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The Alliance Alive Review


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2054187463_AllianceAliveboxart.png.df70a24cd1e4cd10e280e0bae64be6aa.pngThe Alliance Alive is a spiritual successor to The Legend of Legacy, another 3DS RPG that boasted a large character roster and traditional turn-based battles. Both games use the same distinctive art style—one where characters have no noses, for some reason—as well as the same leveling system that grants health and attack boosts semi-randomly. Although AA corrects some of the largest missteps of its predecessor, there are still some clunky battle mechanics to deal with here that can turn the game into a seemingly random grind.
 
The game takes place in a world where humanity has been subjugated by Daemons, who have divided the world into separate districts and left Beastfolk to rule over the humans. The story begins with two young friends who, while out exploring, stumble into a dangerous truth behind the Daemon rule and set out on a quest to put the world back in order. There's a lot of interesting lore here but the game never fully capitalizes on it. After the initial introduction of characters and locations a lot of the backstory is too muddled or unspoken, which makes it hard to care about the game's world. The Alliance Alive is also a bit overambitious with its characters. Their interactions and dialogue with one another is charming but with nine playable characters their motivations and backstories aren't well developed—even the two characters that open the game feel pretty two-dimensional. Somewhat ironically for an RPG, there isn't enough time devoted to storytelling here.
 
1400366715_AllianceAlivebattle.jpg.4d8eb6cd4c139aca99361084c73f99c4.jpgI'll start with the most important change to the gameplay for anyone that played The Legend of Legacy: you do not need to draw contracts to use magic. It was a neat concept but in practice it was insanely tedious, and thankfully Alliance Alive streamlines its magic use. You still need to equip specific items to use magic, but you won't be wasting several turns just to cast one spell. That said, magic still feels underwhelming in this game. The offensive spells are never quite as effective as you'd hope, so mostly you'll just be using magic to heal. Since there is no group healing magic you're often stuck having one character heal individual characters every single turn during boss fights. For basic battles you often don't have to heal at all since your party auto-heals all damage after battle, which is nice but also creates something of an imbalance between the pace of normal fights and bosses. You only actually get to/need to use strategic planning against bosses—for normal enemies you're better off just attacking all-out to defeat everything in just a turn or two.
 
The Alliance Alive does bring back battle formations and the level up system from its predecessor. Formations let you change the focus of each character—attack, defend, or support—to balance your party effectively. Again, this is the kind of strategic thinking that only gets used in boss fights, and although the game gives you a decent amount of options there's little incentive to experiment too much. And like the last game characters don't have levels per se. Instead, after battle they might earn an HP or SP boost, and during battle they might learn new combat skills for the weapon they have equipped, or boost the attack/defend/support rating for a skill they used. Just like The Legend of Legacy this feels like a weirdly unnecessary system for increasing power, especially since it can feel totally random whether or not a character will earn one of these stat boosts. It does feel like they come more easily in The Alliance Alive, so there's a bit less grinding, but the uncertainty is still an odd choice.
 
1829967766_AllianceAlivemap.jpg.eb9fe38ef7225248cc00245a22e01654.jpgNaturally, the game has all of the other core mechanics you'd expect from an RPG: exploration, finding/buying new equipment, etc. There are quite a few optional dungeons as well which only have a somewhat random chance of providing any good items but can be valuable grinding locations. As seemingly random as leveling can be in The Alliance Alive you do need to make sure your party is in tip top shape at all times—there are a couple of significant difficulty spikes which can completely blindside you if you aren't keeping up. One in particular feels awfully unfair; the game definitely could have benefited from balancing the overall difficulty, especially between mindless normal battles and more challenging boss fights.
 
All that said, The Alliance Alive definitely scratches an itch for anyone that enjoys classic turn-based RPGs. Not all of its RPG mechanics are completely engaging, but RPG fans will still feel a satisfying familiarity with the basic battle and exploration systems.
 
The controls are simple enough to learn since it's an RPG, though I don't understand why L is used to confirm in a lot of the menus. The graphics have a certain charm to them, even though the lack of noses is a bit weird, and the chibi art style kind of makes it feel like the entire game is made up of children. Still, the art style suits the 3DS, given the hardware. The music is well composed, even if few tracks stick with you after finishing the game. While playing though they have the suitable catchy-ness and gravitas of a good RPG soundtrack.
 
1286389826_AllianceAlivedialogue.jpg.e9941c430b67806d2cfda94b408178a5.jpgWith nine playable characters, several weapon types, and the variety of formations you can employ, there's a lot of variety in The Alliance Alive, which makes it ideal for repeated playthroughs. In fact, there's a new game+ option that lets you carry over certain abilities, which helps you fast-track through some of the early parts of the game. Even if it can be a grind to do so, the game is very friendly to experimentation and creating your own ideas for a battle party. All told, The Alliance Alive is just about mid-length for an RPG—about twenty five hours or so, depending on how much you grind—though maybe it should have been a bit longer to flesh out the story more.
 
The Alliance Alive does an admirable job of fixing the issues found in the developer's previous game, though all the pieces of this RPG still don't quite come together fully. The story has some interesting insights into a unique world, but the game doesn't fully capitalize on it. The gameplay, although less tedious than The Legend of Legacy, still has some nagging issues that make it feel both grindy and, at times, unbalanced. There's plenty of room for experimentation but the grind of building up characters with different weapons/skills can be tiring. The Alliance Alive is a solid RPG but in many ways a forgettable one as well.
 
Rating: 7 out of 10 Alliances
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