There’s a game out right now called Sword of Convallaria (SoC). It’s a mobile RPG tactics Gatcha game that is also on Steam. People who like tactics games have games like Fire Emblem, Triangle Strategy, and Final Fantasy Tactics for retro fans. And everyone who likes Gatcha games is grinding away on Genshin Impact, or for some other bizarre reason, you’re still playing Fate: Grand Order (You guys know you’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome, right?) So I was thinking that this game would just be forgotten, right?
While on the surface, you may be looking at a cash grab, the reality is that this game houses an in-depth, multi-ending story with numerous branching paths, chances to change the story and a separate roster of characters from your main collection. Characters are given incredibly hefty characterization, and it all stems from the idea that your little mercenary group can now affect the world that may have been fated to perish in an all-encompassing conflict. It reminds me an awful lot of Radiant Historia, one of my all-time favorite time-travel-based RPG games from the Nintendo 3DS.
My experience with this game has been strange. On the one hand, you have the introduction where you die unexpectedly, characters with defined models are killed, and your character, recently freed from imprisonment, meets an undue end. From here, you are given a second chance by a deity that takes the form of a cat. Splitting the story into two halves.
The first half is your standard daily progression system, where you draw characters from a pool with decreased rates to get powerful characters. You take on increasingly difficult tactical challenges, free to use whatever resources you gain. This is all to protect the afterlife from calamities that keep on causing trouble and mayhem. Fighting the celestial cancerous beings and making your way through the story. This is, unfortunately, the surface level of this game, where it takes the form of an admittedly decent tactical fare filled to the brim with microtransactions and gating that encourage you to spend money. But that all changes when we get to the second half.
The second half, named spiral destinies, is a fully playable single-player experience with the cast of SoC. Upon being given the opportunity to return to the point of your demise, your characters are returned to their strength within the boundaries of the story. And the solution to saving your character’s lives becomes waiting out the riot and the majority of the carnage and fleeing the city much later than usual. A very small change that results in your fights being much less lethal. From here, you join these mercenaries and are given units in a far more story-based pattern. The decisions you make become far less luck-based and far more dependent on your own decisions.
Your characters will be subject to training and experience based on in-game mechanics, not gathering resources to power up your previously accessible roster of characters. Everything in this mode is gained through gameplay exclusively.
So we hit a rather strange situation. Your afterlife is a mobile game cash grab, and your Earthly life is fun, engaging and limited only by your own choices, cultivating your units and hiring choices, fighting against major characters and ultimately changing the fate of the world. All the while wondering if the events of the heavenly area might also require your attention every so often.
The single-player option isn’t entirely playable from start to finish, though, with replays and different choices being locked behind weekly keys to either replay or play additional chapters. However, upon playing for four hours, I only used one key and played about 13 weeks of gameplay on single-player. It shows no signs of forcing me to use additional keys anytime soon, making me think that excessive playing of the story may be gated. I would most likely say this game is a really decent play, even if you avoid the gatcha elements. I would liken it to something like Triangle Strategy in terms of quality, in my personal opinion. It genuinely feels like they stuffed a Nintendo Switch-quality game into this 2.5D tactics game as “side content”. And personally, I think it’s criminal for this to go ignored.
Okay, that’s all for now. If you try the game out, let me know what you think below! That’s Sword of Convallaria: For this world of peace!
