Chaos Legion Review

The best way of describing Chaos Legion is that it's a complete mess. There's some interesting ideas here. You'd see it's gameplay mechanics pop up in Devil May Cry 5. Astral Chain would use them. The upcoming Tides of Annhilation is seemingly using the ideas brought forth by this game. It being made by Capcom during the 6th gen made finally decide to decide to play it and well to put it simpily, it is such a bizzarely put together title that it could've only have released in that era.

The story, oh man the story. To put it simpily there certainly is a story here, a very badly told and put together story. It starts you off in the middle of the action expecting you to know what's going on. Sieg and Delecriox were once friends but the death of a woman important to them drives the latter to turn heel. There's a girl that appears later that shares a striking resemblance to the dead girl named Arcia.

It doesn't help that most if not all of the character interactions are either non stop exposition dumps or just characters showing the only character trait of constantly showing angst. This goes double for Delecriox which seems to be the only thing he knows how to do or talk about how the death Siela has ruined him.

The plot mainly consists of Sieg and Arcia wondering around, fight Delecroix and then do some more wandering. There is some world building about an order of some kind but it's all so badly presented through title crawls that it's hard to really get attached. Sieg and Delecroix seem to be the only active members and that's it.

There is a scene later in the game where Arcia dies after being shot in the head but ha not really fake out.

It is fascinating in how bad this story is even for Capcom action game standards.

Gameplay is where things get interesting and where it's ideas get borrowed from. In Chaos Legion, you don't fight alone, you do what the title implies fight with a Legion of familars.

It's about using your familars effectively to get through battles rather than be effecient on your own. Sieg can summon them using his as long as his Soul guage is filled. Legions taking damage drains them but hitting enemies will get it back up and do a little damage to the enemies themselves.

This is sound on paper however the gameplay problems start rushing in quickly. The awkward controls, design and structure reer in their ugly head fast.

Enemies are damage sponges even on easy. The thing that made this tolerable was that larger foes dropped health upon health. In order to lock on you need to hit them with lightning which can be problematic since bigger enemies and bosses can level your health bar very quickly. Since stages are very long, it can be infuriated to get far into a level, spend minutes trying to lower a larger enemies' health bar, get hit by them once or twice and you could be killed even before you can press start to use a healing item. This is worse for bosses because they can level your health super fast, destroy you soul gauge within seconds on top of being damage sponges. The Legion AI will also prioritze enemies around the boss rather than the boss himself. Force attacks are the only way to do major attacks to the bosses.

To add to all this, Sieg has no real dodge command since all he can do is a backflip. I didn't know after beating you had to use lighting to lock on which you can see why this never got adopted since adds needless busywork when you can just hold a button to lock on.

You can equip two Legions at a time but there is a lot of stop and go. In order to activate your equipped Legion, you need to press L1 to switch press L2 to switch to the next one. There is no seemless switching, you need to press L1 to turn on or off, press L2 to switch and then wait again to press L1 to activate the next Legion. Certain Legion being strong against flesh and others against metal. You want to attack a flesh enemy but then a metallic one? You have to do that tedious switching process I described.

On top of this, you get XP and new Legions but never get a chance to practice the new ones until you get into the levels but by that point you want to just stick with the ones since only two can be equipped at a time. Using new Legions are a risk and a waste of time.

There's also a pointless shooting section with Arcia later in the game where it's only one level for that run of the campaign. Her healing items never transfer over to Sieg making it pointless since you could've played that whole level as him and nothing would be lost.

Save states on emulator and the health drops greatly helped me here.

One amazing thing about the game is the music. It is by far the best thing about it. You might be familar with some songs while not knowing the game itself. There's choirs and electric guitars that do a great job at making the player feel empowered during gameplay. The intermission songs are also fantastic.

Overall, messy game but it's worth checking out of curosity.