Spirit Valor (Android) review "I mean, an improvement is an improvement. I think. "

Last year, when I triumphantly (?) brought back the Kemco Khallenge, I made a mistake with the game I chose to play. Nothing against Destiny Fantasia — well, other than the points I made against it in my review — but it was an older Kemco mobile JRPG that had been out for years during my previous stint writing about these games.

No, if I were to truly do justice to whatever the hell it is that I’m doing, I needed to look in a different direction. To today’s games by Exe-Create. After all, how many reviews of games by Kemco’s top developer had I previously written where I’d commented over and over about how they had potential, but due to how quickly they were churning out games, that potential was blunted by all their constant asset recycling? Even worse, plot elements up to and including the entire basic concept of a game also would be repeated.

But a few years have passed. And even if Exe-Create is still Kemco’s top producer, they aren’t blasting them out quite as frequently as before. So, wouldn’t the best question for me to seek an answer to be: Have these guys finally put all the pieces together to make legitimately good games not dragged down by how they feel all-too-similar to their other titles? And, well, with Spirit Valor being released in America late in 2024, it seemed like the perfect choice for me to start investigating this mystery.

As for an answer: In some ways, yes, Exe-Create has found ways to build upon what they’ve done previously. This game kept my attention for 25-30 hours with me not getting that itch to play something, ANYTHING else until the very end when I was completing the second of two potential post-game scenarios.

The reasons for this are simple. First, the team put a bit more effort into creating stuff. There are a decent number of monster designs. Sure, some of them might be encountered quite frequently throughout the game, but there are a decent few which only get brought out for a couple battles and even a few unique sprites for some of the more notable bosses. Progress! Also, there is a good amount of diversity in dungeons, with nearly all of them having a particular gimmick and very few of those gimmicks being repeated later on in your quest. Maybe it’s pits that drop you to a previous floor, or platforms carrying you across chasms with you needing to hit levers to alter their paths, or even teleportation devices whisking you from one land island to another — the thing that matters is that most dungeons have something to differentiate them from the others.

You also have a pretty good battle system where three of your four party members can summon spirits on a fight-by-fight basis and, if the random number god is smiling on you, acquire those spirits as allies. Each of those three characters can equip four spirits and have several others in reserve. Those equipped also will gain levels and, as a result, add to those characters’ spell books. Since I like being able to customize my party, I liked this. And it was a simple, intuitive process that Exe-Create didn’t screw up by trying to be too cute for their own good. Hell, they even kept some of their annoyances to a minimum. You won’t find spells or skills that have their effectiveness determined by the 10s digit of a character’s health. Instead, enemies appear on a three-by-three grid and your various attacks will connect with one or more spaces, so just try to fit as many foes into their radius as possible.

Also, at its heart, Spirit Valor has a pretty decent story, at least by Exe-Create standards. The game opens with a brave warrior and his two companions summoning a spirit to fight a demonic overlord. Said summoning goes horribly wrong, though, as the warrior cannot sufficiently master the spirit and winds up having to take it into his wounded body, so it doesn’t also turn into a powerful demon due to being stuck in the human world instead of its own.

The outcome of this confrontation is that the spirit takes over the warrior’s body, while he goes into a sort of stasis to recover from his wounds. Meanwhile, the overlord and both the warrior’s allies vanished. Feeling obligated to finish off the overlord, the spirit decides to use the warrior’s body to gain new companions and get the job done. However, Alvin, one of those old allies, finds the empty shell of the overlord’s body and decides that if he can replenish that being, he’ll be able to graduate from mere sidekick into something far more powerful.

There are a few twists in the plot, one of which I didn’t even see coming! At the very least, Exe-Create was able to keep things moving and, despite having a fairly small cast of characters, craft a story in which no fewer than three try their hand at being the main villain. They’re taking steps towards legit quality!

Now, they just need to take a few more steps. While I’d call this game an overall improvement over at least the majority of their past work, it was hard to not notice that some things have not yet changed. The plot may have been good; the story-telling often was a different matter.

Exe-Create still struggles to write actual characters, so if you’re expecting anything more than a bunch of basic “do-gooder” tropes posing as your protagonists, you’re out of luck. You get the idea they WANT to involve stuff like character development, but don’t know how, so they just have all the one-dimensional ciphers talk a lot and hope that settles things because, LOOK AT THEM! They’re growing as a team and now trust and support each other without question! Even if you’re pretty sure they’re giving some variation of the same “We believe in you and you’re a valuable part of the team” speech every damn time.

Ah, yes, talking a lot. Another Exe-Create staple. Whenever you get to a new town or dungeon or meet someone important, you can count on everyone having a discussion. Which, as I’ve grown to expect, is about 25 percent dialogue that’s actually necessary and 75 percent that’s each member of your party making sure everybody knows that, yes, they must go on because the world depends on them being noble and beating the bad demons. You know, in case you didn’t get the message the last umpteen times it was delivered.

Of course, those things could just be complaints that hit me harder than most because I’ve played a fair number of these games. And, sure, I would have liked it if Exe-Create was as willing to devise new story-telling tricks to go along with its neat spirit-summoning combat, which was at least something I hadn’t seen the company utilize before. Because with Spirit Valor, I found a game that had fun combat and character customization, as well as a plot that had a few decent twists…but was saddled by characters whose dialogue seemed determined to force me to skip past it as quickly as possible. This game was an improvement over most, if not all, of their stuff I’d previously played. It just might not have been as much of one as I’d have hoped to see.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (January 24, 2025) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.