The Book of Warriors Review | Fire Emblem With a Rogue-lite Twist
The Book of Warriors is ultimately a game I recommend to players looking for a Fire Emblem-type strategy Rogue-lite experience. I think it…
The Book of Warriors is ultimately a game I recommend to players looking for a Fire Emblem-type strategy Rogue-lite experience. I think it has a few rough edges, but it is overall a good game.
I don’t normally play Fire Emblem games, or even turn-based combat games in general. I find myself getting bored or demotivated at a certain point. I was fully expecting a similar thing to occur here, but to my surprise, I put in a solid 17 hours and enjoyed a lot of my time with it. The rogue-lite elements I think were done well enough to keep me coming back for more.
Specifically, I enjoyed the sigils, I thought there was a good number of them, and I enjoyed how the different types can synergize with each other quite easily for some incredibly fun combos. Here’s a simple example — Every time this unit takes damage, create a graveyard where they’re standing. Then an additional sigil makes it so that every time this unit stands on a graveyard, destroy it and summon a skeleton ally. It was interesting experimenting with all of these in ways that make you feel like you’re breaking the game and was what I looked forward to the most when booting it up to play.
There are 3 areas to traverse, each with a handful of stages and some branching paths, with plenty of goons throughout and bosses at the end. The art direction overall is good and cohesive throughout environments, ally, and enemy designs. As you route a path to the boss you can be selective about the stages you encounter, which can be events, challenges, battles, and elite battles. Battles (of either type), reward a selection of sigils to choose from on completion. Elite battles have tougher enemies that drop better loot. Some of that loot includes gold which can be spent at a shop that refreshes with each new area, and there’s also a more expensive shop that appears at random. It’s important to know how to spend your gold if you want to win. All of these help you in your journey to defeat tougher and tougher foes.
I hit several points with this game where I decided that some of the fights were “practically impossible.” At one point I even took a four-week break where I thought I’d shelve The Book of Warriors and not return. But I did come back, I mixed sigils differently, tried some other strategies, used the “rogue-lite” currency to upgrade some classes, and after some good hours over this last week of picking it back up, I managed to beat the game. My frustrations may have been because I kept selecting the ADVANCED level boss, so chances are it may have just been designed for players with a few more upgrades under their belt. But regardless, it IS possible, I did do it.
On that topic, the end of the game is a bit underwhelming. There is a story that plays in an opening cutscene every time you start the game, which led me to believe that we might get a concluding cutscene after beating the 3rd area boss, but nothing played. Beating the game was also the way I learned it just had the 3 areas, which was a bummer because I had leftover gold and loot I was saving for what I presumed would be the next area. You do get a lot of rewards though, so it was nice to use that and upgrade some classes for the next run.
When you do beat the game for the first time, it opens up “Hades” type heat difficulty modifiers, where the following runs put you at a slight disadvantage (especially so with the bosses). Regarding difficulty, as I said previously, I quit playing the game several times because I thought there were some unfair boss encounters. So extra difficulty… I’m not sure about it. Most of the game is fine and designed well, and when you die it certainly feels like your fault, with maybe a little bit of bad RNG mixed in there. But there is one boss I think is unfair.
The final boss in area 3 in particular. There are two bosses here. Area 3 is the only area this happens in, fine, a little extra challenge. But they each have massive health pools over 1500hp a piece… by comparison, the most I have ever gotten out of an attack is like 120 damage. One boss is a ranged enemy that teleports around the map (randomly on heat level 1), and there is a constant stream of other enemies that spawn at the end of every round until you kill the teleporting guy. Oh, and at some point, all of them end up with 20 HP regeneration stacks, meaning they can almost outheal you if you let up. Then, if you can’t beat them in 20 rounds, you will probably eventually die of the timeout poison. It feels like… it was intentionally made, to not be fun or fair or beatable, because there is so much going on, and this is the only time in the game where you have to deal with this much at once. But it’s not “impossible” because I have beaten them… once. So it may just be the case that I need to get better, but those are my thoughts there. One more gripe:
Something the devs asked me to help them with was to point out areas with bad translation. I told them I’d be happy to help with that… For the most part, the game is fine and I understand the English. But there are pockets of mistranslations almost everywhere. So much so, that early on I decided it would take too much of my time to report every one I saw to the devs. Some sigils I don’t quite understand the effects of, some game mechanics from the in-game guide I didn’t understand but did kind of learn from context, and there are just entire sentences here and there that are oddly worded. I know this might be a smaller dev team, so a translation budget may not be available, but man, a properly translated game would have gone a long way for me. I think it would sell much better, and get better reviews, if they hired a professional translator to give this game (or the sequel) several good passes. If it was not as fun as it is, I probably would have stopped playing early on, and given a more negative review because of this reason. In our current industry climate, games can’t survive on partial effort with localization! But that’s just my opinion.
Overall, sure The Book of Warriors has a couple of faults, but in the end, if I wasn’t enjoying myself I wouldn’t have spent almost 20 hours playing it. I think a lot of players will enjoy it, especially if they love Fire Emblem-type strategy games. The mechanics are really fun to master, as you optimize your teams and synergize sigils together to beat it the first time. Makes for a good package at the price they’re offering it at. The only downside: the end-game can be almost unfairly tricky, and some of the translations may keep you scratching your head. Hopefully, these gripes are changes we can see in a future update, or in the sequel (which you can wishlist now, though it is not released or in English). Thanks to the devs for giving me the chance to play it, and especially to Gummy who reached out to me originally.
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.