I’ve recently began playing this game (I’m up to Chapter 3 out of 10) and while I’m definitely not ready to judge it yet, I’d like to talk about my impressions so far.
Chaos Wars is a crossover RPG- it was made by four (!) Japanese game companies, and features characters from about a dozen games, including Growlanser, Shadow Hearts and Gun Grave, and many I’ve never even heard of, like Spectral Forces. It came out in 2008, but apparently wasn’t very popular on this side of the World, most likely because of the horrendous translation job done. (Actually, the dialog itself doesn’t seem to be so bad, though there ARE a lot of grammatical errors; it’s the English voice acting that is SO bad, I actually switched to the Japanese track, something I never do!)
The story is about a world called Endia, that, for some so far unexplained reason, keeps dragging in people from other parallel universes (read: other games.) A group called The Luin (Uh, I think that’s supposed to be “Ruin”) are hunting down all the “Keys” that activate Endia’s dimensional gates for their own purposes. Rin, a girl who is the hereditary Guardian of said gates, recruits the displaced heroes to oppose them, and to try to find a way to return the “knights” (as the Endians call them) back to their own worlds. However, villains have also been brought over, and some of them have allied with the Luin. Others however, have joined up with The Kishindan, a vigilante group that is at odds with Rin for some reason.
There are a total of 50 recruitable characters (including three original ones, a trio of Japanese high school students who are the game’s main characters) though about 5 of them cannot be recruited if you choose certain others. (Being the impatient player that I am, I decided to play the game TWICE at a time, alternating between one save and another, so I get to see the alternate events and characters already. Yeah, I’m weird. 
)
CW is a tactical RPG; meaning you have to move your characters around a field to do battle (but only 5 at a time.) Curiously, while all the characters have special abilities from their own games, they can only use them when transforming to more powerful forms after charging up for a while. I don’t see the point of this. Also strange is the fact everyone’s skills (except the special ones in their super forms) can be removed and switched around with other party members (!) This allows for great customization, but doesn’t make much sense.
The graphics are largely “superdeformed”, probably intentionally since most of these characters are already famous in Japan in more serious-looking forms. You can see them in their actual forms when they perform their super attacks, though, and in fact doing so allows you to add those pictures to your character’s profiles (in a book at their base.)
The opening theme is pretty good, but then again I tend to like most music. On the other hand, I noticed that the game played kinda slow, and then realized that it was because the characters always stopped to say something before performing any actions in battle! Luckily you get the option to turn off those expressions off at will.
As I said, I’m not ready to evaluate the game yet, but so far it sounds good… not great, but good for what it is. It has both moments of humor (for example, when the main heroes ran into the hero and villain from Shadow Hearts struggling, they, ahh, misunderstood what was going on :hahaha;) but it also has some poignant moments, such as when one of the Shisengumi (actual historical Samurai heroes from Tokugawa-era Japan) found out what was going to happen to them from the “heroes from the future” he was saddened, until he realized that being from different universes, perhaps history would not be the same on his world.)
More comments later.
