."

There's also formation. This is an interesting system, where you can assign characters "positions" that are basically stat changes, and then also change their actual formation on the grid to boost the strength of certain arts or draw/avoid aggro. Using a given art in a given position will also strengthen the art when used in that position, which is a weird choice that seems to just punish you for experimentation. It's just sort of finicky to set up and there aren't really enough options to it, but it's a nice idea.

What about gear? Gear is surprisingly sparse in this game, with 7-8 of each weapon type only. 1-2 of those will be starter strength, so there's very little to look forward to. Very little non-starter gear is easy to simply purchase at a store as well, yet the difference between different levels of gear are substantial, considering your base stats are locked in. So you're constantly looking for gear to outfit your large team (and don't neglect team mates or you'll regret when the game forces you to use them), but always feel behind, as you'll only have, say, 1 good bow but 3 bow-users. Alot of the gear in the game is unique, outside of research, so you will inevitably feel like you're just under-equipped constantly, which matters alot when enemies are 1-shotting you over it.

So let's talk about the guilds and research. There are 5 guilds in the game, which each can offer alot to the player...not that you'd know that. The game gives you very little information on what the guilds can really DO for you, so you have to just level them up to find out. Except, there are a limited number of "recruits" available to you, meaning a limit to how much guild upgrading you can do. This is very frustrating when you realize the best positions, the best gear, the best spells, and numerous other bonuses, are all locked behind the guilds. You're basically making choices that will have heavy late-game impacts without any way of knowing what's what without referring to like the one detailed guide on the internet, and really, you should be able to unlock ALL of them eventually, but too bad.

Speaking of choices, let's talk about side-questing. There really isn't that much of it, it's mostly just either extra fights and dungeons, or recruiting people. But the game can be annoying about it; you often do have choices in these quests, with often unforeseeable consequences. Some people might like that, but I find it annoying; you're already limited on recruits for guilds, but you can easily limit yourself even more with a bad choice you had no knowledge of, or you can miss out on gear in exchange for...nothing, because some choices have no positive outcomes.

Since there is a character limit, I can't write an entire novel on the mechanics, but I've hopefully made my point--the game is frustrating. It tells you how things work, but it doesn't really tell you how things work. There isn't a satisfying gameplay loop, there isn't a clear understanding of how everything is supposed to fit together in a cohesive vision--it feels more like mechanics for the sake of mechanics, with insufficient information being given to the player to navigate all these different systems. It's the sort of game that I imagine the experts really like, because they know it backwards and forwards, but for a new player just trying to have a good experience, it's very frustrating--you don't know where to spend points, what gear to use, what formation or position to use, what guilds to upgrade, how to handle sidequests, even where to go in some of the main quests. It's an okay game for the first act but then it really falls apart, and begins to feel either like homework or like beating your head against the wall to progress, since you can't even just grind levels to overcome any weaknesses. I can only recommend this game for people who like learning lots of arbitrary rules and systems just for the sake of it.

I like the part where Vivian nukes the enemy.