Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

"Who would have thought I'd recommend an RPGMaker game in year 2022?" reads one of Symphony of War's most-upvoted positive reviews. "Not me, that's for sure. Yet here we are, proving that you can make a great game from any engine with enough creativity and talent." That's the honest surprise running through most of this game's reception: built on an engine better known for small indie narrative projects, Dancing Dragon Games used it to build a squad-based tactics game deep enough to earn direct comparisons to genre landmarks most reviewers assumed nobody was still trying to make.

Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem, taken seriously

The comparison isn't casual — it's the most common reference point in the entire review corpus. "Fire Emblem" appears in 25 of the 100 most-helpful English negatives (people naming the thing they wanted this to be even while criticising it), and "Ogre Battle" in 12. One of the highest-voted positive reviews (95 votes) states it outright: "This feels like the spiritual successor to Ogre Battle 64 and I didn't realize how long I had been waiting for that. Absolutely worth it. 10/10." The screenshots back the pitch up: squad-versus-squad battles with a morale bar arcing across the top of the screen, detailed unit stat blocks on both sides, and a scale that goes well beyond the usual one-unit-per-tile Fire Emblem formula. Artifacts, unit affinities and class traits add a genuine build layer on top, and multiple long-playtime reviewers single out the New Game Plus system as a standout — one 471-hour review calls the whole thing "the best I played in 2022" and asks the developer directly for a sequel.

The complaint that dwarfs every other

Set the combat aside and the story is where this game's reputation splits, decisively. It's the single most common complaint across the negative corpus — 63 of the 100 most-helpful English negatives raise it, more than triple the next most common issue — and the specifics repeat with striking consistency across reviews written months and years apart. "The story? Awful," reads one. "There is a bad guy. We must kill him. We are the good guys. God says so." Another, from a reviewer who otherwise liked substantial parts of the game, describes chapter transitions as offering "conversations" you simply click through with no real input, calling them "pretty generic." A third sums up a pattern several others echo almost word for word: "the gameplay, the mechanics, are all fun and even fantastic... but the story just falls flat."

What makes this genuinely interesting rather than just a weak point is the contrast with the game's own community reputation: "Story Rich" sits among its top handful of vote-weighted Steam tags, at 280 votes, well ahead of many mechanical descriptors. Set expectations from that tag alone and the actual writing — which even a large share of fans describe as thin, expositional and underwritten — will land as a genuine disappointment rather than a known trade-off.

The other recurring note: it's often too easy

The second most common thread, difficulty, shows up differently depending on who's writing. "This game's 'normal' difficulty is a joke," reads one review at four hours in. "I literally don't think it's possible to lose while using the default squad setups the game gives me." Several others report the same on higher settings, describing default loadouts and grinding as enough to steamroll most encounters without engaging the tactical systems the game is built around. This isn't universal — some reviewers on the hardest difficulty with permadeath report genuine struggle — but it recurs often enough (30 of 100 negatives) that anyone wanting real tension should expect to self-impose harder rules rather than trust the difficulty labels as calibrated.

7.5 out of 10. Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga delivers exactly what its most enthusiastic fans promise: a genuinely excellent, deep squad-tactics game that earns its Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem comparisons through real mechanical substance rather than surface resemblance. What holds it back from a higher score is equally clear and equally consistent across three years of reviews — a story that even many of its defenders call the weakest part of the package, and a default difficulty curve that lets a meaningful share of players coast through without ever being tested by the systems they bought the game for.