The Alliance Alive HD Remastered review: two worlds in one

If you love the JRPG genre and have a PC, a Playstation 4 or a Nintendo Switch you are in luck. The developer NIS, hand in hand with the distributor Bandai Namco in our country brings us the remastering of a title that passed without pain or glory by the Nintendo 3DS handheld. In a decade of second chances for old games that did not work at the time, we bring you the analysis of The Alliance Alice HD Remastered, a classic game in its proposal but innovative in its story. Do you dare to fight by our side?

A world invaded by demons

Like any good JRPG, The Alliance Alive HD Remastered puts us in the shoes of a group of heroes and heroines who must save the world from destruction. In this case, the bad guys are demons called Daemons. Our enemies divided the kingdom into several territories to be able to subdue the humans in a simpler and faster way, however there is always a resistance that opposes them. Sit well in your gamer chair Akeron, this story must be listened sitting down.

We will be part of that resistance and we will start the adventure embodying a couple of young people who belong to one of those groups that have not yet surrendered. The arrival of a group of Daemons to their city will turn the story upside down, as they will be forced to flee, leaving behind family and friends who will be locked up in a large fortress for misguided humans. A kind of prison that serves as a lesson to send a message: all those humans who defy us will never again walk free in the kingdom

Neither the good guys are so good, nor the bad guys are so bad

The particularity of this video game, and one of the points to highlight in our review of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered is undoubtedly the variation of the point of view of the story. At the beginning of the story we will control the two young people of this small town that still resists the onslaught of the Daemons. However, after a few hours we will take the role of a Daemon who is curious about the investigations of a human doctor, her faithful bodyguard and the doctor herself. A somewhat unusual situation in a JRPG, a genre in which we are accustomed to handling a single group of characters, who are the good guys in each story. And not only that, but once we have completed that part of the adventure, we will also control a couple of allies of the Daemons who are not very clear whether to maintain that support or help the resistance not to lose the battle. These three stories will come together and we will find ourselves in front of a very special videogame in the presentation of its main story

Innovative turn-based battles

The gameplay of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered meets the standards of any turn-based RPG. Random battles that we can decide whether to face or not, as we will see the enemies walk around the world map (as can happen in other sagas like Dragon Quest and even in one of the most groundbreaking Game Freak's proposals, Pokémon Let's GO), increase of skills and stats of the characters as we complete battles, normal attacks and skills that consume points, etc. A priori nothing new in a genre that currently gives more prominence to real-time combat than turn-based battles. However, it should be noted that the skills of the characters are not acquired by leveling up (since in The Alliance Alive HD Remastered you do not level up), but you will get them more or less randomly during the fights. One of our characters will carry out a command and suddenly have a kind of "revelation" that will make him learn a new combat technique

Novelties and more novelties in a traditional genre

Another novelty at the gameplay level of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered is undoubtedly the variation of the combat style depending on the type of weapon we use. We will have access to normal swords, large swords, spears, staffs, bows ... and each type of weapon will have assigned a number of techniques that we can only learn if we usually use that weapon in combat. On the other hand, we will not have to worry about our life points, at least beyond the battle we are carrying out. At the end of a successful combat, our life points will return to the maximum. Finally, we were pleasantly surprised by the actions we can perform on the world map. Usually, the world map in RPGs serves only as a corridor to get from one place to another. In our review of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered we want to highlight the situations we have had to face walking around the map. On one occasion we had to move with a kind of hang-glider from mountain to mountain until we could glide to a hidden cave. At that particular point in the adventure, it didn't hurt to have the help of the Arkadia gaming controller

As members of the resistance, or the so-called Alliance, which is the name that gives the game its title, we will establish ties with different "allied armies" that will help us in combat and give us information about the monsters in that area. In order to have access to these alliances we will have to visit towers located throughout the world map. And as happened in titles of the genre such as Golden Sun, we will also have to overcome a series of puzzles to advance in certain dungeons or locations.

A spectacular graphic change with the same melody

We couldn't end our review of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered without talking about its graphical facelift. A fantastic job has been carried out in terms of resolution and remodeling of certain textures, turning a Nintendo 3DS game into a proposal worthy of being considered as next-gen. The art of this videogame was already one of the highlights of the original work, and now with the improvements introduced it becomes a great proposal for those who value artwork

The soundtrack of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered does justice to the good role-playing video game that it is, with unique melodies that will remain forever in our memory, as it did at the time the original soundtrack of Final Fantasy VII, and we recommend you listen to it with our new headphones compatible with Nintendo Switch. While it is true that we miss that the characters have voice in the cinematics, since this absence does not work as well as in other proposals such as The Legend of Zelda. We feel that we are missing something

The best

• The combat system works perfectly and will surprise even the usual players of the genre
• Admirable graphical wash: it looks like a totally different game to the original one
• A story that surprises: we can play from the point of view of the good guys and the bad guys

The worst thing

• It arrives with texts in English
• We miss that the characters have voice in the cinematics

We have made the analysis of The Alliance Alive HD Remastered thanks to a download code for Nintendo Switch provided by Bandai Namco.