Crown Gambit

The Good: The art and gameplay was wonderful. Not only the design was appealing but the gameplay itself was fun. The strategy part comes out great and challenging, especially once you get to the harder difficulty modes. Crown Gambit makes sure you're engaged the entire way. The mix of 3D and 2D blends seamlessly and again, adds on to the beautiful art. The story is also great for the most part, every choice you make matters, even the tiny ones. It's also nice to see how our paladins grow up and what future they hold depending on your ending. All of your protagonists matter, and the strategy doesn't come from just gameplay, but your dialogue as depending on who you choose to talk, your goals may or may not fail. It's rare to see a game with multiple main characters that truly love all of them equally. The Bad: Crown Gambit suffers from having too many characters near the end of it. I simply just did not care for them. Though the main characters and heirs to the throne and written well, most of the paladins I fought I killed without second thought unless they had a connection to a protagonist. I assume this is to encourage replays so you can meet them through other paths, but I still couldn't care about it. The game is also somewhat hard to play, not in difficulty but just trying to play it. It's finicky to cancel a character's card, or switch because sometimes the game just chooses not to pick up your mouse/trackpad input. There were multiple times I messed up my gameplay because I used a card I didn't mean to by accident and couldn't undo. Not saying the game needed an undo, but I wished I could sometimes. Overall Crown Gambit has excellent writing and art with choices that matter, and great strategy that will put your mind to work. But only as your okay with the finicky systems and boatload of characters. I personally loved it but had to point out the bad as well. An average run took me 5-8 hours but it depends on your reading speed.

Overall I really liked Crown Gambit. This game has lovely art and a lot of story to tell. The combat starts very basic but quickly picks up in complexity and strategy. The branching narrative allows for a lot of your choices to have very different outcomes, which is great. Apparently there are 6 endings, of which I have seen two. (I had a choice of two endings at the end, and reloaded to see the other option). I would recommend NOT reloading your choices unless you click the wrong dialogue option accidentally, as there are a lot of characters to remember and reloading frequently will quickly make it hard to remember which side you supported in your current timeline. I have two main critiques. The first is...a lack of creativity with your card decks in early game. One full playthrough will have you obtain approximately 75% of the characters total number of available passives and active abilities from their skill tree; and while there is a good variety for a single playthrough, starting back at the beginning with very few rigid options is a little boring, and it will take up time to build up your variety again. i played my first run on Knight difficulty, but will probably do subsequent runs on an easier difficulty just to get the narrative up to where my skill level is challenged. Secondly: Ludonarrative Dissonance with the Relics. The story tells you that wielding more than one relic leads to insanity, but the heroes can hoard a massive amount of relics and feel nothing, so long as you don't use empowered sides of any of your cards. It would be great to tie the amount of relics owned into increasing your base Influence rating to really showcase their influence. Along with this; I almost never choose the option to destroy relic cards, as it reduces the amount of deckbuilding options you have. Perhaps a specific ending will require it, but I don't think it would be nearly as fun of a playthrough. Other: There were a few moments I had where combats would completely hang, mostly in the late game fights. I had to restart the final fight once when I had nearly won it. Some of the english text had typos or used the wrong word in a few places, but it was still overall readable. These critiques are coming from a positive place; I think this game with a bit more polish could really shine, but it is already a diamond in the rough!

A good story and decent combat