The DioField Chronicle Review – Looks like PS2, plays like old RPGs, of course I had fun.

The DioField Chronicle Review - Looks like PS2, plays like old RPGs, of course I had fun.

Technically more native to the PS2 than even the Switch, The DioField Chronicle is a very solid tactical/RPG crossover gameplay. Needs some time to develop but then picks up momentum.

DioField Chronicle is a wonderful game to turn on, stare at, shut down and forget it ever existed. At least at first glance, it doesn’t look like 2022. It looks like an extrapolated PS2 game, offers rendered cutscenes with stiff-necked protagonists from that time and, above all, the optics. In addition, the hand-holding mentality of the first hour seems like something that Square Enix found in the drawer and quickly knocked out before it completely spoiled.

But then I just kept playing, it’s a test and everything can’t be gold. DioField Chronicle will never do that either, but I spent my vacation days with it this week. With joy and increasing fun. Once you get over the almost-retro shock, real qualities show up here.


Square cutscenes that would have blown us away in 2002.

In principle you play Baldur’s Gate or one of its numerous spiritual successors, only reduced to the combat system, without the annoying role-playing part. The part where you wander around for a long time and chat and stuff. This is limited to the headquarters of a troop of mercenaries in Fantasy Land X, of course I mean DioField. Here you have a dozen rooms that are gradually unlocked, in which you accept quests from a few residents standing around, improve weapons, unlock skills, shop, whatever is just as fundamental. Everything that other role-playing games pack into cities you visit and celebrate visually and atmospherically. Short distances have something, but here they are bare like a freshly built cheap prefabricated house without furnishings.

From here you look for the next mission on a map. Or rather, you are assigned the next relevant one. Only a few side quests may or may not be completed. It’s all pretty linear. Then you are on the map of the mission and you can’t call it anything else. You can see in the wide shot that a piece of land is flying around in Limbo, on which you then perform your heroic deeds. Even zoomed in closer, it doesn’t get any nicer or more detailed. That impressive diorama shot at the beginning, reminiscent of Octopath or similar artwork? Yes, no, this is a lost PSP game that has now been rescued. And just don’t expect the characters to be more beautiful than their surroundings.

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Just press pause and DioField will behave like a Baldur’s Gate. Except Baldur’s Gate was really, really good looking in its day.

You’ll get over all of that once the fighting picks up steam after a few tedious missions. You control four heroes in real-time by giving directions and commands in pause mode. Either individually or in a group, this is easy to do and there is also a time lapse. As with Baldur’s Gate and Co., you hop back and forth from pause to action, steer to the next target, select special attacks, buffs and healing and make sure that your troops are never in the opponent’s AoE areas while as many enemies as possible should be squatting in your attack radii. I’m not explaining anything new here, the concept was invented for RPGs 25+ years ago and it has stood the test of time. If you do it well, you can’t go wrong. So it’s good for DioField that it does it well.

In addition to the four heroes, you can assign “secondary” heroes to each one, whose attacks and skills you can always use without them being on the field themselves. It is also leveled, so that you can keep a pool of heroes up to speed despite the 4-cap. Above all, with a clever combination of heroes and classes, you have a good and constantly growing repertoire of options that you also need. DioField loves to only show a few opponents at first and gradually throw the good ones onto the field. Sure, after a failed attempt you also know what’s coming, because the missions aren’t dynamic. Too bad, because repetitions in particular to bag all the rewards would have increased the replay value again.

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Little by little you collect more heroes and you don’t get a better story, but you do get more options in battle. That’s more important.

Very often I didn’t have to deal with too many details and sent all the heroes on an opponent or kited a small group to use my own area effects for a quick clarification of the situation. Especially the Esper monsters known from Final Fantasy are a great help. So big that they charge relatively slowly and want to be used judiciously. So the brief skirmish along the way is not an issue. However, the bosses or higher-level groups in particular show what is in the system. If you don’t position yourself correctly here, a healer will quickly be crushed between the fronts or an assassin will bite his teeth on a shield. And again and again you have to make sure that you quickly get out of effect areas and into good positions, otherwise that’s it.

The mixture of fast manoeuvring, tactical resource management and a bit of terrain make the fights, which never last longer than 10 or 15 minutes, a wonderful short intermezzo for in between, without it becoming too primitive. By no means do all games of this type offer this and if they do, then rarely so convincingly. As my repertoire of special moves and opportunities grew, I threw myself more and more enthusiastically into new fights and even started repeating old ones to reap the optional targets and associated rewards.

As far as the story is concerned, it’s as outdated as the optics. The saga of aristocrats, mercenaries, villains and monsters has a beard far longer than Baldur’s Gate and never quite has the bite of a good RPG. Staggered dialogues meet pseudo-complex intrigues. It would be solid foundation for a mediocre fantasy train station novel, and it is solid foundation for a game like this. But just don’t expect that you’ll be waiting spellbound for the next twist.

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Waiting for DioField to go on sale at a reasonable price? All I can say about that is…

After the first sluggish rounds and two hours, The DioField Chronicle develops a good flow of the game, which ensures that you ignore the grey, murky soup of the 2007 graphics and then concentrate entirely on your heroes and the next battlefield. To put it bluntly, it’s a game that would have made waves on the PS2 and, now that it’s finally released with a minimal restoration, 20 years late, has held up really well. To put it politely, you cross a tried and tested combat system with proven RPG elements into a fun little tactical game that’s always good for another round.

But then a note and I really don’t go into the price that often: I had to look twice, but DioField is really a full-price title, even if it doesn’t look like it in any way and, to be honest, it doesn’t quite give it in terms of play either. For the money you could have treated DioField to more trappings. gigsen, tell them… “on sale then”.

The DioField Chronicle – Pros and Cons

Per:

  • Well-designed and consistently motivating “real-time with pause” combat system
  • Challenging boss fights
  • Many battlefields and missions
  • Numerous equipment and upgrade systems

Cons:

  • Technically not exactly state of the art
  • It’s really ugly and gray in gray
  • Did I mention it looks like a PS2 game?
  • Story is more present than gripping
  • No dynamic factors on the battlefield

Developer: Square Enix, Lancarse, Square – Publishers: Square Enix – Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Microsoft Windows – release: 9/20/2022 – Genre: Tactical RPG – Price (RRP): about 60 euros



Reference-www.eurogamer.de