Chroma Squad: I was supposed to work today but I just binge played Chroma Squad. Went from the beginning to almost the end.
This is a kickstarter'd SRPG. You are a group of actors playing in a sentai series like Power Rangers.
You need to do flashy moves to get more audience, more fans, more income... In fact, between battles, you can do the traditional buying / crafting / picking skills stuff you'd see in an RPG, but also pick a marketing strategy for your show (!) It gets pretty in depth and the management is as important as the actual battles.
This game is the most meta shit. You spend half the time not knowing whether what's happening is supposed to be a part of the sentai series within the game, or not. And then it gets more complicated as the cast gets seriously threatened by srs guys later on, but even then they keep acting and attracting fans and all. Because they need money to fight evil? BUT and that's the kicker, the filming crew (visible in every battle) is never acknowledged by the real villains when they really should be, so maybe all of this is also just an act. I don't know.
If that wasn't meta enough The Power Rangers company actually sued Chroma Squad, so Chroma Squad included the Power Rangers guys as enemies/huge douchebags in this game. Their lawyer is literally Satan.
Of course the game also has traditional 4th wall breaking on top of it.
Battles are... particular for a SRPG. There's no terrain and allies/enemies can't really block you, so there's excessive freedom of movement. The game's not too complicated as a result.
Every party member can for free use a support move instead of attacking. You can then launch other party members in the air for free (it's very useful) or combo if both party members are next to an enemy. If all 5 members combo at once, they get a crazy finishing move.
The game has some weird stats, including skill regen. Each skill has a cooldown before you can use them again, and higher skill regen reduces that cooldown.
Each party member starts with one skill and gets another one at the beginning of each chapter.
This means that at the beginning of the game, every party member mostly uses physical attacks, with the occasional skill once per battle (the cooldown is too long to use skills two times per battle, really) By the end of the game, every party member has like 4 or 5 active skills with almost no cooldown, and the game becomes very fun and very ridiculous.
You get 5 party members and can choose their looks and colours, but there are 5 fixed roles much like the XCOM roles. You get a limited choice of passive and active skills and can change them anytime, which is pretty cool.
Character breakdown:
Lead: Leader is the tankiest party member, so she was pretty useful as the girl at the beginning of the game I put generally in front. Enemies almost always attack the closest party memebrs. She has some nifty skills, but lacks a real niche. I consider her to be the least useful member of the team! Weird.
Medic: Very competent healer. She has a passive that makes her autoheal adjacent allies when using the support move, and that makes her the most useful party member in the early game by far; as this means she can both heal and attack within a combo in the same turn. Later on, she gets mass healing with low cooldown. Her healing skills are also one of the best ways to raise audience.
Brawler: Obviously Brawler does the most damage, which sounds good on paper but is not very significant earlygame. Everyone else does low 2HKO damage and she does high 2HKO. So, she kills enemies as slowly as the others, unless she uses her weapon skill or is facing a particularly tough enemy or a boss. However, she does slowly start getting absolutely ridiculous skills: A traditional Spin2Win move that basically OHKO any regular enemy adjacent to her, plus a Trample skill that doesn't cost an action and makes her move 5 spaces away while damaging anything in the way. So you can go Move -> Trample - > Spin2Win to go to other side of the battlefield while killing half the enemy forces, yay, BALANCED
Techie: Techie's the gun nut, and not a particularly powerful party member, but notable for having the first AoE in the game. He then also gets a very strong AOE attack/movement debuff , and that's about it. Good enough!
Scout: Scout's the MVP! Scout is already dominant at the beggining of the game, because she has an AoE stun that doesn't cost a turn. It's a real lifesaver. Then all her skills she gets next are ridiculous. She gets +2 movement (on top of her passive +1), a skill that's stronger than a physical attack that she can use every round, and then some ninja invincible backstab healing stuff that's completely OP. Endgame Scout is unreal. In fact she is unkillable.
