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.

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

Yes, the game is good to satisfy your ADD, ADHD, OCD and all that good jazz. But for the love of god PUT IN MORE / BETTER MUSIC! (If you buy this, I personally recommend listning to clair obscure music in background instead)

In terms of variety of characters, skills, enemies, and roguelite progression this roguelite RPG is certainly up there with some of the best.
Visually it replicates FF6 style, and while I liked the character costumes, I feel like the enemies could looked a bit better, although I can respect it for now as an indie game.
That said musically it's incredibly boring and I get sick of hearing the same battle theme over and over again.
Recommend if:
-You like FF6 aesthetics
-You like turn based combat
-You like progression & meta progression
-You like equipment customization
-You like job classes
-(Minor) You can stand repetitive music

Pretty good, but could use some improvements.

Learning curve 6/10: While the in-game instructions are pretty good, they're incomplete. There's occasionally mechanic quirks that it doesn't explain completely. You'll be spending some time figuring out how abilities are best used and how to build an effective party.

Combat 8/10: This is the main gameplay component. Each combat will require you to pay attention; the game leans hard into damage types, status effects, and chaining reactions, While the complexity ramps up reasonably, the difficulty scaling of Elite fights needs some work, particularly in the early game. For some fights you're going to wipe and have to come back with a different party. Characters can be set to auto, but it's not like you'd see in classic Final Fantasy where you put it on auto and it just attacks constantly; instead a character set to auto is run with an AI. The combat speed can be toggled on the fly between 1x, 2x, 3x, and 4x.

Story (English) 3/10: The story exists, the spelling is fine, and the grammar is about 95%+ correct. Character dialogue is occasionally a little stilted. It's not complex, and seems to be mostly of incidental.

Rougelite 6/10: It doesn't detract too much, but includes some annoying components. Maps (except for special missions) are similar to games like FTL, with branching paths with random encounters and points of interest, and are randomized every time you go for a run. You can back out if the paths look too annoying, but there's no consistency from run to run. If you do a run and hit a wall, you can't rebuild your party to try again and expect to find the same encounters. Special missions are fixed though, and you get several you can run after finishing each chapter's main mission. Those, at least, let you come back and expect the same fights in the same order.

Rougelike mode: Not doing it, not interested. It's an optional game mode, recommended for those who have completed the campaign mode.

Variety 7/10: The enemies in each area tend to be a bit limited in variety, but they do mostly change from act to act. The backgrounds are unique in their style and presentation, but not very interesting. The main point of variety is the 100 characters, and while they do slot into roles (tank, healer, etc), characters in the same role have mostly different abilities - for example, the Cleric, Medic, Angel, Healbot, and Priest are all healers, but each functions very differently from the others,

Music 2/10: The music is easily the weakest part of the game. It needs more variety and more energy. It's all kinda samey and just there, tangentially, some of the sfx for abilities are irritating. Hopefully somebody will mod in a way to import music files at some point.

Overall: As I understand it, the dev team is like 2 or 3 people. There's a Discord for people who use it, I believe. It's clearly inspired by the classic (and best) Final Fantasy games, but has modern mechanics and a paper-thin plot instead of an expansive world with lots of NPCs and an interesting story. If you miss FFRK in particular, you should like this game. I do recommend after a while just turning off the music and putting something else on.

If you enjoy turn-based combat and crafting builds then this game punches far above its weight class—just don't a proper story. The core gameplay involves pitting six party members against increasingly infuriating (in a good way) enemy encounters. Your overpowered spellcaster can and will be thwarted by a slasher that kills them before they even get a turn, or perhaps a mage that reflects spell damage AND casts the same spell back at your team. What's truly impressive is that each of the 100 characters has a distinct playstyle which can be further molded with relics. Chronicle Mode is your "story" mode where you have persistent town upgrades, characters, and relics which you'll bring into randomized runs through 6 acts. There are generic/boss relics and every character also has two unique relics which can be unlocked for unlimited duplication by completing themed missions for that character (e.g. copy 7 unique skills with the mimic). Singularity Mode is a roguelike mode where each run is separate and you're simply unlocking more stuff that can randomly appear in future runs. You can get tons of playtime between both modes, though the vast majority of mine was spent in Chronicle Mode. My main minor complaint is that early battles can be a bit a slog without upgrades or the vast pool of characters and relics to choose from. Once the game opens up, you can start crafting truly crazy setups that you'd be hard-pressed to find in any other turn-based game that's not Siralim Ultimate.
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As an example for how flexible builds are in this game... You have a Rune Scribe whose main gimmick is inscribing runes that combine an effect (damage or healing) with a trigger condition (attacking, dodging, getting hit, turn start) which is already interesting at baseline. You can build around these runes by equipping relics that augment healing or damage. One spicier setup is giving her a relic that makes Sonic damage shred defense along with relics to boost her overall damage output, then you apply a rune that adds Sonic damage on attack to a party member that attacks often for some pretty absurd damage. However, this character also has a Spellshield that she gets at the start of the turn (or manually applies to others). You can build around this by equipping a relic that boosts stats when blocking damage along with other relics to boost her defense / Focus (magic) stat. In combat, you can apply a rune that heals when hit then position her front and center to block damage and heal around her whenever she's hit. Or you could run a different tank and apply the same rune / spellshield to them. She also has a passive which adds her Wisdom (MP) stat to her magic hits. The problem is that she doesn't really have offensive magic outside of a dispel. Well, you can equip a relic that adds MP cost to magic hits while also granting an offensive spell and suddenly she's a pretty strong spellcaster. Now you can add more relics to augment her magic damage and/or grant some better spells to turn her into a powerful mage with built-in survivability (her spellshield) and support (her runes).
My criticism here is that there are only four relic slots that you're trying to fit stats, granted skills, and multiplicative boosts into. Some characters already boost their main stat up to the soft cap (twice the base value) with all the skills they really need so you can use all their relic slots for multiplicative boosts / utility, while others might have an interesting mix that's a lot harder to mold into something crazy with only four relics. Some relics are also too good to pass up within each archetype. This is a very minor nitpick, however, considering the game has 100 characters that are pretty much all interesting as a baseline. You don't just have a fire mage. You have a fire mage that builds up stacks by casting spells, explodes for tons of damage based on these stacks when he dies, then revives himself when any enemy is downed.
tl;dr the characters and builds in this game with 100 characters are somehow more interesting than many other turn-based games with a fraction of the roster size