Review | The chronicle of DioField

Review | The Chronicle of DioField – In the current gaming landscape, there are nearly endless studios that provide us with our share of games every month. One of the big names in this sense remains Square Enix, which has made it clear, by giving up its Western studies, that it wants to go back to doing what it is good at. As a result, several completely different Final Fantasy titles and RPGs are now raining. The DioField Chronicle is a standout here with its focus on strategic gameplay as it tries to tell us a dark story with a medieval twist. If this sounds a little familiar to you, we’re not surprised. With the release of The DioField Chronicle in today’s gaming landscape, Square Enix truly has only one formidable competitor: itself.

The oldest story in the book

A conflict takes place on a fictional continent where various empires have been able to live in peace with each other for years. The Trovelt-Schoevian Empire advances after defeating the Rowetale Alliance and makes rapid leaps towards the Kingdom of Alletain. Given their Aletaine roots, a group of mercenaries called the Blue Foxes decide to put an end to this and protect their home kingdom. Leading the way is a group of four heroes, each with their own experience, be it magic, archery or head to head on horseback.

This story immediately reminds us of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but also various television series that we have been able to follow in recent years. We’ve also had similar stories in Square Enix games like Triangle Strategy, which was released earlier this year. The DioField Chronicle is a collaboration between Square Enix and Lancarse. If the latter does not immediately seem familiar to you, we understand it perfectly well. The only other title in their repertoire that hits us right away is Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, a Nintendo DS game from more than a decade ago.

Nothing and everything

Primarily, The DioField Chronicle is played as a strategy game with mixed RPG influences. The combat system is known as the “real-time tactical battle system”. In normal words, this means that you control your units in real time, engage them in combat with opponents in your path, and then issue specific commands during battle, such as defend or launch a more powerful attack. This system works correctly and can be quite a challenge at times, but in our opinion it does not bring much news.

By completing missions, the heroes you undertake on the paths earn skill points which you can spend to provide them with extra power. The basics are obviously represented as more attack power, extra lives, or new attacks to exploit. It’s a form of progression that has been expected from Square Enix games in general in recent years. Of course, it doesn’t hurt and encourages you to keep playing, because that attack at the top of the skill point tree sounds really cool … But we’re working on the same tune again, only now the title The DioField Chronicle in home screen instead of Triangle Strategy, Octopath Traveler or even Tactics Ogre, of which we can also expect a new part by the end of the year.

Spend these skill points in your headquarters. In this hub you can also buy new weapons, armor and accept new missions. As far as we’re concerned, the hub seems a bit forced, since its added value hasn’t become entirely clear to us. Spending skill points, shopping, and accepting missions could also have fit on a menu and it’s not that the hub is really interesting anymore. Empty corridors, boring spaces with almost nothing to explore and no additions to the tradition of this world. In fact, we wanted to get out of it as soon as possible, because the hub is definitely the ugliest part of the game.

A knife in a firefight

We played The DioField Chronicle on PC. Since you generally play better strategy games with a mouse and keyboard, we tried this first. However, mouse and keyboard turn out to be a bad choice in this game. The way the mouse moves has that typical floating feeling you get when stick inputs are literally transferred to a mouse and even standard keys don’t make any sense. Don’t want to use the Enter key in the menu to confirm something? No, apparently we do this with the F test. Either way, a checker is a must.

Unfair

Strategy games often benefit from a top-down perspective. Since a strategy game often has to summon several men at once, the models are less of a quality. That’s not a bad thing, because The DioField Chronicle looks nice and acceptable on missions. This changes as you walk around the hub. Your character does not walk, but skates through the aforementioned empty halls. Apparently the physics does not exist in the hub, as well as the color and characters look like mannequins in a cosplay costume up close. It would have been good to give an example in this sense, for example Fire Emblem: Three Houses, in which clearly attention was paid to the hub.

Square Enix has instead equipped the PC version with various modern comforts. A wide range of texture, shadow and even FidelityFX Super Resolution options. However, what left us speechless was the ray tracing option. Because?! In a game where detailed reflections and lighting matter, ray tracing is a nice addition, but these features are lacking in The DioField Chronicle. Anyway, we tested it. On the system we used (Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT) the game ran at well over one hundred frames per second. With ray tracing enabled, which in our opinion doesn’t add much graphically, this became between sixty and eighty.

the swan song

If The DioField Chronicle excels at anything, it’s the music. This is not surprising, because after some investigative work we soon saw that two composers who collaborated on Game of Thrones are responsible for this. That Square Enix asked these composers is somewhat humorous, as the story of The DioField Chronicle is essentially similar to that of Game of Thrones. Voice acting is fine in Japanese, but far from English. Voices more often sound muffled than clear, as if the dialogue was being recorded with the microphone of a budget smartphone.

Played on: pcs.
Also available on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S, Nintendo Switch.