Team Ladybug does it again!! They have rapidly become one of my favorite developers after Luna Nights, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, and Drainus, and Blade Chimera does not disapoint. This game isn't like a mindblowing revelation for the Search Action genre, but it is a strong display of pure workmanship that excels at just about everything it attempts, I think. Well, I did tweak the controls, the default configuration assigns Jump to the A button, Weapon 1 to B, Weapon 2 to Y, and your Demon Sword to X. Having Jump on anything but the bottom button already feels kind of awkward to me but Shin has little hangtime so it can be tricky to maximize the height of your Weapon 2 attacks (which I usually assigned to melee weapons) when the buttons are across from each other. I ended up remapping Weapon 2 to Left Trigger, which happily was not being used for anything, and that worked out a lot better. But um, anyway, excellent search action gameplay, loved tracking down the well-hidden puzzle pieces and how the game would camouflage its linearity but Fusion-ishly telling you where your next objective was located but not at all how to get there. Blade Chimera also, perhaps controversially, allows you to warp to any map square you've visited previously except for the most recent new square you've entered. I say controversial because I was of two minds about this at first; fast travel is always such a convenience in games but when I'm spending more time warping around than actually traversing the game's environments, it's hard not to feel like that's a failure of level design. Shouldn't I want to walk around more if it is engaging to do so? But while Blade Chimera is ludicrously flexible with your warping, it's also rather secretive about where to find quest-related enemies and goals, so if you want to accomplish those quests you're going to be doing a lot of exploring and walking around anyway. Many quests involve defeating specific enemies and the bestiary pointedly does not tell you where you can find them, which might sound kind of lame to some people but suited me just fine. There are also several puzzles that revolve around using the warp, by warping to a specific map square and then immediately jumping to attain more height than you otherwise can, so all in all I'm pretty down to clown with the game's infinite warp anywhere mechanic.
Nobody plays these kinds of games for the story, but I quite liked what Blade Chimera was going for on that front. The characters were well-realized and the dialogue snappy, and it got me giving a good think about the virtue of novelity. Or rather, that being novel in your storytelling is perhaps a bit overrated! As long as the story is cool or beautiful or any other manner of positive adjective, who cares. And I have to admit, while the final villain's identity is easy to see coming from a mile away, the build-up is cool! And the way the game stuffs him full of pathos right at the end, effectively, really caught me off guard. There are some kind of unresolved threads and elements that you can tell definitely had more material in the development notes but didn't make it into the final game, like your dog jailbreak buddy ends the game still in a cage and a couple of your terrorist buddies have names and portraits and end up with like one line each, but on the other hand there is value in learning when to trim the fat, y'know?
Game Number: 25
Year Played: 2025
Platform: Switch