THE DIOFIELD CHRONICLE Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

THE DIOFIELD CHRONICLE Free Download GAMESPACK.NET To some it’s going to come across as silly, I know this, but there’s such a methodical tone and crispness to the way that the voices have been recorded that it lends this game a voice-acting aesthetic that’s distinctive and quite immersive. Almost surprisingly so. I liked this game’s characters and became deeply invested in the plot, and I wasn’t even sure why I was finding it as appealing as I did as I played. After all, the game’s not exactly an innovation on the War and Peace-like “historical epic” storytelling structure, and the characters aren’t exactly stretching the range of literary heroes. It was only after looking back at clips I’d recorded as I played that I started to notice just how theatrical it really is, and that it was almost easier to imagine the characters as actors on a stage than characters in a game. As a theatre tragic, that’s when it dawned on me why I liked the storytelling approach so much. TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

THE DIOFIELD CHRONICLE Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

The DioField Chronicle is a rather point-blank title. This is a strategy RPG about the events that occur on the continent of DioField, through the eyes of the small mercenary corp hired by Duke Hende. This corp, the Blue Foxes, is a private group jointly led by four extremely different people. These people, Andrias and Fredert, childhood friends and mercenaries, Iscarion, a former knight who left his position due to abuse his colleagues committed on the job and Waltaquin, the daughter of a prestigious house who lost her family in a conflict between noble faction, if not for the backdrop of a war between the kingdom of DioField and the invading Empire, none of them would be able to agree on anything.The Blue Foxes can take any jobs they want, with the caveat that any orders from the Duke take priority. As a result, their missions can be anything from bandit removal and animal extermination to assisting the royal army at any given notice. Thanks to the pragmatism of Andrias, the closest the story has to a main character, these missions will most often be whatever will benefit the Blue Foxes the most amid a heated political climate.

Featuring a unique and beautiful world that blends fantasy, medieval and modern-day influences, and a deep yet innovative real-time battle system.

The world of DioField feels like anyone’s first try making up a whole new setting for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, complete with an evil empire trying to conquer everything and characters earnestly named things like “Fredret Lester.” You have corrupt nobles scheming, a fanatical church, beast men – it’s all well within the Big Book of Fantasy Tropes, but it’s not entirely without charm. There is something homey about it all, even if it feels fairly predictable.“Fire Emblem meets Baldur’s Gate” is certainly a five-word phrase that will get me to pay attention to something, and that’s exactly what DioField Chronicle is. With some incredibly gorgeous production values backing it up, this is a game that, almost by stealth, has come through to be one of the year’s highlights. The narrative itself is well written and tells a ripping yarn, but it must be said upfront that it doesn’t do much that we haven’t seen before from JRPGs that focus on large-scale conflict. There’s an evil, expansionist empire, an alliance of benign powers that have formed to hold them in check, and then there’s you, starting out as part of a tiny band of mercenaries that have been bankrolled by one of the aristocratic elite, certainly destined for great things but unaware of what they might be. Fortunately for your career prospects, your little troupe just happens to be sitting on land that is rich in a rare material required for spell casting… and you can see where this is going. GUTS AND GLORY

THE DIOFIELD CHRONICLE Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

What helps set DioField Chronicle apart is that there’s a highly stylised overwroughtness to it, and while that would usually be an issue, in this case, where it’s quite obviously a deliberate stylistic approach, it actually works. Characters speak in such an elevated, theatrical way that you’d think they were auditioning for Shakespeare. The figurative bugbear looming over all of this is the control scheme, which is just a pain. It seems designed for a controller, but I actually find it equally annoying whether I chose to play it that way or with a mouse and keyboard. Selecting units is imprecise. You can pause the battle by selecting units, but there’s no standalone pause button. Certain simple actions just take more steps than I feel like they need to. If I have my knight selected and I hit the key to bring up the special moves menu, why does it switch to a different character and make me select him again? I thought I would eventually get used to frustrations like that, but at best I learned to tolerate it a bit more by the end. And it’s a bummer, really, because the kinds of clever things you can pull off would have made me look forward to every mission otherwise. Each one is brisk, about five to 10 minutes long even with a lot of pausing, which keeps the action fierce and the campaign from ever bogging down – even if you do all the optional stuff like I did. Mission types that I would normally find annoying, like escorts, become almost a speedrunning puzzle that encourages me to think about the optimal path of destruction before I even hit “go.”

Deep, strategic, real-time tactical battles

Similarly, I loved the Game Of Thrones-inspired tactical maps that popped up during briefings for your missions, to highlight the “pieces” that were in play and what they would be doing in the battle ahead. Another appealing element was the diorama-like presentation of the battlefields themselves. The action might have been in real-time, but thanks to the aesthetic layout the action instead looks like come kind of grand board game. The way that everything in DioField Chronicle has been designed to give a deliberately performative, “stage”-like quality, is vivid and interesting, and perfectly carries a literary quality.Or to put it another way, if I was creating a video game adaptation of War and Peace, I may well have envisioned something like this. That’s the kind of epic quality that the narrative aims for, and the aesthetics drive it home.Even more impressive is that the presentation is, if anything, the weakness of DioField Chronicle. Pausable real-time action is so perfectly my “jam”, and the development team have really done it justice in this game. In DioField Chronicle, you command a small unit of heroes around a battle map. Each of them has distinctly different skills and abilities, and many of those are focused on manipulating the battlefield (funnelling enemies in certain directions, holding key points, or setting up flanking attacks). Hardrock Sex 3D

THE DIOFIELD CHRONICLE Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

The game plays out in real-time, but at any point you can select a hero, which pauses time and allows you to direct them around the map or select the ability that you want to use at your leisure.Combat in The DioField Chronicle is a peculiar blend of turn-based and real-time strategy gameplay. You select up to four units to deploy and give them directions on where to move. If they move close enough to an enemy, they will begin to auto-attack unless you direct them not to. Each character has a couple of skills, determined by that character’s specific class and equipped weapon, which can be used at any time, that cost EP and have a cooldown before the character can use another skill.Within the home base, Elm Field, you take control of Adrias as he checks in with his allies, those who join him in battle, and those who supply armaments; weapons, accessories, items, and Magilumic Orbs (we’ll get to those later).Then you can head out on a mission. Each story-relevant mission is preceded by a needlessly elaborate cutscene in which the lead characters discuss and lend their thoughts to the decision. These cutscenes are fun, each adding flair to the main cast and briefing you on the current state of the war or various kingdom power relations that would generally lurk outside your scope as mercenaries.

Realistic “diorama” style battle scenes

It’s easy to draw lines between The DioField Chronicle’s sweeping story of war, magic, and shady politics and those of Game of Thrones or Fire Emblem. I’d have to write off the whole fantasy genre if borrowing were a deal-breaker, but they still have to figure out how to assemble those parts into something that stands alone. In this case, it ends up feeling like, at best, a generic version of its inspirations. And while its real-time combat system is an exciting twist, it’s often difficult to work with the controls as you fight through its quick, engaging battles. Even the characters who end up having unexpected or interesting roles to play in the unfolding tale end up coming across a bit dull, though that’s no fault of the veteran voice cast.While recovering is fairly straightforward, even a single unit can be rather tricky to take down without damage if you want to conserve EP, which makes taking on large swathes of enemies a considerable risk. You’ll need to time your offensives not to risk your unit being overrun. This means that how you direct your units can make things much more accessible or challenging for you, allowing you to become engaged with far too many foes at once or, depending on the objective, skip enemy encounters entirely.

THE DIOFIELD CHRONICLE Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Bosses like the fearsome wolf Fenrir have multiple health bars you have to deplete, which changes up the pacing of some missions in interesting ways, allowing healers more of an opportunity to shine. And of course, enemy casters and elite fighters have area attacks of their own that you have to scramble to avoid – which made me even more annoyed at the lack of a simple pause button I could hit to collect my thoughts. At least failure usually isn’t that big a deal, since even the longest missions are fairly short and designed to be replayed for bonus objectives. However, some missions do feature long dialogue sequences you have to button mash through every time you replay them.This really is a “best of all worlds” approach. It allows the developers to make each character a complex entity on the battlefield, with multiple skills and abilities that can move them around, and tactical depth in how you use them to counter the enemy attacks. With other, true real-time systems, individual characters or units need to be kept more simple than this, else it becomes too much information for the player to track, but this comes at the expense of tactical depth and individual character development.

Meanwhile, the real-time nature of the combat adds urgency and flow that helps build the impression of a grander strategy at play. Fire Emblem – which is in so many ways comparable to DioField Chronicle, lacks the energy that real-time combat brings to the table, and while that series is very fine (everyone that knows me knows how much I love Fire Emblem), it never has the gritty intensity that a real-time system unlocks. That’s why I compared DioField Chronicle to Baldur’s Gate at the top of the review. With its likewise pausable action, Baldur’s Gate set the standard for how a developer could blend tactical and character depth with the visceral appeal of watching enemies splatter in real-time. It’s been disappointing that we’ve seen relatively few examples of this kind of game in the years since, because when it works (and it often does), it sings beautifully. Half-Life Alyx

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S:THE DIOFIELD CHRONICLE