Battle Chasers: Nightwar

The pitch

Battle Chasers began life as Joe Madureira's comic book, launched in 1998 and left unfinished when the artist moved on to other projects. Airship Syndicate, the studio Madureira co-founded, revived it as a turn-based RPG, funding development through a 2015 Kickstarter that raised well over its goal on the strength of the art alone. The game arrived as a full release on 3 October 2017, no Early Access period, with console versions following the following month.

The premise sends a small party -- Garrison, Gully, Calibretto, Knolan and Alumon -- crash-landing in a hostile, magic-soaked region called Skycradle after their airship goes down. What follows is a fairly conventional dungeon-crawling RPG structure -- a hub town, an overworld to explore, dungeons to clear, gear and crafting to manage -- built around turn-based combat that draws heavily on classic JRPGs: Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy come up constantly in the review corpus as the clearest points of comparison, both as praise and as a standard the game is measured against.

Where almost everyone agrees

Read enough Battle Chasers: Nightwar reviews and one thing becomes obvious fast: there's very little argument about the game's two biggest strengths. The art -- Madureira's comic-book style translated into isometric environments, character portraits and combat effects -- gets called "gorgeous," "stunning" or "beautiful" in a large majority of both positive and negative reviews. The combat system, built around action points, a perk tree and an "overdrive" resource that charges up through the fight, gets similarly consistent praise for having real tactical depth rather than being a JRPG skin over simple turn order. A reviewer with 101 hours logged, having finished the game twice including a New Game Plus run, calls it flatly one of the best turn-based RPGs they've played; even reviewers giving the game a thumbs-down routinely open with some version of "the game looks incredible and the combat is genuinely good."

Where it splits

What divides the review base isn't a disagreement about quality -- it's a disagreement about pacing, and it shows up with unusual specificity across the negative sample. The single most repeated complaint, by a wide margin, is the lack of any way to speed up combat and travel animations. Turn-based RPGs live or die on how fast their systems let you iterate through fights, and reviewers across multiple years -- 2017 through 2025 -- name this as the thing that turns "engaging" into "a drag" the further into the game they get. One reviewer's summary is representative: "everything is slow -- running, traveling, attack animations, the grind to level up." Another describes trying the game multiple times over several years, getting to the same point, and quitting again, unable to remember why the first time.

The second consistent complaint is the game's difficulty curve, which several reviewers describe not as hard in an interesting way but as structurally demanding detours into crafting and backtracking that the main quest doesn't clearly signal. A reviewer who otherwise praises the combat and art puts it plainly: the game "wants to extend the gameplay value with tedious xp grinding" rather than through content that feels purpose-built. This isn't a minority complaint -- it recurs across reviews written a year after launch and reviews written in 2024 and 2025, suggesting it isn't a launch-week balance issue that got smoothed out with patches so much as a structural choice the developers stuck with.

What the numbers say about where people stop

Global achievement data lines up with the review pattern almost exactly. Early-game milestones sit comfortably high -- 88% for a survival-related achievement, 60% for "it's just beginning," around 50-57% for early crafting and combat tutorials. From there the curve falls steadily rather than cliff-diving all at once, which fits a game people drift away from over many hours rather than bounce off immediately. By the far end, achievements plausibly tied to endgame content and finishing the campaign sit at 2-4%, with the lowest-completion achievement on the list -- likely tied to the true ending or a hard superboss -- at 2.6%. That is one of the steeper drop-offs covered in this lane, and it corroborates the specific, recurring shape of the negative reviews: not "this game is bad," but "I loved this for fifteen or twenty hours and then stopped."

Value nine years on

At its usual steep discount -- 75% off, down to NZ$8.99 at the time of checking, from a NZ$35.99 list price -- Battle Chasers: Nightwar is an easy recommendation purely on a cost-per-hour basis. Committed players report 50-100+ hours across a full campaign and New Game Plus, and even players who eventually stopped typically got well past their money's worth in hours before the pacing wore them down. The game received no major post-launch content expansions, but it also didn't need them -- Airship Syndicate built a complete, self-contained RPG rather than a live-service base, and nine years of steady Very Positive reviews suggest that structure has aged fine. The thing that hasn't aged, by the review corpus's own account, is the absence of a fast-forward option for combat and travel -- a quality-of-life feature that has become close to standard in turn-based RPGs released since, which makes Nightwar's lack of one feel more dated with each passing year rather than less.

Verdict

Battle Chasers: Nightwar earns its Very Positive reputation on the strength of two things nearly every reviewer agrees on: the art is exceptional, and the combat system has real depth. What keeps it from a higher score is equally consistent across nine years of reviews -- a grind-heavy middle stretch, difficulty spikes that demand detours rather than rewarding skill, and no way to speed up the parts of the game you've already seen a hundred times by hour thirty. The achievement data backs the reviews up almost exactly: a lot of players start strong and a very small fraction finish. At full price that pattern is a real risk. At the discount it almost always sells at, it's a beautiful, tactically interesting RPG that rewards knowing, going in, exactly where the fatigue sets in and pacing your own expectations around it.