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    Fallen Legion

    Game » consists of 2 releases. Released Jul 18, 2017

    Fallen Legion is an action RPG from YummyYummyTummy.

    vert_vermillion's Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire (PlayStation 4) review

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    Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire - Review

    There's also a video version of this review available

    Writing is an important aspect in any medium where you are trying to tell a story, or even just convey information. When it’s done properly you can do some interesting things, especially in games when it’s coupled with good gameplay, visuals, and other aesthetic choices. Keep in mind that writing is more than just throwing big words on a page or overstuffing a story. If your audience can’t follow what’s happening or knows what to do, then you’ve not done a very good job at getting your message across. I bring this all up because Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire is a very fun and beautiful looking game, but I’ll be damned if I could ever tell you what’s going on in it.

    In Fallen Legion you play as Cecille, a young princess turned sovereign when her father is assassinated on the battlefield. She is given a sentient grimoire, a relic used by her father, to help her retain political power as she tries to make her way back to the throne in Fenumia’s capital. All is not as it seems though, as the top Strategist in Fenumia is leading a coup against Cecille after discovering the atrocities that the grimoire she possesses has been used to commit. And from here is where things start to get confusing.

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    Even though Fenumia is a monarchy, it has a house of representatives called “The Princes.” Every major political and social event goes through the court of princes with the head king or queen getting a final say in everything. The way this translates into gameplay is that you are given a very vague set of responses to myriad of issues. Each choice will provide your troops with a different kind of buff and then have some kind of effect on a moral bar that determines how much your people like you and then also on another moral choice bar that dictates if you’re good or evil. One of Fallen Legion’s major advertising points was all about shaping the kingdom the way you want through your choices, but everything is so hard to follow that I eventually stopped caring about the actual choices and just picked off of which buff I wanted at the time. It worked, I guess, as my overall moral with the people always stayed relatively high.

    What makes this confusing is how convoluted it is. The moral system doesn’t make much sense, and I have trouble believing that the story is actually influenced by what choices you make. In almost every dialogue exchange or run in with an NPC I was reading about how I was either hated, someone was trying to backstab me with the common people behind them, or how someone is close to usurping the throne, when I supposedly have the whole country backing me. I’ve never been a big fan of good and evil choice systems because of how they dumb down stories, but Fallen Legion is on the opposite side of the spectrum where the system seems to have no actual bearing on the story at all.

    The writing for the game also feels rather confusing at points. In the aforementioned moral choice options your selections are boiled down to 1 or 2 options. One I remember in particular was something along the lines of “The peasantry is revolting against one of the princes,” with the options being “Support,” “Attack,” and “Ignore.” Never really clarifying who you are attacking or supporting in the scenario.

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    The mixed quality of writing isn’t just limited to these choice sections though, as it bleeds over into the story as well. Often times it feels like writers were trying to build something clever, but really it just ended up pulling me out of the story. Picture this: as our young princess storms her way through a burning city to catch a criminal it’s revealed to her that the bandits they just slaughtered were mostly innocent people. The bandit leader reveals to you that she and the others had been setup by separate branches of the government to have them eliminated, as they were seen a blight on the country before. It’s very dramatic, it builds up that maybe there’s corruption all around you, and that this stuff is harming the citizenry too. During her monologue the leader goes off about her distaste for the officials that did her and her comrades in and then ends her speech by comparing things to a “wet fart.”

    I’m sure I’m nitpicking, but this isn’t the line I’d expect from a jaded soldier, or anyone over the age 20 for that matter. Weird little scenes like this, where the dialogue rips you out are thankfully pretty rare, but they were there enough to deter my interest in the plot. There’s sets of expectations a reader will have when they get involved in a fictional world, and if you stray too far outside the realm of believability it can shatter everything. The farther along in the story I got, the more I found myself feeling less enticed by what was happening.

    If my interest in the game was dying with its story and writing, it was kept alive by almost everything else. There are a lot of elements to Fallen Legion’s gameplay, but the main one is its combat. It mixes elements of real-time and turn-based strategy that’s based around mastering timing. It’s sort of like if you threw all of the best 16-bit era RPGs into a blender and hit puree. You roam from section to section on an over world map with a 3-man team of exemplars. Each section is filled with 5 to 6 battles, where you fight a handful of enemies. Each exemplar has 3 attacks that recharge when they’re not attacking or blocking, and you can stack attacks together to build up a damage multiplier.

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    In the downtime between attacks you have to block the computer’s assault by parrying them. Parrying a melee unit breaks their defense and parrying a ranged unit reflects the projectile back at their whole team. If you ever fail to parry an attack it resets your damage multiplier and ends whatever chain you had building. It’s a very technical system that you’ll probably start by button mashing your way through, but you really do need to get a hang of the combat rather quickly. There’s at least two noticeable difficulty spikes in the game that test you on your ability to perfect block, and you’re guaranteed to fail almost every time if you can’t. Despite this, the difficulty feels just about right. It’s a level between frustrating and engaging that kept me from putting the game down.

    Team balance is also very important, and I’m not just talking about mixing ranged and melee exemplars. Every exemplar has a unique set of skills and attack cooldowns. It’s important to mix and match all of these things or otherwise your team’s synergy will go out the window very quickly. You wouldn’t want to take a character that can clump mobs together if you don’t have other high damage skills that hit multiple enemies. Likewise, you don’t want a team of slow and beefy tanks because they’ll make it impossible to raise your combo meter and gain a damage multiplier. I often find it rare that a game can get me to change around my loadout or squad, so I appreciate that Fallen Legion can do so without making it seems like a hindrance. Characters are fun to experiment with, and all of the weird interactions they have make teambuilding fun.

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    It also seems like a waste not try out each character at least once just to see what they look like. All of the sprites share a similar hand drawn style with some exaggerations. It feels reminiscent of something like Odin’s Sphere or Dragon’s Crown. Enemies and backgrounds share this too, but because of the amount of quality put into each it seems to have impacted variety. Expect to see more recolors or models with slight variations, but that said some of the bosses have pretty interesting and unique designs.

    The music for Fallen Legion is phenomenal. It’s honestly one of the better soundtracks I’ve heard out of a game in a while, indie or otherwise. It’s a shame that there’s not a sound test in the options menu, because a lot of the tracks sound good both in and outside of gameplay.

    Overall, I found myself pretty content with Fallen Legion. There’s a Vita version of the game that tells the story from the tactician’s point of view, but I don’t feel inclined to play through both. Fallen Legion’s combat is very fun and challenging, but it’s story elements and lacking. The game feels a bit over ambitious, and it tries to do a lot of world building without much exposition to it. I like the idea of being able to buff your characters mid-level of strategic choices, but not in the way that the game tries to do it. If you’re looking for a less-than traditional Action RPG I would say to give Fallen Legion a shot. It’s $20 price feels about right for what you get, but at the same time I feel like it could have been so much more.

    Other reviews for Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire (PlayStation 4)

      Legion Of Flaws 0

      Fallen Legion is an action RPG created by Independent Development team YummyYummyTummy who is mostly known for creating educational games for kids.At first glance the game looked rather interesting being a fan of Role Playing Games otherwise known as RPGs, I was highly looking forward to sitting down and spending some good quality time with the game.Unfortunately though it didn't take me long to loose interest in this title. The gameplay though fun and not very difficult to grasp and get used to...

      1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

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