Child of Light is an RPG whose battle system intrigued me. It expands on Final Fantasy‘s ATB system to make it more tactical and engaging instead of just a reskinned initiative system — though, in the circular nature of things, it actually bears a lot of similarity to FF4’s original ATB system. I’ll tentatively recommend it, but only if you’re particularly interested in RPG battle systems.

Like in Final Fantasy, characters all have a standard wait time between turns, which progresses in real time and is based on their speed stat. The twist is that every action takes additional time to execute, and if a character is damaged while casting, they are interrupted and set back in the timeline. Most strategies revolve around timing your attacks so that you interrupt enemies while avoiding being interrupted yourself, and there are additional abilities that can slow or knock back characters as well.

What I consider to be the best innovation of the game is that it makes the real-time aspect actually matter: There is a mechanic where you can move the exposition fairy around the battlefield to generate special effects if he illuminates a character. This adds an element of real-time movement to an otherwise fully turn-based system, which I think is a neat idea.

Unfortunately, the implementation of all of this leaves much to be desired. The firefly effect for heroes is health regeneration while the effect for enemies is slowing them down, and these two effects are not balanced at all: the healing is so minuscule that it’s always a better choice to mitigate damage by slowing enemies instead.

The other thing that feels very off is that characters always travel the full length of the “cast” portion of the timeline, with casting time only affecting the speed at which they do so. This makes it very hard to judge where a character will end up relative to others, which is particularly bad when battles revolve around executing your actions before your opponents. I think it would have been much more logical to have everyone travel at the same rate but end at different points, probably denoted by notches on the “cast” bar corresponding to each tier of casting time. It would also have been nice if enemies explicitly declared their casting times instead of you having to puzzle out how your casting times compare.

Unrelated to all of this, there is another mechanic I’d like to highlight: Your equipment can be equipped to any slot (weapon, armor, or accessory), with different effects for each. I found this to be a clever way to get more depth out of equipment by making you think of multiple ways to use the same item. There is also a crafting mechanic where you can combine three of the same item to upgrade to a higher tier, or combine different items to create a new item with a special effect. This was interesting, though you’ll fairly quickly discover all the possible combinations and from there it’s just a matter of upgrading them into “the same, but more”, which took a lot of the spark out of it.

The game is ultimately fairly enjoyable and still has more to engage with than a typical jRPG, but overall I felt it needed more time in the oven. I’m also not sure it has enough depth to carry the whole playtime; by the late game I found myself using the exact same strategies and the battles became very repetitive, made worse by the fact there’s not much enemy diversity.

The difficulty is also very weird; I played on hard mode because I find most RPGs too easy, and this was fine for a while but turned frustrating in the late game, where enemies do ridiculous amounts of damage with blisteringly fast attacks that constantly interrupt you and give you no time to recover. (Apparently, the fan consensus is that normal mode is way too easy and hard mode is way too hard, with no middle ground.) Despite this, I never used more than a handful of the dozens and dozens of consumable items the game hands you at every opportunity. Maybe if they had been instant, but when they have the same casting time as your regular support moves, there’s not much incentive.

And, minor, but the main character is weirdly weak? Statwise she’s a jack-of-all-trades and therefore master of none, except for her HP which is even lower than the squishy wizard’s. Even her particular niche, light magic, is mostly irrelevant thanks to equipment that makes regular attacks light-elemental. For most of the game I benched her in favor of specialists who could fight more effectively. Possibly this is intentional to reflect how young she is? But still odd.

Storywise… this is one of the very few times I’ll say “Play the game, skip the story.” All dialogue is written in rhyming scheme — every single line — which requires everything to be contorted into painfully tortured wording because English fundamentally is not designed for that. Many scenes are borderline incomprehensible. And this might just be me, but the obvious artifice of it makes it impossible for me to take anything seriously — it feels like the characters are, well, acting out a script rather than real people experiencing real emotions. Immersion is totally broken.

The actual plot itself is deliberately cliche, though not painfully so. It’s a rough adaptation of Snow White with some elements of Sleeping Beauty, reimagined as a portal fantasy. There is a slightly clever twist midway through, though it’s pretty easy to see coming, and the ending does not pull an “it was all a dream/metaphor” like I was fearing. It’s overall unobjectionable aside from the rhyming scheme thing, but that’s about all I have to say.