The DioField Chronicle is a strategy role-playing game co-developed by Lancaster and Square Enix, and it’s available now on all platforms. The DioField Chronicle takes place across a war-torn continent as war rages between the Kingdom of Alletain and the Trovelt-Schoevian Empire. At the same time, the Rowetale Alliance suffers a defeat from the Empire and all attending are turned toward Alletain.

The main story focuses on a mercenary group within the Alletain Kingdom named The Blue Foxes, and more specifically, the four heads of the unit. Andrias is the leader of The Blue Foxes. At a young age, he was trained as a soldier and eventually became a personal bodyguard to the Prince. With his battlefield knowledge and resourcefulness, he makes for an ideal leader, launching quick attacks with his daggers.

Fredret is the second head of the unit and a long-time childhood friend of Andrias. He is skilled in horseback combat with a lance, and his attack styles are great for leading a frontal assault while others flank. Iscarion is the son of a nobleman, and following his family history, joined the local orders of knights before being recruited into The Blue Foxes.

He is trained as an archer with a deadly aim and a knack for setting up traps to lure targets into while keeping his range. The last head of the unit is Waltaquin, a noblewoman skilled in the use of magic from an early age. She can be a deadly force with magic while also being able to offer great support with healing spells.

Unlike previous games, combat is more along the lines of real-time strategy. For example, Final Fantasy Tactics is not turned-based, so you will need to be in constant awareness of enemy troop locations in case they are trying to flank you and your troops. Missions can range from defeating all targets to protecting areas and escorting supplies to safe locations, and boss encounters in the game can be rather challenging as they have more health stages compared to base enemies.

When they go to a new stage of health, they do a big pushback skill that will require you to move the units back into combat and change who is holding aggro for the fight. Square Enix games have a trend of using a summons, and as a long-time fan of the Final Fantasy series, I was extremely happy to see Bahamut making an appearance in the game, and being a starting summon, they are a great way to turn the tides in battle, with massive attacks that deal insane damage in a large radius.

The unit’s come in different skill trees and players can expand on them using their personal preferences. The skill trees are for “Solider”, “Cavalier”, “Sharpshooter”, and “Magicker”. After missions have been completed, you will earn points to apply to the tree. I personally focused on the “Solider” tree to deal the most damage possible and put down bosses faster. There is also the Summon skill tree, helping to make the power of the summoned creature higher, leave the battle with an effect that may help the player, or leave a mark on the targets.

The graphics for The DioField Chronicle has a few different styles. Firstly, the combat portion of the game is played with an overview of the combat area, which is played on a diorama-style battlefield and offers little to no visual joy. Between missions, you will get to walk around the headquarters and talk with other characters. This is done in a third-person perspective and does offer some nice close-up details on the characters’ armour and gear, and then we have the cutscenes using a visual novel-style of interaction.

The cutscenes are my personal favourite out of the graphics used within the game. The voice acting and audio for the game are done well during the cutscenes, but they can be a bit lacking outside of videos. The provided subtitles can also come across as written poorly, not making sense when first reading it, and the voiceovers during combat are short and don’t take away from the fight, but in saying that, it does leave the game in a tad bit of dead silence. The battleground music could’ve had more work done, as it was rather bleak overall.

The DioField Chronicle is a good fresh real-time strategy game, but the story did feel a bit empty at times, and not giving any major connection to the characters did make me feel disconnected from the full-on experience. Given past games from Square Enix, I was not expecting a Final Fantasy clone, but the story of the characters could’ve used a bit more of the touch that Final Fantasy brings to the table.

I preferred being able to level up the skill trees as I tend to take a direct approach to combat in games over range and magic, but in this game, I was still able to play with my style and get used to having ranged units as a fallback action, or use them to set up distractions and traps. I found the game to be a bit slow overall compared to the games I play, but it was a nice breath of fresh air to slow things down and take a planned look over a battlefield to plan my next attacks.

Written by: Shane Walsh