This game could only have been made in the early 2010s. Chaos Rings is of another era, a time when smartphones were seen as a new frontier of big-budget gaming before the freemium model became the standard, where spending $13 on a phone game could have been reasonable! I didn’t think too much of it when I first finished this game, but a decades’ worth of hindsight has me feeling nostalgic for Chaos Rings even with its faults, for taking so many standard RPG elements and implementing them in a way suitable specifically for phones that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Gameplay is horribly unbalanced in the player’s favor; the main gimmick was that you can have your duo take an action together to strengthen the effect, and also receive damage together for the turn, or have them take individual actions. However most enemies have rather little health so the base duo attack would easily wipe the floor with mob encounters and even bosses would only last a few minutes with adequate equipment. But I have to ask: is this really such a horrible thing given the platform it’s on? I also remember trying to play Final Fantasy Tactics on my phone, and the amount of starting and stopping mid-combat quickly turned me away, while I was always able to feel like I made a significant amount of progress in Chaos Rings on my 20-minute bus ride to school thanks to the bite-sized design philosophy. Certainly there should be a way to better tune the difficulty while still having quick battles, but Chaos Rings was experimental in nature and thus I have to forgive it at least a little.

The narrative is also surprisingly ambitious. There are four duo storylines: the two default stories, Escher’s and Eluca’s, are pretty standard enemies-to-lovers storylines, don’t reveal much information about the life-or-death tournament setting, and have very similar endings, so it lulls you into a sense of complacency about what to expect for the other two duos, which is then subverted by their far stranger predicaments and personal connections to the tournament. Ayuta and Olgar’s stories are angsty and melancholic, where even their good endings feel bittersweet instead of the triumphant feeling of the other two. It’s surprisingly captivating and the romance feels far more developed, the kind of stuff you could expect to see in a console RPG.

I’m not sure it’s something worth seeking out today, as Squenix has stopped distributing this game and if you’re able to find and play it on your phone today, you also have the technical know-how to emulate a wide variety of games on it as well that eclipse Chaos Rings in quality. But there’s at least something worth remembering about it, a game that could have pioneered big-budget RPGs designed specifically for phones that took what it did and improved even further on the base.

Amazing Story and Characters.
Gameplay needs some balancing.
Here’s my rating of it on my personal scale.
Gameplay: 6/10
Story: 10/10
Characters: 9/10
Music: 7/10
World/graphics: 6/10
Total: 38/50