Mar 18

Mar 18 Review | Blade Prince Academy - Needs To Apply One's Self In Class

Blade Prince Academy isn’t about a boarding school for medieval royalty, but rather a much darker subject: an elite troupe of assassins and enforcers who ensure the safety of the city of Abjectalia at any cost. Abjectalia was created by banished mages for forbidden magical and medical experiments, so if this education program sounds a bit strange, it is. The students here may have homework, but they’re just as equally likely to have a field trip to head to the slums and make sure the Pillz gang isn’t ruining lives with their vice of choice, Delirium. If that sounds like a lot going on - there’s a reason for it - the game was a series of French novels prior to this release. Politics, betrayal, morality, and parties all await you in this tale of shadow ops.

Blade Prince Academy splits its gameplay loop into two halves - time spent at the eponymous academy, and time spent venturing out into the hostile and unsettling streets. You’ll come back to the academy after every mission where you’ll recuperate, upgrade, and debrief your students to decide with who and how you’ll approach your next adventure. When on a mission, you pick up to four students to shoot first and ask questions sometimes.

If I can sum up Blade Prince Academy in one word, it’s “ambitious”. There are many systems at work here; a support system similar to Fire Emblem or Persona that increases characters' stats by having them interact with each other, the Black Mage Altar where you improve or remove gameplay-altering rewards called Pacts, the Laboratory where you can improve your potions from the bog standard ones found in the field, the infirmary(not their dorm room, which is a bit strange) where students can rest to recuperate their energy after being in the field, and the Park where you can take in more character chatter. Many of these areas can be upgraded to be more efficient and ultimately help you in the field of battle.

During missions, you’ll do an excessive amount of killing, breaking objects for Skullz(the game’s currency), and navigating traps. While this sounds like standard video game fare, the game’s ambition doesn’t just stop at being a Kickstarter project with the aforementioned academy activities. Actions like opening chests and breaking down doors will increase your Threat level, rewarding more experience, Pacts, and various currencies. There is a danger to this because enemies will be enhanced if you decide to increase Threat. So as a player, you have a choice of increasing your Threat level, but if your party is knocked out on a mission, those characters will need to spend a week in the infirmary - I hope you’ve been cultivating a second set of studious pupils!

It’s never a good sign when there are human-sized test tubes.

The game makes a good first impression with an immaculate artstyle of cel-shaded characters paired with expressive character portraits everywhere else. The environments are varied from grimy back alleys with disturbing graffiti and sickly-looking lime green water, gardens of lush green forestry, cultist headquarters complete with viscera and bones strewn about, and airships fueled with a certain bodily fluid. That said, sometimes the screen gets a bit too busy with effects obscuring vital information, and I would have liked to have seen characters get another pass for some more detailed animations, but overall the visuals of this game are excellent. Even something like destroying an explosive barrel has a bit more flair to it with comic book-styled onomatopoeia accompanying the weapon hit or explosion.

Some fights include interactables like these blood tanks.

In gameplay, you’ll learn fast you’ve got a tactical pause(which you can modify in the settings) which is where the game starts to show its flaws. The screen moves very slowly, so the developers are sending a mixed message when they want you to be tactical, but having to manually zoom out and wait seconds to get a lay of the land through scrolling isn’t respecting the player’s time and ability. I noticed even before booting up the game, it displays ‘no controller support’, and in diving into it, I can see why. For some reason, instead of using the decades-established ‘left click to confirm and right click to cancel’ or vice versa, it’s somewhere in between, causing even basic actions to take longer than they should. On top of that, I could not find any ‘cancel’ shortcut or button for attacks, which has been present in everything from Warcraft III to Fire Emblem: Engage over the years.

Despite the somewhat unintuitive controls, the game is very easy, even when stacking Threat, so these hurdles aren’t going to prevent you from making progress, but the ‘tactical pause’ is more of an ill-suited bandaid than a back-of-the-box feature with that in mind. The best example I can give of this is if I did not use the pause feature, I could not reliably order my students to attack enemies. This combined with the fact that the game expects you to quickly manoeuvre your units to keep them alive and perform combo attacks, as well as avoid friendly fire, makes it feel like you’re fighting with the game to do what you want. Additionally, during the last phase of the game, there is a huge difficulty spike that you may not be prepared for.

The soundtrack and sound design is also uneven - I was largely unimpressed and I eventually turned on my own music or a podcast as there’s no voice acting and the foley effects for weapons and magic were lacking.

The story is strange - while this is not the first time I’ve engaged with in a piece of media where not all is as it seems, the dialogue doesn’t come off as purposefully off-putting but more so unintentionally stilted. It can range from perfunctory to immersion-breaking: in particular there’s a line about a student going to a brothel, but in appearance, all the kids seem to be teenagers at most - so yeah, that is pretty off-putting. I know it’s a fictional series with elves, trolls, and vampires, but seems like a strange callout to make, and I can’t say if French heritage has anything to do with that.

Many of the characters are one note, and strangely, seem to be more facilitators than anything. This isn’t a problem in itself, but considering how many people you end up killing, I started to wonder if there was another way, especially when you end up confronting former allies. I do like where the story eventually goes, eschewing the trope you think it’s going for, and making me curious about the previous novelizations even if tracking down an English translation might be tough.

In Blade Prince Academy’s drive to follow in the footsteps of Persona or Fire Emblem, Angel Corp has missed a crucial element to why people are drawn to these games: these characters ultimately just aren’t very interesting and are mostly one-note. The brute who ‘don’t speak so good’, the religious zealot who can’t go one sentence without praising the almighty Moon, the unreliable friend who suspiciously knows too much. I started skipping dialogue as it started to feel like an uninspired 80s cartoon. The relationship system may reward your characters with stats, but the dialogue feels almost copied and pasted from character to character. Even to the point I encountered bugs that had a character talking to a mirror image of themselves. One of the best parts of games that layer in social sim mechanics is the relationship dynamics, and I was very disappointed in this aspect of Blade Prince Academy. Even stranger, some of the more interesting character dialogue is COMPLETELY optional in The Park. Racism, classism, homelessness, and poverty are all things that are brought up, but the game tucks them away and ultimately doesn’t reflect on them of any meaningful length of time, and that’s a shame because that would have been interesting and compelled me to get to know these characters better.

The game starts tutorialisation off well, but by the end of the game, I wasn’t sure how to perform certain later game mechanics that even the achievements hinted at. This was compounded by the amount of bugs I’ve encountered. This is the buggiest game I’ve officially reviewed, and I am sad to report although many are harmless, there are quite a few bugs that affect gameplay: characters becoming unresponsive, missions being un-completable forcing a hard reset, even the potion Laboratory(which I PAID in-game currency to upgrade) stopped letting me use the upgraded version of potions. I would hope the team at Angel Corp is planning to fix these bugs post-release, as currently they massively detract from the experience.

Thankfully, as I mentioned before, the game is easy. It is short as well, so clearly, the development team at least knew not to move its scope beyond what it could handle in terms of overall content.

As a former teacher, Blade Prince Academy reminds me of students who are capable, but for some reason, didn’t decide to do the assignment as instructed, and earned a grade much below what they deserve. If this game was a student, I’d point that fact out and urge them to redo the assignment. The lore, graphics, and gameplay ambitions are clear - it’s just Blade Prince Academy needs to roll up its sleeves and actually show us what it’s capable of.

Score: 6/10