Developer: Yummy Yummy Tummy
Publisher: Mintsphere
Platforms: PlayStation 4
Tested on: PlayStation 4
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire – Review
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire is a PlayStation 4 exclusive. Where most RPG PlayStation 4 exclusives are released/developed by NIS America, Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire has been developed by Yummy Yummy Tummy and released by Mintsphere. Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire is a PlayStation 4 exclusive, but it’s not the only title in the series. Fallen Legion: Flames of an Empire is a PlayStation Vita exclusive, so the powerful handheld is getting some love too, which is always nice.
Story
You are Princess Cecille. You’ve lost your father and what happens to the only child of a King? They rise to the throne. The thing about this is that the Empire you’re about to ascend the throne to, is on the verge of collapse, and you’re nowhere near the Castle for your inauguration, so you have to make your way there before anyone else sits his/her ass on the velvet and declares your right null and void. You’re not a helpless princess however, you’re given tools by your late father for your survival. You’re given a tome –pardon- a Grimoire with an attitude and a desire for souls, and the power to imagine certain weapons into life. These are called Exemplars. You meet more weapons come to life on your journey.
The story starts off abruptly. Immediately you are thrown into the fray with little to no information apart from a dead dad. As you play you’ll be given choices and those affect your Empire, but the problem is that you don’t know the overall state of the surrounding Empires, like who’s your biggest threat, who’s who and who you should feel compelled to support. Giving the player a hint of what’s going on before the general collapse of the Empire would help a lot, as would making it so the player himself knows –for the most part- how much of a dick they are being to whom and how this affects their legacy. It would help the immersion and make the player feel less like they are going through the motions and actually making sense of the situation, for better or for worse.
Graphics
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire isn’t exactly an ugly game to look at. It has hand drawn 2D graphics that don’t look like some badly animated flash cartoon, but are really fluid in their movements. A minor setback is that when you are in full combat mode, and you are stringing together combos, the action can be rather flashy and you might lose track over the enemy in the melee and get hit, resetting your combo counter. Sure, enemies flash red when they are about to attack, but with all that’s going on onscreen at times it’s easy to miss an enemy and have your counter reset. Re-using character models to represent a certain type of character, like making all the ‘peasants and their wives’ look the same, feels a bit gimmicky and even a little lazy. Having a lot of character designs might take a little bit more effort, but at least it won’t feel copy pasted.
Sound
Whoever the sound engineer is that made the music for the game, he deserves a raise, pronto. It’s really awesome music that gets you right in the mood to bash in some enemy skulls and murder you some dragons. It’s bombastic, it’s fluid, and finding where the track loops is quite a challenge. Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire does have voice acting. It doesn’t really do it justice though. Sure enough the voice acting is decent, but having only one character have a voice at certain times, feels lackluster. Either go the extra mile and give every character a voice, and the character trait that comes with it, or let the player roleplay to the fullest and give no one a voice.
Gameplay
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire is a 2D action/adventure RPG. The game throws you into play by telling you what button does what in the first two stages and then lets you whoop ass. It comes down to this: every face button has an assigned character to it. Triangle directs Cecille herself, who is capable of throwing magic at the enemies, healing her Exemplars, to downright even reviving them should they fall in battle. Square, X and Circle are all tied to an Exemplar, pressing these will have them do an attack. L1 blocks enemy attacks, and when you do so at the right time, you’ll get a perfect block and if it’s a projectile attack it’ll be bounced back, if it’s a melee attack, the enemy will be vulnerable. Mashing buttons is a possible way to victory. You can also take it slowly, carefully waiting until the ATB gauge on your character has been replenished. This way you can string together attacks into link attacks or even have enough attacks in a row for a special attack, all this while blocking and slowly whittling away the enemy’s health.
It has to be said that blocking is a finicky business. You’d think that blocking when the enemy glows red –which indicates an attack- should net you the perfect block and a free ATB gauge refill, but it doesn’t. If an enemy glows red it indicates an incoming attack, after which they’ll wind up their attack and unleash it. It’s also a different timing for different enemies, so you can’t really ‘train’ for it and have muscle memory take over. A great idea on paper, but the execution deserves execution. Also, why pressing and holding block doesn’t block is beyond imagination, the developers could have opted for halting the regeneration of the ATB gauges when you are blocking and thus stopping the player from infinitely blocking in between attacks, but they haven’t, so if you block a nanosecond too early, your block will be dropped and the cooldown for the block will stop you from regaining control over the combat situation, sometimes resulting in losing an Exemplar, especially later in the game.
Conclusion
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire is a fast paced RPG that nails the middleground of turn based and real time action so the game doesn’t lose momentum at the most crucial points during gameplay. If you are looking for a game that’s easy to master and still fun and fast paced, then this is something you should look into, if you like your story explained to the letter, then Fallen Legion won’t draw you in.
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire - Review,
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