Etrange Overlord Review – Review

Etrange Overlord is an action-RPG with an interesting hook and a story and dialogue that are certainly an acquired taste. Courtesy of Sohei Niikawa, creator of the Disgaea games, Etrange Overlord takes you through Heaven and Hell on the titular protagonist’s journey to become ruler of all. Its most unique feature is a revolving lane that brings items, power-ups, and tools around each stage, but is that novel mechanic enough to earn a recommendation from us?

I hope you like Japanese musical performances in your game because heroine Etrange never misses an opportunity to put on a performance. What’s funny is a menu prompt that asks if you want to skip each musical interlude before it comes on screen, which makes me think even the folks making the game thought these events might be too common. At its core, though, Etrange Overlord is a stage-based, button-mashy RPG with a lightly explorable overworld and fairly simple progression mechanics. The first world, Hell, is subdivided into a handful of areas, with completion of the newest stage opening up the next one. A handful of boss battles pop up along the way, which are much more involved and complex than the normal stages.

Every stage has a slightly different flavor but falls into one of a few categories. After choosing up to four characters from your ever-expanding cast (and sometimes being forced to take or leave behind certain ones), you’ll typically face one or more waves of foes or need to survive or protect a target for a set amount of time. Capture the flag and Fort Knox-style stages add variety, but the former feel particularly tricky if you’re not playing multiplayer and instead have to rely on your CPU squadmates. In every one of these levels is a rotating track or lane that revolves constantly while carrying items that boost your attack, activate your special move, or heal you. You can also find energy tokens to power up machines like turrets or bombs that can be held above you and thrown at enemies. If you imagine a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, you’ve got an idea, but in some cases there are also platforms on the track that you can ride across gaps to safety or into the fray. It’s a neat gimmick overall, but the button to board the aforementioned platforms being the same as your character’s dash ability is frustrating.

While there’s some decent enemy and objective variety in the normal levels, at times you’ll run into major difficulty spikes. These can force you back to the drawing board, which in this case means returning to base and using your accrued funds and materials to level up the attack power of your party members, boost the proficiency of the lane items, or craft dishes that offer a set of temporary buffs based on recipes you find on the overworld map. I found success early on by leveling up Etrange and her projectile basic attack, but eventually you run into a cap that can only be raised by completing missions, including side story cutscenes, or going back to old stages and finishing off their secondary objectives, like winning without having a teammate get KO’ed. What dampens the enjoyment of any grinding is the fact that every character only has an attack, a dash, and a special attack that requires an item you pick up from the lane; it’s overly simple and quickly becomes tedious, but it does encourage you to swap to different characters for the diversity.

Returning to the narrative elements of Etrange Overlord, there’s an awful lot of chatter before and after the normal stages in particular, and that’s not factoring in the previously mentioned music scenes. One cutscene before a major boss fight features a back and forth conversation that must have lasted more than five minutes, and while I’m sure the playful banter back and forth on display does have an audience, I was much more interested in the core gameplay and less so the window dressing and plot.

The repetitiveness of the gameplay loop is certainly less of an issue in short bursts, which is how I would approach Etrange Overlord, but I can’t help but feel strangely compelled by the lane system and the strategy needed to survive some of the more diabolical challenges, like holding a key aloft until it finishes materializing, all while avoiding enemies attack from every direction. Those moments are the ones that drew me in, even if the aesthetic and story elements held little appeal for me. If you’re into the art style and don’t mind Etrange’s constant need to be the center of attention, you may find an interesting time-sink type of action-RPG. If you’re more put off by the anime-style storytelling, chibi-looking characters and combat mechanics that lack real depth, I’d say skip this one, just like I ended up skipping Etrange’s musical numbers.