I have been enjoying Alliance Alive recently. The combat system feels like big improvements over SaGa Frontier and even Legend of Legacy, but the storytelling component needs some help.
There’s a lot going on! It has unique characters, distinct
cultures, and world-altering conspiracies, but it feels like everything interesting happens off camera. My characters always felt like they were racing to hear about a story that happened somewhere else.
This game originally hyped its connections to Suikoden, and I'll admit that it has improved on some aspects of that series over the past (checks notes) you know what? Never mind how long it’s been.
The combat system is nuanced and rewarding. Every character
can use every skill, and their abilities improve when they get used more frequently. It’s more than just picking fight off a menu or working towards an arbitrary EXP goal; you are encouraged to make thoughtful choices about the roles that you want each party member to perform.
Your characters also build skills faster when the stakes are
higher, which actively encourages players to seek out more powerful enemies and hunt rare monsters. As a whole, the system works to deliver victories that feel more meaningful, making it less like grinding and more like seeking out new challenges for sharpening skills.
However, the base building felt like a giant step backwards.
You literally built bases, placing identical structures in interchangeable locations on the map, but they had no effect on the story. In Suikoden, new recruits unlocked new areas of your castle and opened up different functions in the game. In Alliance Alive, you just fill a bunch of empty rooms with NPCs who have a single line of dialogue.
The entire story felt like a sequence of empty locations waiting to be populated with something interesting. NPCs traded speech bubbles with the lead character on the screen, and different members of the party had their own personalities — serious, silly, inquisitive, or wary — but it was rarely reflected in their surroundings.
It’s the opposite of the storytelling that you see in a game
like Dragon
Quest XI. Those stories force the player to use specific characters at different points
of the game so that they can explore an environment that reflects their struggles. (Think of Erik confronting his own greed as he explores the fortress made of solid gold, or Sylvandro leading his post-apocalypse parade into a town that’s plagued by a dancing curse.)
Any member of the party can take the lead in Alliance Alive, which means that each location has to support several different interpretations.
Is the player leading a quest for vengeance? A mission of scientific inquiry? A race to recover lost artifacts? There are so many possibilities that the designers can’t commit to any specific emotions. Everything is presented with an
identically accommodating blandness.
I second-guessed a lot of my story choices, trying to figure
out whether I was supposed to experience exchanges as something serious, funny, sad, or silly. I kept asking whether it would play better with different lead characters. And then I wasted a lot of time re-loading different scenes to find out that it didn’t.
The big cutscenes weren’t much better. There were so many
characters in each sequence that none of them ended up being memorable. Marketers have a cliché that describes this phenomenon: when you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.
It ended up being like the paradox of immersive gaming:
you
have to remind the player that they’re in a game if they want to feel like
they’re making choices that matter. In this case, if Alliance Alive told more narrowly
focused stories, its world might have felt more expansive.
