Chronus Arc (Android) review "Hell has frozen over and I found a Kemco game I truly liked!"

So, I've been doing this "Kemco Khallenge" thing for three years, give or take, and I'm sure we've all had a good amount of fun watching my sanity slowly erode as I alternate between half-decent JRPGs that fall a bit short of actual goodness for one reason or another, and bottom-of-the-barrel crap. Despite constantly hearing the voices of others questioning my desire to continue on this unholy path instead of playing the myriad of far superior titles that have been stuck in my backlog for years, I've persevered from one title to the next and you know what? Finally, I've been rewarded!

I don't know exactly how this happened, but when the folks at Hit-Point delivered Chronus Arc to their Kemco overlords in late 2013, they pulled off a miracle: they produced a game I found to be genuinely enjoyable, hitting upon a formula that neither they nor any of Kemco's other teams have been able to duplicate since. Taking the best elements of their RPGs and "borrowing" a healthy-sized dollop of Lufia II, the crew created a game that might not be the most original thing I've ever played, but was enjoyable from beginning to end.

Hit-Point has never been the best at telling stories, but the studio was able to rise above that weakness to write a script that at least didn't openly annoy me. In one of the world's kingdoms, protagonist Loka and his master, Teth, are preparing to perform a time-reversing ceremony that's one of their nation's traditions. Before anything of that nature can actually happen, the duo are confronted by Geppel, the captain of the guards in a neighboring kingdom, who demands that the Chronus Fragments used for the ceremony be handed over to him. Teth buys time while telling Loka to escape and inform the king of this turn of events, but when the lad returns, there is no sign of either Geppel or Teth. Along with Sarna, the princess of the kingdom, Loka goes on a world-spanning quest to find his master and get to the root of Geppel's schemes, a process that predictably leads to far more dangerous foes. The duo will gain one more ally in a young girl looking for her missing father, and wind up visiting a number of dungeons and towns.

It's all standard stuff, but the game around it is surprisingly meaty. Whenever Hit-Point releases a more traditional RPG, its developers love tossing in the option to customize weapons with materials found scattered throughout dungeons. Everyone starts out with the most basic weapons and armor and, by collecting materials, can upgrade them a number of times. After a few such upgrades, you'll be able to mold them into a superior class of weapon or armor, provided you've scoured towns and dungeons for a particular NPC who'll regularly show up to hand out equipment manuals containing recipes for that new stuff.

Instead of buying new stuff in stores or finding it in dungeons, you'll gradually build your characters' offense and defense by traveling to dungeons, harvesting their material spots and going to town to see what you can do at the blacksmith's shop. Each dungeon houses specific materials, while a few also can be obtained via slaying monsters, so you'll be consistently strengthening what your team is wielding.

Of course, if one was in a deductive mind, they might figure out that to maximize everyone's equipment, they'd have to repeatedly journey into the same dungeons in order to collect materials before moving onto the next in order to do the same. Fortunately, unlike Hit-Point's other games using this system, Chronus Arc features visible monsters on the screen in dungeons, which at least gives players the opportunity to dodge a few encounters, making those repeated treks a lot less tedious than they were in random encounter-driven games like Cross Hearts Arcadia. So when you're going to the optional forest dungeon located next to the game's second town for the sixth time, instead of fighting a couple dozen battles, you'll be able to at least attempt avoiding the lion's share of them.

That is, as long as you've completed the side-quests pertaining to that location. In each town, there is a guild offering a number of quests to kill a certain number of a particular enemy, deliver some materials or defeat optional bosses. Success in these missions, which tends to come quickly and easily, will bestow money, healing items and even the occasional material.

Also, these dungeons actually offer more than the average Kemco game provides, as you have to occasionally use your brain to make progress. Regardless of which of several studio teams is making a Kemco game, you can typically count on them having, at best, simple "puzzles" involving finding a key or switch to open a door or avoiding trap floors dropping you down a level. Many of Chronus Arc's dungeons are actually laden with block-pushing puzzles that must be solved to open doors. Generally, the puzzles that allow you to progress through dungeons are fairly easy, but there are some pretty tricky ones on side paths leading to noteworthy treasure.

And there is some treasure you'll definitely want to acquire. As you progress through the game, you'll notice that your characters don't gain much strength just by earning levels, and that the skills and spells you'll pick up are of limited use against foes and bosses that seem to just get stronger and stronger. However, by being thorough, you'll obtain a number of books that allow you to change their classes at a temple you reach a good ways into the game. When you do so, your characters will revert to the first level, but keep a portion of the stats you accrued and then enjoy substantially larger gains (and access to superior abilities) as they progress in their new class. Late in the game, a rare opportunity or two lets you obtain "attainment scrolls," which unlock a superior job class boasting great stat boosts, as well as a couple super-powered abilities.

If a person is struggling to find these items, the good news is they can be easily bought in the game's in-app purchase store. You gain one point for every 10 monsters slain. That's an easy process, as this game is tough enough that the only times you'll not want to hunt down every encounter possible are when you're making those multiple material-collecting trips to one dungeon or another. However, by saving points up for nearly the entire game, you'll be able to purchase a pair of optional dungeons. The first is purely puzzle-oriented. You'll hunt for treasure through nine floors, each with its own brainteaser, some of which are extremely difficult to solve. In a way, the second reminds me of a small-scale, non-randomized version of Lufia II's optional Ancient Cave. It's a 15-level dungeon where the game's weakest enemies are on the top floors and as you go deeper, they get tougher and tougher until you reach the bottom and have to fight a mighty dragon. As an added inducement, the majority of its floors contain several material spots, allowing you to harvest nearly everything you might need.

In case you find yourself overwhelmed by poweful enemies on that dungeon's lower floors, Chronus Arc gives the option to escape any dungeon at any time outside of battle. And then, instead of walking back to the nearest town, you can return to the menu screen to access the map and warp there. This is the sort of thing that is very useful late in the game, when you're traveling to one town to cash in IAP points and then to another to use the class changing temple.

Usually when it comes to Kemco, I can regurgitate a laundry list of flaws that served to diminish any enjoyment I may have derived from their glut of junk food RPGs. And I suppose I could with this one, as well. Touch screen controls and block-pushing puzzles didn't always work together smoothly during my adventure, forcing me to reset the screen a few times due to an inadvertent movement. There are only the usual small numbers of enemy designs and dungeon tilesets, as well, leading to a fair amount of recycled assets. There is also the occasional translation blunder, such as when characters persistently refer to Geppel's mohawk hairstyle as a "mohican". If I kept wracking my brain, I could come up with more.

And yet, none of that stuff (except "mohican" — when you write for both your living and your hobby, those mistakes become out-of-proportion annoying) really bothered me. I played this game for about 20 hours, give or take, and never found myself hoping it'd be over soon so I could move on to something else. That singles this out as a rare breed, as far as Kemco stuff goes. And all it took was an enjoyable equipment crafting system, the absence of random battles in dungeons and actual puzzles to make me think my way through said dungeons. On paper, it doesn't seem like a particularly complicated formula, but this is the first time a mobile game with the Kemco name attached was able to succeed on all counts.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (August 07, 2018) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.