Time Break Chronicles

Time Break Chronicles is a gem of a game. When I first saw it on Steam, I had my doubts: The game is marketed as “a fusion of classic JRPGs and modern Roguelites, with a cast of 100 playable classes to find and unlock. Build your team, customize their abilities, and venture into a procedurally generated adventure through space-time and beyond!”
Does it really have 100 playable classes?
Can you really customize their abilities?
Is there adventure to experience, through spacetime and beyond?
The answer to these questions are “yes, sort of.” I will explain:
Each character that you unlock is a “class” in and of itself. You could categorize characters into a macro-class (Damage Dealer, Tank, Support, Healer), then beyond that is their actual class/job (Wrestler, Chef, Clown, so on and so forth). What does their “actual job” mean? Well, each character is thematic on what a person of that profession would do. For example, the Clown has abilities such as throwing pies, giving allies balloons, and healing allies (representative of making them laugh). The Chef has the ability to prepare food on one turn, then serve it to an ally, boosting their maximum HP and MP. While these examples seem brief and simplistic, the game really comes together in complexity when factoring in the Relic system and managing six characters per team; more than the traditional four. Relics are items you give to characters to change their stats, grant them new abilities, and new passives. Each character can hold four Relics, allowing them to specialize further into a niche; or, completely change their gameplay. Each character has two signature relics, and you can use signature relics on other characters besides themselves, creating an initial repertoire of 200 relic options, plus relics associated with bosses and other sources. To summarize, the game has 100 playable classes in the sense that each character is its own class/niche. It’s not the same as Final Fantasy where there’s job advancement, but the character and relic systems feel novel and unique.
In Time Break Chronicles, there are two game modes: Chronicle Mode and Singularity Mode. Chronicle Mode is, unsurprisingly, the main story mode of the game. Singularity Mode is a roguelite mode with minimal metaprogression. Chronicle Mode has a procedurally generated adventure: The story is divided into, at the time of posting, five Acts with their own plot painting a larger story. The main character, Claire, navigates spacetime by warping from node to node. Each node is a battle or encounter, not unlike Slay the Spire’s nodes, battles, and encounters. Combat nodes fully heal your party between fights, where as Encounter nodes have the possibility of combat, adding temporary buffs/debuffs, opening chests, crossing bridges, being ambushed, or buying items from a mysterious trader in a vending machine. Overall, the story okay and makes sense, but it’s nothing award-winning. The encounter nodes are novel at first, but that novelty wears off when you’ve experienced all of them; or, realize you can simply skip/avoid them. Chronicle Mode also has its own metaprogression: Improving town buildings by spending a metacurrency called Particles. This system adds a lot of quality of life to the game to make runs easier and it’s worth investing into. In my opinion, the appeal of Chronicle Mode, and Time Break Chronicles overall, is the endgame combat. The teambuilding with fully leveled skills and Relics unlocked is fantastic. The game is punishing enough that you need to think about the characters you choose wisely. You will not be able to steamroll the entire game in one sitting. It’s challenging, it’s knows what it is, and is not designed to cater to the zeitgeist. It’s intended for a niche audience.
I haven’t played a lot of Singularity Mode, so I don’t feel informed enough to have an opinion on it.
To summarize the pros of this game: Characters feel unique from one another; and, with 100 characters to choose from, you will find characters you enjoy playing over and over. The Relic system allows you to customize those characters further, and you have the option to save up to 4 different Relic loadouts. The game is very cerebral in that your choices matter and wrong decisions are punished. The main character of Chronicle Mode is likable and very powerful; but, if you don’t want to use her, you can remove her from the party altogether. You can spend over hundreds of hours, like I have, and still learn something new about characters you’ve written off (join the Discord!).
For the cons, there are a few, but not bad enough that I wouldn’t recommend this game:
1. The tutorial feels very slow. If you’re already familiar with roguelites and JRPGs, it’s going to feel like a slog.
2. The damage output early game is low. Fights are going to feel like they take forever. In the lategame, combat can take anywhere between 1-4 turns with fully built, optimized teams. You are going to be introduced to a mechanic called Time Break Techs early, and you will need them.
3. Leveling characters’ skills can take a very long time. This is offset by their quests, which award 2 skill points each (and infinite uses of their signature relic), but the grind is still long. It’s a JRPG, so I understand that grind exists, sometimes; however, this has been a recurring turn off for several people in the Discord.
4. Once you level a skill, you can’t take points out. This sounds like common sense, as all skills are supposed to be maxed; however, some characters have strange interactions with Relics that make it “optimal” to leave their skills at level 1 or 2.
5. This isn’t really a con, but it can feel pretty bad leveling a whole new team just to get absolutely stomped anyway. Again, this game is intended to be hard. You might spend a lot of time in trial and error mode just to fail a lot. That’s okay! Some people really can’t stand it though.
Overall, I’d give this game an 8/10. Really cool and a gem for what it is, especially in Early Access. Looking forward to Act 6 and hoping it’s the endgame content Act I’m looking for.

Tldr; Fantastic game.
Huge amounts of customization and unique ways to build your party. On top of the hundred or so unique characters (all with a unique skill set), each one has four relic slots and every character you unlock adds two new relics to choose from. Relics can do anything from adding more damage, getting a chance to have a free turn, or even adding new skills (and so much more). Endless possibilities for customizing your party!
The most brilliant part of the whole thing is meta progress being tied to earning skill points with any of the characters. Gives the player a reason to at least try each of them. Even if you're not impressed after reading over the skill descriptions of a particular toon, you'll end up discovering synergies and surprises within your team. The result being the most engaging game of this type I've ever played.
The only downside is the meta progress tied to leveling up each character (town levels) ends after roughly one third of all possible skill points are earned. There's already a difficulty scaling system in place which gives a reason to do a dozen or so randomized runs through each act, plenty of opportunity to test and level new characters. If the devs could come up with an infinite town level system, or at least enough that you have an incentive to level up and earn skill points on every character, I think this could be a genre defining title.

Insanely good. Across 100 classes I found only a few of them weak/gimmickly and maybe that's on me rather than devs. Viable party composition variety gets close to Unicorn Overlord, which is a very high bar. And I felt the same vibes discovering synergies and playing with ideas for party building. On top of that there are 250+relics to tune your builds and break the characters totally. Towards late game the game presents a real challenge for party building. Which on one side felt awesome to solve but somewhat limiting on the other. Nonetheless I played this for 50 hours and enjoyed every single minute.

This game is phenomenal, a masterpiece in and of itself. tons of content to see even in my limited playtime it is one of the best games I've had the pleasure of enjoying. I will be recommending all my friends to purchase this themselves.

Derivative, but better than most at what it's trying to do. Heavy recommend for buildcraft autists

Played this game for 10 hrs so far. I bought it 2 days ago. It's so fun! It's definitely a rouge like and you can't be afraid to die, but the powering up is smooth, the buffs and many character group combos make it fun! I love playing this game. It can be a little monotonous if you don't change up your party, but between the personal quests and overall storyline, I'm having so much fun!!

Bretty gud when you get into it. Go to the discord for some guides if you are overwhelmed and they will help you with questions also most of the time.