BLADE XLORD is a Story-Driven New RPG

The intro screen for this game looks pretty cool. We got some cool looking guys, some cute girls. Almost reminiscent of an actual RPG! You know what’s important, though? BLADE XLORD.. BLADE LORD?
I have no idea if the X is silent in the name – I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume it is – was just recently released. And it shares the director of Last Cloudia, a game I actually had some fun in a while ago.

After sitting through a lengthy download, you’re greeted by a beautiful cutscene featuring the main character, Ryde – one of the most generic characters you’ll come across, his hot best friend, Meryl and his.. mentor? brother? Iunno, generic “stronger older guy” character.
We do battle with a giant demonic glowing blue dragon, Ryde loses control, goes Super Saiyan, “kills the dragon,” then we lose consciousness, only to wake and find that Meryl being the good waifu she is remained by our side. #bestwaifu?
Fast forward, we see Heathbell getting beat up by an interestingly equipped knight in glowing blue armor – does this seem a little reminiscent of anyone in particular? No? Just me? Okay.
We’re forced to flee the kingdom, and thus begins our journey.

That took about 20 minutes to get through, I kid you not. The sheer amount of text, half of which you’re unable to skip is actually ridiculous. There’s so much story found within the game – so much more than I had ever expected from a mobile game and I’ve played my fair share of them.
Thankfully eventually I got to actually begin the game and for the most part, it’s pretty generic. You have your overworld, you navigate to each different “zone” with each “zone” having their own selection of “Chapters,” which are in essence just 3-stage fights.
You progress through them until it triggers a scene that moves along the story, and then subsequently move along to the next zone with its own selection of characters and Chapters.
Interestingly, in the time I played I never actually encountered any recruitable characters.
Sure, at the beginning of the game I managed to recruit one, and I know you can recruit them via the Summon system, but I was surprised I never found any story-related characters to recruit in that time.

Thankfully, considering there’s a lot of story, it’s all completely voice-acted in Japanese. It sounds like you’re playing through a Mobile Anime series.
The combat is also more intuitive than what I’m used to in these kinds of games. While there’s an auto-feature, and while I did enable it, if you opt to play manually, it has you make use of field positioning to flank for critical damage, combo’s, individual skill and item windows.
The special effects were great, the animations themselves were fantastic. Overall the game itself was pretty damn good.. for a game of its kind. I still prefer my RPGs to be less of a “spam this zone for 20 Chapters” and more of a “Freely explore a large world filled with story.”
This was pretty good – I can honestly say that it was better than I had anticipated.