Chaos Legion

"Chaos Legion has some serious flaws, but is overall a good game."

This is my first review, so I'm going to be straight forward about this.
Now that I've got that out of the way, I'll start by saying Chaos Legion is not the game it looks like at first, and you'll either love it or hate it depending mainly upon your play style.

Overview:
Graphics 9/10
Sound 7/10
Game play 8/10
Story 5/10
Bonus For Thanatos Being Awesome +1

Graphics: 9/10
There's no doubting the graphics are good. In fact, each enemy is very well made, and is very well animated. The game's graphics really shine when it comes to the main character Sieg, the Chaos Legions themselves, and the larger bosses. Sieg's cape/trench coat-ish thing looks awesome, and is appropriately far too unrealistic to add to the effect. I wonder sometimes why he wears it despite the fact it's torn, but that's beyond the point. Each Chaos Legion is unique, but they all have a certain metallic look to their designs. They all look appropriate for their function, except for Arrogance. You couldn't tell that Arrogance is a "shield" by looking at it, but whatever. The bosses look great, and you can pretty much tell where you can hurt them and where you can't. Most of the bosses have that bigger than life feel that a lot of RPGs try to pull off.

Unfortunately, most of the actual levels look bland. While the more action-heavy levels aren't hindered by this, and it never looks absolutely horrible, it's still an eyesore. There are a few levels that look really good, so that kept me from lowering the score to an 8 or 7.

Sound: 7/10
There's really nothing special here. It's good music, and it's appropriate for the area. It's just nothing to write home about. There is this really awesome feature where the music gets more hardcore, for lack of a better word, when you have a Chaos Legion summoned, though. That saves the sound score from a 5. Oh, and the sound effects are okay. Generic at times, but okay.

Game play: 8/10
As I said before, you'll either love or hate this game depending on your play style. The game play consists of beating things up constantly. There aren't any real puzzles, and the fighting does get repetitive if you insist on killing everything that moves. You shouldn't do that. At the beginning of each "scene" (basically just a big fight) you're given an objective much like a strategy game. If you accomplish the objective, all the enemies still alive die, and give you health. It is much easier to complete some objectives if you kill everything, but you'll live longer if you aim to complete the scene and forget about the rest. There are some pluses to killing everything, but living tends to be more fun.

The part that stands out about the game is the game's namesake creatures: The Chaos Legions. The Chaos Legion system plays like Final Fantasy's summon system would in an action game. Chaos Legions have Force, Assist and Enchant abilities. Force is your standard summon feature. It's tempting to use Force constantly, but if your Chaos Legion takes to much damage, it can be temporarily broken. Also, while using a Chaos Legion, Sieg moves slower and his attacks are weaker. I think Sieg's jumping abilities might be reduced by using a Chaos Legion as well, but I'm not completely sure. Assist abilities are usually triggered using the triangle button while you don't have a Legion summoned. They tend to be very situation specific, and use up a lot of Souls (think MP) but a few, such as Guilt's Midnight Punisher, are useful to simply boost damage. Enchant abilities are mainly new abilities that Sieg can use whether or not a Legion is summoned or not, and as far as I know of none of the Enchant abilities require Souls to use.

Now, there are some flaws in this game. First off, if you don't have the right Legions with you in a level, you tend to get your butt kicked a lot worse than usual. If you have inappropriate Chaos Legions, it's still possible to beat a level, but it will take almost three times as long in many cases. If you do bring along the right Chaos Legions, and approach the battles properly, you can breeze through most scenes in under three minutes. When properly equipped, a few scenes can be skipped entirely!
Thankfully, the return feature allows you to return to the Intermission with all your EXP. Unfortunately, any items you used are still gone, and any items you picked up have to be picked up again. I think Thanatos fragments might be an exception to that rule, but I'm not sure.

The other blaring flaw is the difficulty of the boss battles. Rather, the amazingly ridiculous amount of time it takes to defeat a boss. Most bosses will take a good ten to fifteen minutes with the right strategy. A few of the bosses are insanely difficult to beat, and require near mastery to take down without wasting plenty of healing items. On the plus side, most bosses provide minor opponents to recharge Souls on in case one of your Chaos Legions are broken.

Story: 5/10
The story makes no bloody sense at all. But you're not playing this for the story, are you? Well, for those of you who are, I cut the score down to 7 for you. Oh, and I cut it down to 5 because Victor wants to be a more Gothic version of Sephiroth. At least Sieg isn't a Cloud-wannabe.

Bonus For Thanatos Being Awesome: +1
Yeah, Thanatos is awesome. Just use his assist once. You'll scoff at any Final Fantasy summon after seeing that one time. In fact, Thanatos's assist is arguably better than summoning him. It's just a real pain you have to collect a bunch of fragments to use him after the first level. Yeah, you lose Thanatos at the end of level 1. What'd you expect? It's the last one on the list, and it's title is Ultimate. I mean, come on.

Overall: 8/10

Rent Or Buy?
Rent it first, if you can. If you can't, go ahead and buy it. You can probably find it at a local game store for less than fifteen bucks. Trust me, it's worth it.

Final Rant:
Arcia's useless. She doesn't even help you. In fact, she doesn't even appear outside of cut scenes. Wow. Completely useless. She whines a lot too...

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/21/06