Battle Chasers: Nightwar

Surprised there isn't any talk about the upcoming viddy game based on Joe Mad's classic late-90s comic book series. The game is coming out in a few days, ffs. Has a solid trope page, too.

For anyone unfamiliar, Battle Chasers was a very short-lived (but never officially cancelled) pulp fantasy comic book created by Joe Madueira, which ran a mere 9 issues from 1998 to 2001. Remembered outside of its fanbase mostly as "that comic I never read but I'm totally sure it ripped off Berserk", due to one of its main protagonists being a very obvious expy of Guts (kinda ironic, considering that the Berserk manga is also known for having a very inconsistent release schedule, but at least the series had been around for almost 3 decades), it's actually a rather quirky beast with a lot of stylistic and thematic elements that are commonplace nowadays to the point of being generic, but were quite new fresh in the day, and highly influential for that matter. If you look at anything from World of Warcraft over Torchlight to League of Legends, Joe Madueira did it first with Battle Chasers (which in turn was strongly influenced by Japanese manga/anime and video games, esp. JRP Gs like Chrono Trigger, as well as Capcom fighting games). He eventually went on put the comic book business aside and make video games, so these days he's primarily known for creating the Darksiders series.

The story of Battle Chasers follows the exploits of Garrison, a disgruntled ex-Paladin with a massive sword totally not based on Guts, as well as his protegé Gully, a 9-year old girl wearing two even more massive magical gauntlets strong enough to lift up and toss trees and boulders, which she involuntarily inherited from her father after he suddenly disappeared. After Garrison was hired by the pirate Red Monika to free one of her associates, she accidentally unleashes a bunch of very dangerous evildoers into the world. Teaming up with the hulking but peaceful war golem Calibretto and the wizard Knolan, the merry lot go on to save the day, get stinking rich, and most importantly, find out why Gully's mysteriously absent dad left her those unwieldy gloves.

Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a quasi-continuation of the comic book (though 3 new issues are in the works, too), and comes in the shape of a JRPG - or, rather, as what has been described as "turn-based Diablo", mixing the exploration of procedual dungeons and a heavy emphasis on loot and gear with classic JRPG-style combat and overworld exploration. There are only six playable characters, five from the comic book, and a new one, so each is unique with their own skills and function. Combat is chiefly turn-based - no Final Fantasy-esque "active time battle" stuff, or pseudo-real-time combos like in Valkyrie Profile - and strongly focused on character synergies; e.g. the mage slowing an enemy down with an ice spell, then the tank breaking their armour with a blunt hit, and finally the rogue sending them off with a crit they had charged over the previous two turns.

The game is coming out on Steam, PS 4, Xbone, and - somewhat later - also Switch.

The only thing I remember about this series is how insane Red Monika’s...design was.

She still looks pretty ridiculous, but they did knock her down a peg.

I got a sense that Gabe liked it.