KEY NOTES:
-SRPG Tactical Gameplay
-Unique Playable Characters Only
-Job/Class System
-ENG/JP Dual Audio Voiced Options
-30-40 hours to clear main story + lengthy post game

Relayer is a SRPG developed by Dragami Games. The developers were originally part of the Kadokawa Games team that had also developed other games like Natural Doctrine and God Wars so they are no stranger to strategy games.

STORY

Taking place in the middle of the 21st Century, mankind had advanced into space after uncovering an artifact on the moon that dates back millions of years ago. That artifact takes the form of a humanoid mech dubbed the Original One and with it, mankind had dramatically increased their technological advancement within a short time period and were able to develop spaceships, mechs and space colonies. However, the discovery of the Original One also revealed the impending alien threat called the Relayers and their goal to end all life in the universe.

To combat the threat, spirits of the celestial bodies confer special abilities to certain individuals. These abilities include control over gravity particles and allows them to pilot special modified mechs called Stellar Gears that make great use of such particles. These humans who have the Will of the Stars are called Starchildren.

The story opens with Terra, the Starchild of Earth as she gets dragged into a battle involving some Relayers attacking the moon colony. Her younger sister, Luna suddenly steals the Original One and escapes the battlefield. Hoping to unite with her younger sister, Terra joins the Asterism crew on their mission to retrieve the stolen Original One and defeat the Relayers.

Relayer's story is a space opera with many different factions in play, but it's not a particularly deep or complex one as some would expect from the genre. The politics between the factions don't have much nuance to them and their motives are very clear and plain. Alliances and relationships are fortunately dynamic so they shift often and help keep developments somewhat interesting. The pacing isn't particularly slow either and reasonably paced throughout.

The worldbuilding isn't explored in great detail during the course of the story, but there are a number of terminology scattered throughout. Relayer's world doesn't have much originality within the genre, but it's still an interesting one. Further details are provided in the in-game glossary which makes for a fun read.

The sci-fi plot itself is rather straightforward and easy to understand without significant plot twists. Despite that, there is a lot of focus on it with some surprisingly lengthy cutscenes and dialogue. It has a good balance of relaxing slice of life moments and serious ones. Much like the worldbuilding, the story doesn't really do anything new that hasn't been done before. Even then, it was still interesting enough to keep me invested and see where the story was heading. Relayer may not have started off particularly strong, but it did ended on an emotionally high note making the story a highlight of the game.

CHARACTERS

Relayer's cast of characters is on the large side. From the NPCs in the different factions to the playable characters, there's a lot of characters to keep track of. Fortunately, nearly all major characters have sufficient screentime to leave an impression. While a few of the main playable character's development are lacking, most of them have decent to good development with sufficiently explored backstories.

There are a number of emotional character moments that took me by surprised. The game did a good job in getting me emotionally attached to many of the characters. The writing execution on these moments were well done in general. It helps that the group's chemistry is great and they are generally fun characters to watch.

The character storylines helped carry and move the story at various points making it a very character driven story overall.

The antagonists however are a mixed bag. Most of them are very cookie cutter one-note with shallow motives and goals. They lack any real depth or complexity. The saving grace with these ones are that the game does a good job in making you dislike or outright hate them.

VISUAL PRESENTATION AND DESIGN

Most of the game's story is told through Visual Novel style cutscenes. It is quite standard in that style, but there are often a lot of character sprite portraits on screen surprisingly. Each character sprite have a decent amount of different expressions and poses to help keep things more engaging. There are also times when they tried to be creative by shifting the sprites around the screen to indicate movement. These are mostly used during comedic moments.

The Stellar Gear designs look pretty nice overall and were very appealing to me, but they lack variety within the same Class types. All of the Sniper Class Gears for example have the same structure and the only aspects that distinguishes them from one another are the different paint jobs. On the positive side, the Gears do look noticeably different when compared to other Classes.

Enemy mech units are unfortunately very plain and generic looking. They don't really get custom designs and it's very hard to distinguish them from one another at a glance.

If there is one visual design that Relayer does well is the use of battle cutscenes. When initiating an attack against an enemy unit or on the receiving end, the game switches to a short cutscene of a few seconds. Counterattacks and evasions are done within the same cutscene as well which makes it flow very well. The cutscene use very dynamic camera angles to simulate the actions which results in some dramatic moments. The highlights are the duels between same weapon types so there's more going on then a one sided assault. Overall, it's like watching an anime mech fight scene. There isn't a lot of variety however, but I never got tired from watching them. For those that do get tired of them, there are options to speed them up or outright skip them.

MUSIC

Relayer's soundtrack was composed by Shuichiro Fukuhiro and Kensuke Inage. The former only did a few tracks including the Title Screen track and the ending theme. Kensuke Inage did the majority of the soundtrack. The soundtrack as a whole doesn't have many tracks. At roughly 15 tracks, there are many repeated songs played throughout. Most of the songs aren't amazing, but they sound nice and fit the sci-fi theme of the game especially the battle themes. The main highlight is the ending theme song which sounds like something from the Ar Tonelico series.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay loop is simple. You advance the main story from a list. Story battles are not repeatable in a single playthrough, but nearly all of them have a repeatable skirmish battle with the same enemy placements. There's just isn't any story dialogue in these skirmishes.

When not moving the story along, you spend most of the time at the Asterism ship hub. Other than the typical tinkering with character equipment and abilities, you can view optional side events with characters. These events are a nice to way for further development of characters and see how they interact with the characters they don't normally interact with during the main story. Many of them are on the humorous and comedic side.

There aren't any sidequests or side content other than these optional events.

COMBAT

Battles are fought on a large grid map and the fundamentals to the combat are simple. There isn't anything particularly complex in its mechanics and not a whole lot to keep in mind either.

Relayer makes use of character turns instead of player's turns. On a character's turn, they can move and then perform an action, but they can't move after an action. A key aspect of the combat revolves around good positioning and taking advantage of attack ranges.

Not exactly like a triangle weapon system seen in some other SRPGs, Relayer's weapon advantage system is more about whether the weapon ranges are different or the same. After receiving an attack, a unit will counterattack if it's within their range. The use of range is also not typical either. Using the machine gun as an example, it has a range of two spaces. It can attack any unit from two spaces away, but it cannot attack anything within one space. So if it receives damage from a sword attack which has one space range, the machine gun unit cannot counterattack. The logic applies to the other ranged weapons in the game like the Sniper Rifles and Bits. The weapon range setup essentially gives a large advantage to units initiating an attack with a different weapon type.

One mechanic that further emphasis positioning is Back Stab. After finishing an attack on an enemy, if there's an allied unit placed directly behind the enemy, then the ally can initiate a subsequent followup attack which cannot be countered. While useful overall, this only works with other sword users so the conditions are stricter than I'd liked. Enemies can also use Back Stab as well.

Another key element of the combat is the Aggro system which isn't too common in these types of games. Aggro builds up on every action and the higher it is, the higher an enemy unit will likely target them over others. Many characters have abilities and effects that make use of Aggro one way or another. Whether it's a Tank that has buffs that can increase its Aggro, Assault's skills that get stronger as its Aggro rises or a Sniper's ability to drain its Aggro to remain hidden, Aggro as a whole affects many character's roles.

While not a unique or original mechanic in anyway, buffs and debuffs in the game are very effective. Nearly every unit in the game has some variation of buffs in their arsenal.

The enemy A.I. is somewhat decent, but they aren't aggressive enough at times. Enemy forces on the other side of the map won't charge forward or engage until an allied unit is within nearly within striking range. They do make good use of buffs, debuffs and inflicting status ailments though.

Battle objectives are very ordinary here and without much variety. Nearly all of them requires defeating every enemy unit while some allow defeat of specific units only. A Game Over is usually when all allied units are defeated, but there are a few where the defeat of a guest unit is an automatic Game Over too.

A neat aspect about battles are the large deployment capacity. You can eventually deploy up to 10 units per battle so you can use favorites more often.

As a whole, the game's difficulty isn't that challenging. Although the higher difficulties have enemies with stat advantages over your characters at similar levels, good use of positioning and fundamentals of the system can get you far. It's worth noting that defeated allied units cannot be revived in the same battle whether by using consumable items or from a character skill. There aren't any permadeath in the game fortunately.

BATTLE MAPS

One of the biggest and common complaint with Relayer are the battle maps. They are pretty much nearly identical from one another and consist of large, but flat battlefields. There's no elevation to hinder you or special terrain that decreases how far a unit can move through. They are very empty and a lot of tactical strategy potential are lost from them.

At around the halfway point of the game though, you do start seeing obstacles in the terrain. They can't be broken or climbed over. Weapons and attacks can't bypass them either with the exception of the Bits weapons. Depending on the map, these obstacles can either provide limited issues or a bigger hindrance as they force characters down narrow paths. It's worth pointing out that these obstacles only exists on maps where there's solid ground.

WEAPONS AND UPGRADES

Another issue with Relayer is the lack of weapon variety. There's just six types in the game. Two of them includes the one-handed sword and the two-handed sword which are mostly similar to each other (they have the same attack range). The game also treats the Shield as a separate weapon type although it's not used in attacking.

Some weapons can be obtained in loot boxes or from enemy drops, but the majority of them are obtained from the ship's shop. Weapons can be upgraded too by expending money. Each weapon can be upgraded three times, but a few of them can be changed into a new one.

Armors and accessories in the form of Chips cannot be upgraded unfortunately.

CLASSES AND JOBS

Surprisingly, Relayer makes use of a class and job system. It is however not like other popular SRPG titles like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre or even Dragami's own God Wars where characters can switch to a large number of jobs. The system in Relayer is a lot more restrictive and limited in comparison.

Each character belong to one of the four classes (Assault, Sniper, Tank, and Scout) and there's no changing their core class. Instead, the characters have jobs that can be changed within the class that are similar yet different to one another. For example, Terra is part of the Assault class that emphasizes close ranged combat. The initial job in the Assault class is the Fighter Job. From there, it can branch to either the Vanguard or Shinobi Job. The former specializes in fighting on the front lines and tanking hits while making use of high Aggro. The latter specializes in keeping Aggro low while fighting on the front lines undetected.

The mid level jobs have an expert job that they can branch off too which are similar in style to their mid level job counterparts. Despite having the option to choose which job branch to go down, the reality is that each class only has two branches. With only four core classes and a very large playable roster size, there's going to be many similarities between the characters.

STAR CUBE

The Star Cube is where most of the character's skills and abilities are unlocked. Very similar to a skill tree, you can unlock active skills, passive abilities, and fixed stat upgrades in the Cube using JP (Job Points). The Star Cube is linear to some degree since you have a starting node and can only unlock subsequent nodes that are adjacent to them. The Cube does have branching paths so you have some control over what to prioritize. Once you unlock all of the nodes in the Job, you can unlock and advance to the next Job tier in its branch.

Picking a new job in the mid tier level shouldn't be taken lightly since you're locked into that job path. Picking mid tier Job A will essentially prevent you from unlocking nodes in mid tier Job B for example. It's not permanent however since unlocking all of the nodes in the Expert Job will open up the other mid tier job. Just don't expect to do this until end game when playing the game normally.

It's important to note that not everything carries over between Jobs. Stat upgrades and passive abilities do, but Active Skills do not. This leads to an issue I had with the game where I often don't switch to a new Job right when I unlock them. Active Skills don't carry over so it's often better to wait and unlock some new Active Skills before actually switching over. The one positive note is that Character Exclusive Active Skills are usable in any job.

CUSTOMIZATION

Despite the use of mechs in Relayer, it doesn't have the same level of customization from the general mech genre. Such as specific parts cannot be replaced and changed. Instead, the customization is mostly standard for the JRPG genre. Weapons in the same category type are mostly differentiated by just stats and they usually don't have any additional effects (with some exceptions). Some Chips do have special passives attached to them which helps in creating customized builds.

You can upgrade the Stellar Gear's stats directly by expending money to improve specific parts like its frame. The max amount of upgrades allowed per part is 10. Once every part is fully upgraded, the Stellar Gear undergoes a visual change which mostly consists of additional wings, more trinkets and glowing lights. The overall visual change does look nice and the Stellar Gear's name then includes "FF" to indicate its Final Form. Most importantly though is that all Stellar Gears gets a new permanent passive ability attached to it when upgraded to its Final Form. The passives are different from each other to help make them more unique.

Most of the customization however are from the passive abilities that are acquired from the Star Cube. Each character can equip up to four at a time. Overall, Relayer's customization isn't incredibly deep, but the number of passive abilities the characters can acquire does provide some room to do so. The type of skills obtained from the Star Cube does limit the effectiveness of certain builds however. The Character exclusive Skills and Abilities does tend to lean towards one type of build than another.

POST GAME

After clearing the main story, a series of battle stages are unlocked. They are repeatable and are surprisingly numerous. Altogether, there are just about as many stages as in the main story itself. Each post game battle stage does have story and cutscenes leading up to the battle as well.

The post game storyline provides some answers to questions that were never completely resolved in the main story. Along with the serious parts of it, there are a number of slice of life comedic cutscenes that further develop characters and their relationships with each other.

Other than the story, the post game stages are where you can farm ultimate weapons and armors. The battles are mostly of the same difficulty as the main game, but the last few battles are surprisingly very challenging.

Overall, they are worth playing for those that enjoyed the main story and wanted more from the game.

NEW GAME PLUS

The New Game Plus option unlocks once the main story is cleared and can be started at anytime in the post game. Relayer offers a very customizable New Game Plus option to suit your interest. You can choose to carry over nearly everything, nothing or just a few select things. The new Very Hard difficulty option is also unlocked for use on a new game cycle.

FINAL REMARKS

Relayer has a number of issues including general variety and somewhat average strategy and tactical gameplay options, it's still a fun game with an interesting story and characters. The customization is fun despite the limited jobs and weapons. Being a space mech game makes it a niche within the overall SRPG genre. While I wished it dove more into heavier space politics and themes, the story was still an enjoyable one with great emotional moments.

For those that are interested, but still on the fence, Relayer does have a demo that covers the first two chapters of the game and save data carries over to the main game. Most of the mechanics are available for it so you get a good picture of what to expect for the whole game.

Very well written characters, compelling story with political intrigue.

On the gameplay side, map design is nearly non-existent. I would be hard pressed to tell you which map corresponds to which mission unless there's a boss.

On the tactics side, it's decent enough. The game emphasizes good positioning above other things.
Customization is decent. There's 3 basic classes for each unit, and each of those 3 can branch into 2 upgrade paths.

Overall, I strongly recommend this game.

Also, Saturn best girl.

Gameplay: Good.
Story: Good (Eventually becomes good)
Characters: Good. Himiko and Terra best girl!
Controls: Great
Graphics: Good. The Gears (Mechs) looks cool specially after you've unlocked their Final Form.
Length: A bit long. I didn't finish the Wormhole missions as I didn't want to grind anymore.