Let’s talk about inspiration for a moment. Sometimes, ideas that are inspired by great works can create great works in return. An example of this is Shovel Knight, which took the formula from games like Mega Man and other platformers of its kind, then gave it its own spin. Fallen Legion: Revenants has some obvious inspiration within it, but instead of building upon that, it only takes part of what made its inspiration good. The rest is left seemingly unfinished, to its detriment.

Fallen Legion: Revenants is actually a sequel to a pair of games I had seen before called Fallen Legion: Flames of Rebellion and Fallen Legion: Rise to Glory. I had some issues with those games as well, and it seems that they did not improve upon the complaints people raised in the first game. First of all, the Fallen Legion games are inspired by a brilliant RPG most folks surprisingly have not heard of called Valkyrie Profile.

Valkyrie Profile was a brilliant JRPG by Tri-Ace (developers of Star Ocean) in which you played as a Valkyrie who fought alongside the spirits of the fallen known as Einherjar. The brilliant part about this was that you got to experience the stories of each Einherjar and how they died, along with the overarching plot of the Norse mythology-themed story.

Why is this relevant to Fallen Legion: Revenants? Well, in Fallen Legion: Revenants you play as two characters. In the main phase of the game, you play as Rowena, a revenant who has clung to undeath in order to find a way to raise her still-living son and liberate him from Welkin Castle, a prison where an unholy tyrant rules away from the miasma-ravaged wilderness.

Inside the castle, you play as Lucien, a charismatic politician that seeks to undermine the tyrant from within and assist Rowena in her cause along the way. Rowena is able to utilize equipment known as Exemplars, weapons that can become sentient allies who fight alongside her. However, this isn’t the only similarity to the systems at play in Valkyrie Profile.

The control scheme is pretty similar too. Each exemplar (and Rowena herself) is tied to a button. By hitting that button you can make that Exemplar attack. By combining that button with the R button (on Switch) you can issue a deathblow command from an Exemplar or have Rowena cast a different spell than her standard X button ability. However, Fallen Legion: Revenants takes this control scheme in a negative direction. Let me explain a little more for those who aren’t familiar with why this works well in Valkyrie Profile and yet doesn’t work well in Fallen Legion: Revenants.

Essentially, in Valkyrie Profile the game is entirely turn-based, with menus that allow your characters to not only attack, but utilize restorative items and magical spells or abilities. By comparison Fallen Legion: Revenants takes a more Active-Time-Battle mixed with real-time approach. Your characters have individual gauges that fill up to three segments. They can then string three attacks together. You also have to time things so you can block attacks.

You can also move around the battlefield between three squares (front, back, and center) to evade or get closer to the enemy. The problem is, without the turn-based nature of the game and without the ability to use items or menus for things like spells, the game feels somewhat lacking in terms of combat. It is like they watered down a sophisticated system that felt good and allowed numerous strategies, in exchange for button mashing.

I should also mention that Fallen Legion: Revenants is absolute hell on your hands. I can only play in about one-hour stretches before I need to take a 30-minute break. Even after that break, I can only play for another hour, with a max of three hours total before my hands are cramping terribly. If you have any sort of muscular issue with button mashing, this is not the game for you.

Now keep in mind, I can play Hades for hours upon hours. I can play other games with action-based combat for hours. The sheer amount of button-mashing and reflexes used is obscene, for very little payoff. There is no leveling system, except for “Mastery” for each of your Exemplars. Each one has multiple “Mastery skills” that you can earn by doing a certain thing, a certain number of times.

However, there is no real way to increase stats other than through equipment, which is scarce. This equipment also conversely changes how Exemplars play, so some equipment may be entirely worthless for your build or play style.

Now, I am being really hard on Fallen Legion: Revenants because of the combat, but it has some solid ideas in other areas. For example, there are numerous times where choices will be given to you that change the outcome of the level/storyline. These make the game have quite a bit of replay value if you find yourself enjoying it. Additionally, the dilemmas involved really push for things like political debates where you may have to weigh the moral and ethical ramifications of your choices.

On top of that, the voice acting, visual style, and character design are well done. I wish we’d get more backstory on the Exemplars individually, but that is not the direction the developers went with this game. Even so, the character design, level design, and visuals are top-notch.

There are other progression system things involved that you unlock as you play, but they really do feel watered down. In fact, Fallen Legion: Revenants somewhat feels like a mobile knock-off of a sophisticated RPG. Not terrible, but also lacking in what made other contemporary versions of its genre great.

I really wanted to like Fallen Legion: Revenants, but the story doesn’t have enough of a hook for me to be able to look past the combat and the fact that my hands are on fire after playing for a while. If you enjoyed the first two Fallen Legion games, this is more of the same and you’ll enjoy this too. However, I really wish the developers would take a look at the things that are clearly lacking and clearly missing from this.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Fallen Legion: Revenants was provided by NIS America for this review.

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Fallen Legion: Revenants

$39.99

3

Score

3.0/10

Pros

• Good Visuals and Voice Acting
• Interesting Choice Mechanics

Cons

• Combat Requires Too Much Button Mashing
• Very Little Depth to Combat
• Shallow Progression Systems
• Story Isn't Good Enough to Offset Problems
• Feels Like a Bare Bones Mobile imitation