Battle Divas: Slay Mecha is a High Quality New RPG

Someone dropped a comment asking me to test out a brand new RPG: Battle Divas. From the name alone, I’ll admit I really didn’t expect all too much from this. However, I was pleasantly surprised.
The game starts off by giving you a brief prologue: We’re essentially Charlie’s Angels. A group of mostly female heroes that protect the world from evil.
And I when I say brief, I mean it lasts like 10 seconds, then we’re thrown into a tutorial battle.
The tutorial lasts probably around.. 15 to 20 minutes, before you’re finally given control over your character and your life.

At its core, the game functions much like every Gacha RPG: There are various Chapters, each associated with a different character in your party.
The further you continue through the story, the more characters you continue to unlock.
This is actually a very interesting way of tackling the unlocking of characters. Typically, you’re given 5, 10, 20 characters in a special “summon package,” then you spend forever trying to either unlock them, or you cave and go ahead and purchase them from the store.
Being able to unlock new characters after each chapter is a fantastic way of going about providing characters for players to use.
I’m unsure of how many exactly are unlocked via Chapters, I’d assume some would be locked behind the cash shop, right? Otherwise how would they make any money?

Combat is turn-based. Or, it’s a hybrid turn-based combat system, actually. Kind of reminiscent of Fire Emblem, if you’re a fan.
You have the freedom to move your characters around a tile-based grid and position them at an advantageous point. Then once every character is in position, you end your turn, which prompts your characters to go about using whatever attack is associated with them.
Some of them are ranged, some of them are close-quarters. Some are single-target and some are AoE-heavy. This means that you’re all but required to strategically plan out your battles in advance, and trust me, you’ll need to.

The game has an auto-combat feature, which I definitely used to continue with some of the Chapters while showering and cooking dinner, but at a certain point, the game became almost too difficult to auto-play anymore, and required a little more attention than I’m used to giving to a game like this.
Which is a refreshing change of pace!

At the end of the day, this is a pretty basic game. You progress through Chapters, you unlock new characters, rinse and repeat.
But how Battle Divas goes about doing all of this left me pleasantly surprised and excited to continue playing. This alone makes the game substantially more fun for me – and the steep increase in difficulty means you’ll need to actually pay attention to the game.