Chain Chronicle 3 (2016)

[チェインクロニクル3]

Publisher: Sega
Developer: Sega
Platform: Android/iOS

Overview:
After the fall of the Holy King to the invading Black Army, a fledgling band of volunteers rises up to stem the tide.

Gameplay:
The core gameplay is a sort of tower defense. You have two 3x3 grids. Your party of four active members and two reservists (plus a guest helper) has to fend off waves of enemies. If they get to the other side of the screen, it's game over. Characters come in five categories: fighters (close-quarter attack), knights (defense), archers (physical ranged), mages (magic ranged), and clerics (healing). There are various job classes within each category that influences the sort of skills at the characters' disposal. You move the characters around by swiping or clicking on particular enemies to target them. There is an auto-battle option that works fairly well, but special attacks remain manual.

Special attacks warrant particular mention, because I'm pretty sure the "chain" in Chain Chronicle refers to the gameplay element of stringing your specials together for combos. You have a hopper that fills up with icons for the different character types and you can link one to the next. Using the same character successively with cause the cost of those specials to go up. Hyper attacks take it even farther, but they aren't available by default.

As with all gacha games, characters come in degrees of rarity for one-star to five-star. This influences things like level cap, cost and so on. (Characters have a cost attached to them which can limit how many powerful characters you can deploy at a time until you level up accordingly, though the limit is set rather high from the start, which leads me to believe it was stricter in earlier versions of the game.) You can limit break your characters by feeding them copies of themselves or special Arcana Cards for that purpose. Speaking of Arcana Cards, this is how you develop your characters outside battle. You can level the characters themselves and their weapons. Weapons come in rarity just like characters and you can upgrade your characters' weapons to more powerful versions (albeit one grade at a time, i.e. C to B, then B to A, not skipping from C to A) within the same type. Weapons types include slash, stab, bash, bow, magic, holy, fist, gun, and sniper. Each character can have three weapons, so you can take advantage of different weapons' unique properties. Once you hit Level 50, you can use the refinement section of the smithy to combine weapons and other materials to craft new weapons.

I mentioned before that there is a gacha system. Each hub city has a tavern where you can recruit characters and the characters available varies by location. There are also limited banners for events and a free gacha section that uses Arcana Coins and Rings rather than the more valuable Spirit Stones or Gacha Tickets. There is a store where you can buy Spirit Stones, but also sections where you can make purchases with in-game currency like the Spirit Stones themselves, Rings and Spheres.

The main questline involves story, free, and character quests in the town on the map plus additional battles en route. The game preserves the original questlines of the first two sections of the game, so new players aren't missing anything there. In the Events section we have periodic scenario events, the daily Grand Battle, collaboration character quest, daily quests, and a section for old events much like the Side Story section in Granblue Fantasy. There are also challenge quests and the Abyssal Vortex for high-level players to net big rewards. Interestingly enough, unlike a lot of Japanese mobile games, there are no multiplayer battles.

For new players, there's a mentorship system that pairs you with a high-level player so that their helper character (who vastly outclasses your team) can help you get to Level 50 with rewards for both of you along the way. This is particularly handy when it comes to participating in an ongoing event once you start. The main questline is reasonably scaled so that this help isn't necessary, however.

Speaking of rewards, there are various missions--daily, event, starter, etc.--that give you some good stuff if you meet certain conditions. A word of warning, though. You need to pick up the rewards as soon as they're available for maximum efficiency. For instance, if one mission is to have a Fighter in 50 battles and the next is to have a Fighter for 100 battles, the count for the second mission won't start until you've picked up the reward for the first. Games like Granblue don't tally mission progress this way, which is why I wanted to make a note of it.

Story/Characters:
The story is fairly standard for a JRPG and the characterization doesn't really break new ground either. Both the main story and events are generally written competently enough. Some of the characters are reasonably well-developed and interesting while others are mere ciphers, as tends to be the case with this sort of game. It's the opposite of the situation with Hortensia Saga, where I liked the writing but hated the gameplay.

Graphics:
This game originally popped up on my radar because one of my favorite illustrators from Fire Emblem Heroes, Sencha, is a contributor. Some of the primary character art is done by toi8, another illustrator I really like. However, as is the case when you have a bunch of illustrators providing art, there's a range of quality and an overall lack of unity in the art design, two things I really don't like.

In battle, the characters are rendered in 3D SD models that are decent but not amazing. Effects are reasonably flashy and incidental art like backdrops and such are decent.

Music/Sound:
The music here is okay but it doesn't really stand out. Sound effects do what they need to do. There's some voice acting, but it's rather limited. Hortensia Saga was the same way. You'll be disappointed if you're coming off of something like Granblue Fantasy.

Conclusion:
This is a pretty decent mobile game that has plenty of content to keep you entertained if the core gameplay manages to appeal to you. Unfortunately, the international version of the game was shut down back in Part 2, so if you're interested, you're going to have to brush up on your Japanese.

Rating:
Play It