The less exciting chronicles.

As someone who has been involved in gaming for decades, I always find myself pulling for brand new IPs in the endless sea of sequels and remakes. This bodes true for “The Diofield Chronicles” which caught my attention when it was first introduced as an RTS game made for consoles. Given my history with RTS titles like Starcraft, Warcraft, Command & Conquer and more, I was intrigued to see how it would pan out.

The cast of Diofield Chronicles are a proper lot and despite their convictions, don’t stand out as being memorable.

MSRP: $59.99
Platforms: PS, Xbox, NSW, PC
Played on: PS5
Voice over options: JPN and ENG
Length: 25~ hours

A small band of mercenaries has a chance meeting with someone of interest when they come across their carriage being besieged by bandits. From this encounter, they earn a powerful patreon and embark on a journey that will shape the very foundation of the land that they call home.

The Diofield Chronicles weaves a tale of political intrigue, betrayals and conspiracy between various warring factions. However, none of this made much of an impact and failed to get me invested due to two simple, but all too important factors- the characters and presentation.

The main and supporting cast of Diofield present themselves in a rather stiff manner, mostly due to the tone of the overall story and the interactions between them outside of some bickering during their war consul never felt interesting. There’s also a severe lack of character development as well and this was despite me completing every single side quest that was available as almost every character felt like the same person they were at the start when the story ended. New characters join without much fanfare and the one character which I felt had something resembling a personality left the party never to join again. I highly doubt that I would remember the name of a single character in Diofield in a month’s time as none of them were memorable in the slightest.

Secondly, as many dramatic events are unfolding across the world, the vast majority of that is told through the narrator and not actually shown. While I loved the casting choice of Geralt of Rivia’s VA as the narrator, hearing about something that happened will never have the same impact as seeing it happen myself. The point is emphasized by the various antagonists throughout the course of the game which are often introduced and dealt with within the same mission in the span of a few minutes. Even the missions that ought to be big turning point moments within the story felt just like another mission due to the lackluster presentation which felt anti-climatic.

Most of the story is told, not shown.

Even if the story and characters were lackluster, much of that could be forgiven if the gameplay was fun and engaging. Unfortunately, while there is a solid foundation to work with here, it also leaves much to be desired.

As a hybrid RTS, up to four characters can be controlled on the map at once and the action can be paused to take some time to strategize and activate powerful abilities. With ample options on how units can be selected and the option to pause the action at anytime, it was simple to get the characters to the positions I wanted them in and while not as precise as a mouse and keyboard combo on a standard RTS, I felt the Dual Sense controller did a fine job all things considered.

It was simple and satisfying to combo power abilities together to devastating effect- like pulling a bunch of enemies together using a tornado and using “Headshot” which does extremely high damage in a cone area and dropping a meteor on them for good measure. However, due to the limit of only four controllable units on the field at once, the strategies never really changed very much and I found myself doing the same thing over and over again just because it was the most efficient thing to do.

After a few hours, I found that the game was way too easy so I turned up the difficulty to “hard” but it hardly had any noticeable effect as I was killing everything just as easily and never even came close to losing a mission once. In fact, I believe that this might be the most lax I’ve ever felt in hard mode which is a shame because RTS games are typically known for challenging the players.

With the introduction of additional systems like abilities, weapons, skills, and summons upgrades, the game only became easier and given how uninspired the side objectives for all the missions were, it made me feel that I was just doing the same thing over and over again which, truth be told, I was.

While I’m not the type to say that every game needs to be a challenge, but I do believe that every game does need to be engaging and this one fell short of that mark very quickly throughout its play time.

If I could control more units or if the pause mechanic was gated to a limited usage, this could have been a much more engaging experience.

The Diofield Chronicles has a solid foundation of mechanics that is hampered greatly by its poor balancing of difficulty, a cast of forgettable characters and a world that failed to draw me in with its lackluster presentation.

Fun Tidbit: There’s a big twist at a certain point in the story but it’s far too little, far too late to make much of an impact.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.