Finally finished The Diofield Chronicle at 34 hours doing everything I could do in the game. I really wanted to like this game a lot. I was really impressed with the demo and the first chapter. The real-time SRPG blend was fresh and promising and it was really ambitious with its political scope and ensemble of characters. But unfortunately, the game just turn out to be a big disappointment since ultimately, The Diofield Chronicle is just a game with plenty of great ideas with bad executions.

The gameplay is the game's strongest suit. You command 4 units while you can assign another character to each unit to switch them out. Making it a total of 8 characters available to use in each battle. Each character falls into one of 4 main types. Melee, ranged, cavalry, and mage. Each main type is spilt into subtypes based on the weapon types such as range units can be either archery or gun units.

Furthermore the game allows a lot of upgrading, from weapon trees, and each weapon has different abilities the unit can use. There are also skill points you can spend to upgrade abilities such as status effect lasting longer and abilities doing more damage.

Plus you can apply skill points to each character to give them permanent boosts such as higher stat increases and doing more damage to certain types of enemy units. Not to mention you can also upgrade summons to assist you in battle such as increasing the range of Bahamut's attacks.

There is a lot of depth in upgrading your units for the real-time SRPG. It's a very nice idea that blends standard SRPG in games such as Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics while allowing free movement and the game is active at all times unless you pause the game to perform commands for your characters such as movement and attacking.

However, while the gameplay was entertaining up to the midpoint of the game. In the end, due to the various options the game gives you to get stronger and the abundant amount of quests the game supplies you for resources, especially if you complete each one of them with speed and none of your units get incapacitated. Ultimately, I found the game to be terribly off-balance.

By the ending points of The Diofield Chronicle, I found myself to be too strong, so strong that I eliminated any sense of challenge, and quite frankly, the game has gotten much more boring to play since nobody ever poses a true threat to my units. Not to mention certain abilities at this point of the game can one-shot enemies with ease.

This led to my biggest complaint about the game, the story. The Diofield Chronicle is a very messy and out-of-focus tale about the power struggle between the kingdom and the empire fighting for control of the Diofield island.

So the group of the main characters, The Blue Foxes, get dispatched everywhere around the island to deal with problems from rescuing church members to dealing with riots and demi-humans to pushing back the empire.

Initially, I noticed each main quest was directly unrelated to the previous quest but I believed the game was going for an episodic approach when each main quest was self contain enough, and eventually it will build up to something grand and everything will be neatly connected near the end of the game.

But the problem is there is plenty of plot points that remain unresolved by the time the credits roll. From the church to the Jade research to the personal philosophies of characters. It just felt very half-baked and not fully explored to its fullest potential. It just made the game's storytelling into a chunk of sloppy grand ambition that never feels truly satisfying.

One of my biggest criticism is the ending of the game. I won't spoil what happens but it was just very unsatisfying and the explanation for the huge twist at the very end just felt shoehorned with no build-up. Not to mention it was very hard to care for the final boss at all since he just appears out of thin air with nobody mentioning him at all until the final chapter.

Characters just overall felt flat and one-dimensional and not a single character develops in a positive matter. It's extremely hard for me to not love and care for a single character by the time I put down the controller for a game but The Diofield Chronicle achieves that extremely hard feat.

I felt like the game just went from a quantity-over-quality approach to the character. You will have more characters in The Blue Foxes that you know what to do with them from a gameplay perspective. And each character has thier own side quest to try to flesh them out, but it just feels like it wasn't enough. It's almost like they needed more interaction and involvement with the game's overall story. Plus some characters' side quests are incomplete with thier storylines.

Plus, it's a very common complaint that the main characters are generally unlikeable and I can understand that. It's not uncommon for main characters like Andrias to be cold and aloof. However, he just remains like that for the entirety of the game with no sign of changing. Then you have the bloodthirsty noblewoman Waltaquin who only cares for death and destruction and Freddrick, while started off as reasonable, ended up developing in a negative sense. And you have Iscarion, who remained level-headed despite his conflicting political views.

I won't spoil huge details of how the main characters panned out throughout the game and the different perspectives of each main character made the game interesting with how they approached different scenarios. But sadly, the lack of any character development or substantial writing just hurt how the overall story was laid out, especially after chapter 5.

The Diofield Chronice had a lot of promise with a lot of bright ideas. It introduces a setting with a lot of political clashes and conflict and the real-time SRPG is a fun concept on paper. However I just feel like the game ran out of money and time during development to truly realize these ideas to thier full potential and in the end, we just got a very abrupt ending with almost no build-up to that conclusion. It's almost like the game needed to be an extra 20-25 hours longer to flesh out thier promising ideas.

My final verdict is, if you want to play the game for its gameplay then go ahead, it's still generally good despite how unbalanced and overly easy it can get. The real-time SRPG is still a fresh concept but quite frankly, if you gonna play this for the story, then it just going to be a rushed disappointment in various ways and I can easily recommend other SRPGs that tell a much better political grand epic. The Diofield Chronicle makes Fire Emblem Three Houses a very coherent and focused story in comparison.