God Wars: The Complete Legend

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

God Wars is a Turn-Based Strategy-RPG with gameplay similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, with a story about a girl doomed to be sacrificed to a volcano to appease the gods, with a strong story focus on Japanese mysticism. It was originally released on PlayStation Vita in 2017, and arrives on the Switch with added DLC content included in the package.

God Wars is very anime-esque in its presentation, with an anime art style, anime cutscenes, and a very anime-esque plot… and by that, I mean it’s very awkward and stilted in that way that is particular to poorly-localized anime. This would be acceptable to some degree if the game was light-hearted enough to brush off this awkwardness, but God Wars is melodramatic in a way that clearly wants to be dead-serious, but is really difficult to actually take seriously when the poor localization is so frequently cringe-worthy.

That’s not the only problem here, though. The game’s story is unnecessarily confusing, with characters acting in a way that doesn’t make any sense until you read the supplemental material included in the game’s menus. We’re not told how the initial three main characters even know each other in the game’s story – we have to read the back-story to get even a hint of this.

Graphically, this is a game that looks like a relic of the PlayStation 2-3 era, with cel-shaded chibi-esque versions of the characters in battles that further undercut the game’s attempt at a more serious tone. And while the music and cutscenes are decent, neither is especially memorable.

As for the gameplay, what’s here is mostly pretty typical Tactics-style Strategy-RPG fare, although even here, the game suffers from a myriad of problems – slow, clunky menus with fonts that are at times difficult to read and take a moment to load whenever you open them, and slow-paced combat that doesn’t feel particularly deep or engaging. At the very least the game’s job system is nice, but it’s also nothing that we haven’t seen done before in countless other games in the genre.

Despite all my complaints about God Wars, it is still at its core a decent Tactics-Style Strategy-RPG, but With the Switch being home to strong offerings like Into the Breach and Nippon Ichi’s own Disgaea series, a game needs to be more than “decent” to be worth bothering with, and God Wars’ cringe-worthy localization and clunky gameplay simply aren’t worth the time of any but the most dedicated fans of the genre.

tl;dr – God Wars is a Strategy-RPG in the same style of Final Fantasy Tactics with a highly melodramatic story about a woman doomed to be sacrificed to a volcano to appease the gods. Unfortunately, this serious story clashes with the game’s terrible localization, and the game is troubled by numerous other problems, such as clunky menus and sluggish gameplay. Only the most die-hard Strategy-RPG fans should bother with this one.

Grade: C-

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