Fallen Legion Revenants' Lackluster Gameplay Makes It Difficult to Enjoy Its Attractive Story

fallen-legion-revenants-splash Fallen Legion Revenants' Lackluster Gameplay Makes It Difficult to Enjoy Its Attractive Story

Fallen Legion is a niche, tactical role-playing saga created by YummyYummyTummy that already has 4 main entries. Unfortunately, Fallen Legion Revenants suffers from the same problem as the previous installments: it has a fabulous story to tell, but its dull game mechanics and characters are quite boring.

Ivor, You're Going Down...

fallen-legion-revenants-splash Fallen Legion Revenants' Lackluster Gameplay Makes It Difficult to Enjoy Its Attractive Story

Since most of you are probably new to the Fallen Legion franchise, let's ignore all previous games and just focus on this one. Fallen Legion Revenants is the story of the last survivors of the planet, now are forced to live in a floating castle, safe from the corruption outside. However, the ruler of Welkin Castle is far from being an altruistic hero, so bringing Ivor down will be one of our goals. Since the game is divided into 2 parts, we control 2 protagonists: one of them is Lucien, a young politician who wants to dethrone Ivor and give the last survivors of humanity a just government; the other one is Rowena, the powerful spirit of a woman who came back to life seeking revenge against Ivor, who wrongly executed her and locked away her son, Edwin.

As you can see, politics are fundamental to the story, and it's actually interesting to see how things unfold. Sadly, this would have been way better developed in a visual novel, spending enough time exploring the characters and their motivations instead of dividing our gameplay time between the adventures of Rowena (and the Exemplars) and Lucien's attempts to manipulate the inhabitants of Welkin Castle.

A Decent RPG With Several Boring Mechanics

Rowena, now a ghost, can't really fight her own battles. That's why she counts with the help of the Exemplars, powerful warriors she can summon to battle. Although you start with 3 basic Exemplars, some weapons you find throughout the adventure are the vessels in which some of these spirits live, so taking these weapons to the right character could mean recruiting a new ally for our ghostly friend. Also, the more damage you cause in battle, the more chances you have to unlock new Archeus, a set of abilities you can imbue to your team members. All that, combined with the Mastery mechanic, for example, make Fallen Legion Revenants a fantastic RPG with numerous possibilities when it comes to team customization... so, what's the problem, then?

Well, one of our issues with this game is how repetitive the battles are. When controlling Rowena and the Exemplars, you must time your attacks to break a foe's defense and cause more damage to them, while also parrying their attacks for an extra stun effect. You can also move forward/backward and push/pull your enemies for better crowd control and combos or make better use of buff/debuff cells. At first, all this might seem really interesting, but when you start fighting the same enemies over and over again, mashing 3 or 4 buttons to use the very same attacks time after time... it's not that fun anymore. What's worse, there are several combat interruptions for narrative purposes, bringing you back to the castle so Lucien can talk to someone or solve a timed mini-puzzle that gives you the illusion of choosing paths. It's just as annoying as it sounds, and that's why we kinda hate Lucien, really.

To be fair, Revenants uses more or less the same combat system as previous Fallen Legion games, so if you're a fan, you're already used to it—and to be even fairer, this time the combat system is more streamlined than before. That's not an excuse, though; Rowena and Lucien's segments don't always transition well and surely don't complement each other.

Graphics Are Not Helping...

fallen-legion-revenants-splash Fallen Legion Revenants' Lackluster Gameplay Makes It Difficult to Enjoy Its Attractive Story

We're sure some of you would be glad to ignore all these issues just to enjoy a game with beautiful graphics, but that's Fallen Legion Revenants' most obvious problem. It might be a Switch/PS4 release, but it feels like a cheap mobile game, with a subpar design and some clunky animations.

We honestly like the ideas behind Fallen Legion Revenants, from the plot to how cool and badass the 12 Exemplars look, but it's the poor execution that draws us away from it. Hey, it's not unplayable and we're sure a lot of you will objectively enjoy playing it, but it's a pill hard to swallow... especially knowing it's not the first time we feel like this about a Fallen Legion game.


Final Thoughts

Fallen Legion Revenants is only available on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, and although we don't quite recommend it to the general audience, we do encourage all tactical role-playing fans to give it a try! It might not be the eighth wonder of the world, but it could provide you with an intriguing story and several hours of grinding and fine-tuning. Just lower your expectations a bit!

fallen-legion-revenants-splash Fallen Legion Revenants' Lackluster Gameplay Makes It Difficult to Enjoy Its Attractive Story

Editor/Writer

Author: Rod Locksley

Hey! I'm Rod, and when I'm not watching anime or playing video games I'm probably writing about them, but I'm also a graphic and web designer, and I even published a comic book and worked like 4 years for a well-known MMORPG. Curiously, my favorite series are quite different from each other, so I'm still trying to understand what I really like in an anime...

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