I came from a tried of The DioField Chronicle which had left me with good hopes and at the same time with some doubts for Square-Enix's playful proposal. Elements that have been sharpened by the final test of the title, which brings a new iteration of the tactical genre to the videogame market, defined by Square-Enix such as Real Time Tactical Battle. Waiting, therefore, to be able to better enjoy the next season of jRPG thanks to the return of Final Fantasy with its sixteenth chapter signed by Yoshida and at the same time also embark on an adventure with the remake of Tactics Ogre: Reborn, here we are. island of DioField to understand what Square-Enix has been able to offer us.
The Jade Island
The DioField Chronicle bases its narrative construction on a canvas that tries to draw liberally from the fantasy experience, offering us fundamental food for thought to better understand how wars and battles end up destroying not only human lives, but the surrounding nature as well. As we had already had the opportunity to tell during our last trial, the island of DioField is a sort of atoll that managed to keep away from the clash that saw theSchoevia Empire andRowetale Alliance give them a good fight, until the first, in order to have the upper hand in the conflict with the second, does not realize that he is short of jade and starts the assault on the deposits on the island of DioField.
Andrias Rhondarson and Fredret Lester thus, they are commissioned by the prince of the island, as a last wish before dying, to form a resistance group to try to save everything that can be done of the atoll. Grown up and become soldiers, after training after training, the two join the Blue Fox group, discovering everything that is happening on the island of DioField and how the trafficking of jade has become a real pretext for the rise of the despotic Duke Hende.
Presentatarm
The gameplay of The DioField Chronicle provides a clear division between the preparation phase and the battle phase. In the first we will have the opportunity to explore what is a full-fledged game hub, in the role of Andrias. Between interactions and shops to visit, it will be possible to unlock skills, upgrade equipment and learn new game mechanics.
All the party characters, in fact, will have to rely on an AP spending system to increase the passive talents and the acquisition of skills, while each level up will be concerned only with increasing the statistics in combat. Each fighter can activate up to ten passive skills that can guarantee temporary or even permanent boosts, depending on how you are going to exploit your skill tree.
Set aside the preparation phase, which in the first hours of the game will unlock new upgrades from time to time, from battle to battle, you get to the heart of the action. All the clashes manage to be completed in a few minutes, so much so that the sub-quest of completing the clash within 240 seconds is almost always satisfied. Stripped of the turns and also of the chessboard, The DioField Chronicle tries to bring a breath of fresh air to the tactical genre, chasing a mix between the RTS and the cRPG.
On the battlefield
With four characters on the field, your party will attack automatically, while you will have to direct their movements and use skills and invocations, or even spells in case you have - at the beginning you will be forced - a magician in your team. Precisely on this aspect it is worthwhile to dwell to analyze the depth of this system on the one hand, but on the other hand a difficulty calibrated too low, which allowed me - confirmed what I have already seen in the tests - to defeat my opponents with invocations. Attached to this aspect, also the tactical pause, designed to stop the action at any time and let us evaluate which skill to activate, makes everything much easier.
The DioField Chronicle soon ends up reducing all actions to spam of skills capable of overcoming opponents immediately, as well as pushing you to use the same party for the entire duration of the adventure: each recruit, in fact, he will show up in your team with a much lower level than Andrias may have, so he will always be the protagonist to unleash the decisive weapon to win the battle. Likewise, with Summon ready to be used by sacrificing a segment of the TP gauge, very easy to reload, you will soon end up spamming even the arrival of Bahamut, Fenrir and company.
Speaking of the technical aspect, compared to our first test on PlayStation 5, we moved to PC for the final review. The quality has remained on the same level, without pushing us to point out the drops in frame rates or problems of any kind. Although the details of the characters are not very high and the scenarios follow an atypical style, what is exalted in The DioField Chronicle is definitely the soundtrack, signed by the composers of Game of Thrones, which allows us to always have a pleasant and never boring musical accompaniment.
