Alter Age Doesn’t Quite Get Full Use Out of its Age-Swapping Mechanic

Alter Age is a competent RPG that does a few interesting things with a strange premise. Arga, our protagonist, has the ability to shift into a preteen version of himself at will. While this ability sounds useless when you’re staring down a colossal plant monster, it causes shifts in your other party members as they age forward into grownups, gaining more combat capabilities. Swapping the ages of you and the other party members results in a simple, but entertaining battle system, and it also creates some interesting moments outside of battle as well. None of what this ability offers makes the game terribly deep or gripping, but it does make for some light RPG fun.

Arga has been struggling to leave his home town, but without an awakened class ability, he’s out of luck. Naturally, his abilities finally reveal themselves shortly after starting the game, but their effects don’t seem immediately useful to him. Being able to make yourself into a preteen doesn’t have any apparent combat bonuses when you start, but simply having your Soul Alter ability gives you increased power in a fight. It’s enough to help Arga win a battle against a little girl so that he can finally leave the town and start on his quest to hunt down his father, a powerful man who abandoned him and his sick mother long ago. That said, when he gets tricked into pairing up with a pair of young girls in his party, Lillieka and Elsie, his power’s usefulness finally comes into play.

Alter Age gives preteens and grownups different roles to play in combat. In preteen form, you aren’t capable of doing as much damage (although MP costs are reduced by 40%, making them useful as cheap spellcasters or users of support magic), but you accumulate Braver Hearts every turn. As a grownup, you do 20% more damage with skills, but you’ll do even greater damage as you expend Braver Hearts on your strikes. Only grownups can expend Braver Hearts to get that boost, so what you’ll be doing is swapping between forms to gain Braver Hearts until you have a bunch, then expending them as a grownup.

The kicker is that your party swaps ages in a very specific way. You have three characters, and every time Arga switches his age, both of the other characters will swap as well. This means that you’ll have either grownup Arga with preteen Lillieka and Elsie or a preteen Arga with two grownup women. This can make your overall damage output a bit lopsided depending on how many adults you have in the party at a given time and how many preteens you have charging up Braver Hearts. This isn’t a huge crisis during basic battles and many early boss fights, but the game’s late game fights, bonus dungeons, and higher difficulty levels can make you pay more attention to how this mechanic works.

Grinding for levels largely kept me safe (although there can be some surprising difficulty spikes if you start getting lazy about your combat actions) and Alter Age’s Bell items make that much easier to do. The game offers you some bells you can use that affect the frequency of combat as soon as you start the game. The Safe Bell lowers encounter rates significantly (and can drop them to 0 if you find a special place called a Mana Spot in the area). It’s not bad if you’re in a hurry, but the Encounter Bell was far more useful. With that equipped, you get in a fight every step you take, allowing you to rack up fights in a hurry. This allowed me to idly grind levels fairly quickly (and you gain levels pretty fast in the game), taking away some of the time sink needed if I wanted to get stronger or gain more money.

While I was seeing a lot of the combat system, I found it didn’t look too bad. The various pixel art creatures look decent and have some good designs. The characters also look pretty good in motion as well as they go through their various special attacks. They often leap into combat together as well when you enter a command for one of them, making things feel a bit more dynamic as everyone joins in on the beatdowns. None of the designs of visual effects in combat left me truly floored, but it all looked solid when it came together. I had a good time beating on the monsters.

In towns and in dialogue, though, Alter Age is a bit flat and generic, which is a shame as I expected a lot more from the story given the ability to change the character’s ages. Much of the story feels filled with anime and fantasy tropes, making it all fairly dull to sift through. Changing the character ages does result in some slightly different dialogue options sometimes but a lot of the time it doesn’t do anything. The few times it does do something, it’s usually just a minor change in the dialogue or event. There are a few charming moments, but they're so far apart that it felt like a chore to look for them. I found myself begrudgingly trying the mechanic out in places only because I was playing the game for review; I would have stopped bothering with it had I been playing for my own benefit. It doesn’t have any bearing on the story so it’s really just a playful mechanic tossed into the game, but it feels like it was vastly underused.

The game tries to make up for its story being a bit uninteresting by giving you lots of reasons to tinker with its items and carry out actions in the game’s world. There are tons of items you can pick up that you can Synthesize with your equipment to make it stronger, as well as food items you can put together to make special meals to power up the party. You also get a suite of quests you can complete, most of which are basic in-game tasks, to get a constant stream of rewards as you play. You have a ton of these quests available without picking them up, so you just reap a bunch of rewards from playing the game and doing things. It creates a steady stream of benefits, and adds some extra appeal to fighting things, opening treasure chests, and talking with people.

Alter Age makes use of its age-swapping mechanic to add some spice to its combat, but unfortunately fails to use it to make its story any more interesting. It’s a decent RPG that has some good monsters to beat up using its systems, but its trope-filled storyline doesn’t grab the imagination or stir the heart. It’s a decent RPG that I wish had done just a little bit more with its premise, but as is, it still offers a bit of light entertainment.

Alter Age is available now on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and PC.

The post Alter Age Doesn’t Quite Get Full Use Out of its Age-Swapping Mechanic appeared first on Siliconera.