Review: Fallen Legion: Rise to Glory / Fallen Legion Revenants [PS5]

The collection of Fallen Legion: Rise to Glory and Fallen Legion Revenants are two action role-playing games that are now being re-released on PlayStation 5. To further complicate matters, Rise to Glory is a collection of two previous games with some additional content.

The games are set in the fictional empire of Fenumia and in Rise to Glory both stories are about rebellion and change of thrones while in Revenants you are one of the few human survivors in a floating castle that has escaped an apocalyptic fog and you have to fight enemies and find out what happened.

In short, it’s about two-dimensional, side-scrolling role-playing games in manga-style graphics. You control a leader who has a few spells at his disposal and up to three companions, or exemplars as they are called. The actions of the companions are controlled via the square, cross and circle buttons and the spells are located on triangle. Assembling attack combos is easy, but it gets repetitive very quickly. I quickly fall into button hammering with an inserted block or parry here and there when I manage to time it right. In Revenants, the combat system has been overhauled with a simple positioning system where you can push and pull in opponents, and place your heroes on specific squares to gain advantages and be able to control which companion takes damage from enemies.

Another thing that gets reused a lot is the enemy models, which means I quickly learn their attack patterns. However, I am bothered by the unimaginative design of the opponents even though the character design is generally nice. The figures feel a bit like low-detail cut-out dolls, and the animations reinforce this feeling with stiff and paper-like movements of both the main characters and supporting characters.

The story succeeds in the art of being both a little too concise and at the same time unnecessarily complicated, which makes me lose both the thread and the interest to delve into the world and its inhabitants. That says a lot, as I tend to be quite flirtatious anyway and get sucked into the stories fairly easily in normal cases. Both games use slightly different means to advance the plot. In Rise to Glory it’s mostly dialogues between the missions and some events that appear between the battles where you get different moral dilemmas where your answer gives different bonuses. In Revenants, the action is largely driven from dialogues in the floating palace and sometimes events on the battlefield appear where you need to quickly obtain information through diplomacy or explicit threats.

When I sum up my feelings about these games, the word indifference appears at the front of the frontal lobe. The genre of action role-playing games is full of great games, and unfortunately I don’t put the Fallen Legion collection in that category. The battles could have been more engaging and varied and the story would have liked to have been more meaty.