overdrive's Chronus Arc review

I'm happy for you.

Does this mean that you will be moving on from your Kemco Khallenge now and forever? ^_^

Ah, if only... My tablet still has so many of those damn things on it and, if anything, they are decent to play when you're just looking to zone out with something for an hour of so, so I might as well keep churning through them.

Ah. You finally came to Chronus Arc. We've talked about it. It's always been one of my favorite Kemco games too. I was afraid you might be too jaded to enjoy it. I'm glad I was wrong. Should have had more faith.

I still think, from your review, that it might have been a better experience on the 3DS...anyway, very cool.

And Masters is right...might be good to go out on a good note with these Kemco experiences :) "Mohican." Goodness.

Sadly, I have a review for the far more mediocre Astral Frontier I just need to find time to write. And have started Asdivine Menace, which is a decent game...but would it have killed Exe-Create to make more than a couple nice, but minor, changes to their engine from Asdivine Dios? It feels like I'm playing the exact same game, but you can level up skills this time. And then there's about 25+ more on my tablet, so I have to keep going, no matter what it does to my sanity...

As for the tablet vs. 3DS, in a way, yes, as the superior controls would have prevented a few of those "walk too far pushing a block; restart the room" issues that only seemed to pop up during the game's toughest puzzles. On the other hand, those games seem to cost twice as much normally on the 3DS as on Android. And I got Chronus during a $.99 sale, so all things considered, I'd rather deal with touch control nuisances than spending more money!

Another consideration, though, is that 3DS games will always play on 3DS hardware. Games designed for smartphones and tablets may simply stop working when new firmware arrives. Which stinks, if you ask me!

That is true and I did have to deal with that once. I'd heard about Amazon Underground, where you get games and apps for free and downloaded a couple of those Kemco things, as well as KoToR (didn't have a clue if I'd like trying to play a BioWare game on my phone, but at free, the price was right for giving it a try!). And then my phone updated and anything I got from Underground stopped working, immediately crashing when I tried to open it.

But, on the other hand, when we're talking Kemco, that doesn't overly concern me. Their games are far more worthwhile at $3.99 or $4.99 (and amazingly so when I've snagged them for $.99, which hasn't happened in some time, as they've seemed to save all their sales for their trips to newer mediums such as the more modern consoles) than at the 3DS (or other system) price, which seems to be around $9.99.

And, to be honest, if my tablet and Kemco became incompatible, I'd suffer a net loss of about $25 scattered over many months of gathering. These are games I play once and dispose of and I doubt I'd feel anything by losing them all other than, "If I knew that was gonna happen, I'd have bought a few mob movies with that money!"

I've bought a few Kemco games on my iPhone, and not on $0.99 sales. Several of them no longer work, even though I purchased them directly through Apple's store... because Apple just randomly decides to issue new firmware that makes scores of old games non-functional. Developers have to specifically go back and modify their games to make them work again, and a lot of publishers just don't bother. The Kemco games on my iPhone that don't work happen to be--as far as I can tell--all games that are available on 3DS. I wonder if Kemco is just starting to lose interest in smartphones as releasing those games on Switch, 3DS, Vita and PS4 starts to work better than it used to.

They might be. I haven't had that problem with Android other than the aforementioned Amazon Underground not working any more, as everything I've played on my tablet works well or at least reasonably well.

Right now, I think they're more into re-releasing their games on all those other systems you mentioned. Of their five teams, one only has released one game through them and two (WWS and Magitec) haven't done anything in a while. Hit-Point releases stuff a lot more rarely than they used to and Exe-Create's been carrying them to the degree that their recycling and corner-cutting has been really noticeable to people on the Kemco fan-site (yes, one exists) I go to. And they haven't done a new game since June. As a result, Kemco's gone from at least one new release per month to 9 in 2016, seven last year and only three so far this year. But they've had a ton of releases due to re-releases on Steam and modern consoles and handhelds. And their sales all seem to be on consoles, handhelds and Steam and not on Android/Apple now.

I'm curious: have they released a killer app for iPhone yet? I'd be interested in giving their very best effort a shot.

I just started this game, and that "mohican" bit really bugs me. I guess it's technically correct because they are rarely referred to as "Mohicans hairstyles" or just "mohicans," but almost no one calls them that and it's super distracting.

That's the thing about Kemco's translation teams: they'll either distract you with overly wordy dialogue where simple thoughts take a full paragraph to come out OR they'll distract you with phrasings which might be technically correct, like "mohican", but aren't actually used (or at least aren't the most common).