Unchained Blades follows the story of the dragon emperor, Fang, who after being stripped of his powers by the goddess Clunea, embarks on a journey for revenge and to regain his true form. Arrogant and vengeful, Fang is joined in his quest by a cowardly golem prince, a shy medusa priestess, a young phoenix clan maiden, and many other mythical beings seeking to meet with the goddess. In Unchained Blades, players journey through the game with a party of up to four characters, moving through dungeons in a first-person perspective and engaging in turn-based combat along the way. Using the game's unique "Unchain" system while in battle, players are able to try and convince monsters to follow them. If they are successful in using the Unchain system, the enemy monster will then join their party and help them in the future by blocking attacks or supplying players with special offensive abilities. Each character in the player's four person party can hold up to four unchained creatures, ensuring plenty of combat variety.
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The story is pretty much a nothingburger, although the explanation of why the protagonist is a Level 1 weakling is amusing enough.
The game feels largely like your basic dungeon crawler, but with a few varied mechanics thrown in to try and spice things up. None of the mechanics feel particularly unwelcome, though harvest points are obnoxious when they require you to buy or synthesize items with which to harvest them -- the latter being ironic, since you must harvest some materials in order to synthesize some items in the first place.
Leveling seems to be a slog, though the reward of skill points to distribute across a skill map as you see fit feels nice enough.
Equipment (whether purchased, synthesized, or found via rewards or combat or dungeon searching) feels mostly negligible early on in the benefits they provide. Equipping a new helmet and pants that give me an additional +3 defense to one of my characters just means that they're taking about 30 damage instead of 33 per hit, it seems like.
Not much else to say at the moment, as I'm only probably around four hours in and am navigating the first of several "Titan dungeons". It's not particularly inspiring as games go, but not a bad experience, either. Will come back to it at some point and continue the journey and see if the experience gets better, but for now, it's going back into the jaws of the backlog monster.
Edit: Since I forgot to mention it, the chaining system for acquiring monsters sounded neat at first, but it feels like the benefits from the monsters are largely random. You don't control them, they sometimes take hits for you or deflect hits entirely, and although you're supposed to be able to influence their moods to get benefits, I found I had no more luck/success in trying to guess what response a monster might want from a comment than I would just mashing X and picking the first response available. Not a deal breaker, just not something making me go, "I really enjoy this feature," either.