Alliance Alive HD review

Please note, I played this on Nintendo Switch, not sure if other platforms have it or not, but I enjoyed being able to play this in bed when not feeling well. Alliance Alive HD follows in the footsteps of Saga Frontier with regards to dungeon progression and the battle system. Nothing else noteworthy is similar.

Game was one of the most interestingly designed games I've ever played that tried to have a lot of endurance checks. The talent system is very interesting but I'm not sure what value NG+ brings. Perhaps it's for taking on higher difficulty battles? In any case I may come back to this for the hardest difficulty level but for now I will go ahead and review it based on just the one playthrough.

Game features a decent chunk of playable characters, as well as a few optional characters to play as. The characters have strengths and restrictions oftentimes, such as some not having access to purple spells, and there's even a monk available that can't equip weapons. Seems like there's a lot of potential for challenge run ideas with how vast the talent system is. I enjoyed the main gameplay loop well enough but people that aren't fans of turn based RPGs might struggle to find it exciting enough.

This game features battle formations which are very customizable, even better customizability than in Romancing Saga 3(which notably had more formation customization options than Saga Frontier(which was minimalistic in that regard) had even though it was a very inferior game). It has guilds to enhance the battle experience and the players can choose how to develop the guilds which will change how your characters benefit from the work those guild members do. Your characters are essentially world builders which makes the role playing feel a little bit like a traditional strategy game.

The dungeon progression was very satisfying as it offered a lot of endurance checks and if you failed a battle you had the option to spend a finite resource(you can get a lot of them though!) to try the battles again instead of simply accepting the game over. The game has lots of great ideas such as this and I would recommend any fan of innovation in RPGs to try it out for that reason.

I ended up beating the game with a ranger, a monk with a staff, 2 dragoons, and a knight. All except the knight had yellow magic, and only one of the dragoons had purple magic. The way you can customize  your characters is really cool! And the stats system took a bit of getting used to, I was surprised to find out how different stats affected different stuff, but there are levels of mastery to every ability that will increase its power that go beyond just looking at the characters' base stats, so that's very interesting. It is called formation bonus, which adds another layer of complexity to the mastery system. Honestly, the amount of effort that went into the battle system for this game is admirable and exemplary.

I can totally see myself returning to this game for some sort of challenge run(s) in the future, but for now I must continue through the backlog of games. Any game that scores a 5/5 in battle is probably worth returning to eventually for an additional playthrough.

Exploration: 4/5
Story: 3/5
Progression: 4/5
Art: 3/5
Battle: 5/5