Blade Prince Academy

I want to recommend this game. Its gameplay is fun, the art is really cute, and the concept is great. It definitely fulfills the promise of real time with pause gameplay being fun and active, there's not doubt about that. However, the writing is just so hard to stomach. The game centers so much focus on the discussions between characters at base, and half the time it feels written by an AI, and the other half it feels like someone took the dialogue and threw it through google translate twenty times. Which is genuinely depressing since I really wanted to love the characters.

The game is nice but is clearly not finished. There are many bugs and unclear things during the game. But the worse is: by mistake I clicked on "New Game" instead of "continue" and I lost all my progress. Incredibly frustrating.

A very cool game with tactical pause mechanics, which we don’t often see, and on top of that, it has a very cool artistic direction and universe. With an isometric view and an artistic direction reminiscent of the game Hades, Blade Prince Academy surprises with its tactical pause combat system, allowing players to plan their actions in advance and pause at any moment during a fight. The learning curve is a bit tricky at first, but the difficulty progression and the situations presented are well-designed enough that you gradually start mastering each battle. You can plan your actions ahead of time and then watch your characters execute each move in order and perform combos to inflict maximum damage, all in a rather enjoyable way. So far, in 3 hours of gameplay, I’ve already encountered a good number of characters with different skills, roles, and synergies, which is encouraging for the rest of the game. As for the characters, they are quite endearing, and their relationships evolve naturally, which won’t be unfamiliar to those who have played games with similar mechanics. Special mention goes to the splash art of the characters, which is also very well done. In short, there are a few interface and visibility issues when learning the game at the beginning, but that doesn’t detract from the heart of the game, which is very cool, especially the combat system.

As of writing I have only played this game for 4 hours (a lot of afk time) but had already collected a lot of complaints which is not a good sign for the game. But I'm leaving a positive review anyway because the fundamentals are there, it plays reasonably well, and it looks like I have only completed 10% of the game's content. The rest of this review are all the notes I collected about all the things that are either buggy or feel like ♥♥♥♥: Pact system needs an explanation the first time a pact is obtained, not when you have finally unlocked the pact workshop. Pact enchantment RNG is the worst mechanic and is why people quit Genshin Impact in droves. It should tell you that you can only have one type of enchantment and warn you if you are about to overwrite an existing enchantment. (Some) Pact buffs don't have interesting debuffs to mix with their buffs. Eg Putrid Eye gives you +1 Alteration which suggests it might be good on Vekkio who needs to stack a lot of Bleeds, but -2 Haste suggests otherwise, and it slows down his ability to recast abilities that inflict Bleed. Let players overwrite Pacts during missions and not just at the academy. It feels like ♥♥♥♥ to have to discard a really good Pact just because you happened to assign a sub-optimal one to that character earlier. It double feels like ♥♥♥♥ when the best way to optimise Pacts is to theorycraft before going into a mission and recycle all pacts that you don't want ahead of time, meaning not only do you spend more time sitting at the Academy looking through menus than you do actually playing the game, but you enter missions weaker than you should. I think characters are intentionally given low mana reserves to make it impossible to cast your full spell rotation. Main culprit is Phoebos himself. It feels like ♥♥♥♥ to have to put a Delirium Booster on him or make all of his pact enchantments +Mana Capacity just to make his kit work, when you really just want to give him +Attack and AoE Size. New characters should come into your roster at the same level as the rest of your characters to make them useable the moment they are met. Why is Zenesh boasting about his strength when he is level 2 while everyone else is level 7. (I did not replay any missions to get my party to that level by the way, they were just naturally level 7 by the time you meet Zenesh) Introduction to combos with Phoebos's dad is not well explained at all. It might as well just tell the player that combos exist and that they need to read the abilities in more detail, but does not give any sample combos for the player to try out and practice with. Why make Phoebos and O'Ren attend the combo practice session if they have no synergy. Instead of making his dad inflict Taunt, you should make the player use Gadhoo's Taunt ability to help the player internalise the information and immediately see how they can apply it to their play. Academy needs a practice room to practice combos on. Combos are too hard to achieve and largely unnecessary anyway. All non-boss enemies can simply be auto-attacked and killed before they can finish any of their channeled abilities. Battle Timeline is cool I guess. The infirmary system is probably there to force players to use their entire roster instead of spamming the same composition that they're comfortable with, which I appreciate. But very early on you get to a point where all but 2 squad members have no energy but you are forced to bring them anyway because you are not allowed to start a mission with less than 4 members. Instead I had to skip a week and discovered that doing so drained 1200 gold from my bank because half my squad decided to buy tickets to see a show. I understand *a* penalty is required for skipping a week as this reflects poor Energy management, but not only did this penalty not make any sense, it wasn't explained that there would be a penalty, and I was FORCED to skip a week through no fault of my own. Vindicator's Relic is broken. No not overpowered, it's literally broken. Duplicate copies seem to multiply the original effect on top of multiplying by the duplicates so instead of going 4x it's actually x16, letting you one shot everything in the game with your basic attacks. That's the only buggy relic as far as I know. Abuse while you can. Edit: It's not Vindicator's Relic, but some weird bug that happens when you overwrite any Pact's enchantments with a different one. You can trivialise the game by getting 4 or 5 copies of any Pact and multiplying its effects x25.

Mediocre writing, decent gameplay at best, but so buggy it didn't properly save my progress I guess? I'm not sure I accidentally switched to controller, quit, went back in, mouse wasn't responsive, eventually managed to get my way in but then I was in an earlier story point and no. I wasn't enjoying this game enough to go through the terrible plot points and braindead encounters again.

As much as I want to like this game it is so riddled with bugs, some which softlock the game, such as the door in the catacombs not being able to go down past the gate. Kleff getting stuck in place unable to move maning you cant go further into the dungeon even if you leave him where he is locked. This game had so much promise yet does not reach it, aside from the bugs the writing is lacking however you can ignore all those as the combat is really great. The bugs though? ruins all immersion and want to play this game...

Not too far in yet but i recommend mouse and keyboard over controller for this one, it is Playable on controller but keyboard works better for this hands down.

so others were right: the game has many flaws and bugs (characters get stuck in environment, fighting sequence glitches out) for which a mission restart is required but honestly, it's fun! i'm currently maxing relationship level of all battle princes and polishing their loadouts after beating the game art carries - it's very eye-pleasing and i love how the characters are possible ships and stuff it's nice! hopefully this game gets the updates it deserves

The combat lacks feedback, ordering ranged characters to attack explosive Barrels orders them to walk to them instead of attacking and if you repeat one of the first three missions you softlock yourself because of an honestly insane energy system. Really saw potential in the demo but was sadly disappointed.

[b]Overall Game Rating: 3/10[/b] I wanna start off by saying that I really, really wanted to like this game. I opened and closed the review window like 3 times from "just give it a lil more of a chance". The art is super cool and the gameplay loop of semi-tactical isometric with cool combos and unique builds is a niche I'm so fond of but see so little. But I was running into bugs...pretty much out the gate. And I kept trying, and a few hours in I just realized that screenlock bugs or characters getting randomly stuck was just gonna be a staple of the experience that would require me to reset the game. Unfortunately, this game was clearly never finished. [hr][/hr] [b]Gameplay: 3/10[/b] As said above, love the semi-tactical combo based isometric. The actual gameplay itself is fun...when it works. But there's quite a few bugs that will be regularly interrupting your play experience. The game is also pretty grossly lacking in explanations. It gives some in-combat tutorials, but doesn't do things like...explain what each of the status effects do or what each of the characters stats does. A lot of symbols to represent things with varying levels of clarity. Like I get the sword is attack and the shield is defense, but what is the swirly? What is the sparkle shield? You can sometimes catch a glimpse if you happen to have an upgrade with that stat, but it's not something you can see on your character sheet or...when you're picking your stat upgrades. [hr][/hr] [b]Art Direction: 7/10[/b] The game's strongest point, and what initially drew me to it. The character design is super strong, but the environments felt...lacking. Felt like a lot of copy-pasted assets and not in an elegantly done way. Music was okay. Didn't stand out much. [hr][/hr] [b]Story: 5/10[/b] Didn't make it far enough to give a full read on this, but it was giving Soul Eater vibes as it's premise. The writing wasn't particularly noteworthy. [hr][/hr] [b]Bonus Notes:[/b] Honestly, I just really wish the dev would revisit this. I think with a few quality of life improvements and a focus on bug-fixing, this game could truly be a hidden gem.