Time Break Chronicles
Time Break Chronicles is a fusion of classic JRPGs and modern Roguelites, with a planned 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!
Strategic JRPG-like Battle Gameplay
A core element of any JRPG style game is turn-based combat. Time Break Chronicles features strategic turn-based battles, using our custom built engine, against a variety of foes, each requiring different approaches, skills, and maybe an item or two to bail you out. Take care; these enemies are no pushovers. Even the average foes will test your thinking and require a strong team to defeat!
Explore, Adapt, Overcome
Your adventure will not only consist of battles. You will also have to contend with a variety of traps, barriers, secrets, and other encounters as you explore the procedurally generated map. Customize your characters, their abilities, and choose the correct items to help you overcome obstacles.
Customize Your Heroes
Customize your heroes’ abilities with a wide variety of equippable relics, that can do anything from modifying attributes to granting new skills. Craft additional relics to round out your strategy.
Build a Town
Even heroes need someplace to rest after a difficult journey. Build up a town over time with multiple buildings and varied upgrades to support your favorite strategies.
Features
- 100 Playable Character Classes (by end of EA) – Heroes from all throughout history and even the future. Find and unlock them all!
- 6 Unique Stages (by end of EA) – Each stage contains unique enemies, items, encounters, and heroes to unlock.
- Roguelite Gameplay – Every stage playthrough is different, with random effects to give each run a unique feel and strategy.
- Customize Your Heroes – Equip relics and train skills to customize your hero’s abilities and refine your strategy.
- Two Ways to Play – Build up your forces and town over time in Chronicle mode, or dive into the roguelike Singularity mode to challenge increasing difficulties.
- Endless Mode – Play any stage in an endless looping mode for increased difficulty and rewards, and to test your skills.
- Classic JRPG Styling – As fans of classic SNES-era JRPGs, we have tried to recreate the feel and fun of these classic games.
- Controller Support – Play with the mouse or keyboard, or use a controller for that classic feel!
Steam User 4
TL:DR at bottom
i have to say, as a team building roguelike with a story on the side, it does the job really well, but the game honestly needs some quality of life features for me to want to continue running again and again versus going "god i dont wanna build a whole other team"
Theres no pre-sets or templates, none. it is absolutely bonkers to me how many characters, options, relics, combinations there are but there is no way to save it and go back to it. this really makes me not want to make more teams as re-setting everything up or writing down the team comp and idea on paper to re-set up everything, asss to my second complaint.
there are a lot of characters, but there are also a lot of redundant and or characters that need a lot of work for a payout. the big issue in this game overall to me is the supportive role overall. Seb the bard with the proper relic setup takes 3 turns to cap out all the relevant stats you want, granted, he is squishy and weak to AoE the payout versus the risk is worth it. Lets vs lets say, the banker. who requires a lot of management of his debt mechanic for a fairly reasonable payout, its hard for me to want to build around the banker when Seb just does everything i want, and leading back to my first point, i have to make a whole build around the banker, and the headache that entails.
my only last complaint is some relics are just way too specific, or just way too boring, the majority of relics provide new skills, fill niches, or bolster your current strategy. there are some that are generic stat buffs which have their place, but there are others that provide say, channeling buffs, when channeling is a fairly niche ability amongst the cast.
For the singularity mode, or the "roguelike mode" i'd say it almost serves the purpose i want out of this experience, being able to meld several teams, thinking of the future and longevity with the stamina mechanic and overall playing with items that are provided to the player makes a lot of my point 3 less of an issue, unless.
The cast is not made equal, and im not even going to tell anyone reading this that balancing such a wide and diverse cast of characters is hard, and i feel like every single character with relics involved serves their purpose and can be used if you want. its just when characters like Maximus running around in singularity mode its really hard to turn down his sheer utility and buffs, and i find that the case with a lot of the characters in that mode. and the harder i go up the floors the more i want to take these characters.
TLDR: Overall, for the early access idea of "Final fantasy 5 meets a roguelike" concept, I really enjoy it, it needs some things ironed out, but if that description is what you want out of a game, Time break chronicles provides, albiet, a bit rough around the edges.
Steam User 4
This is one of the best roguelikes on steam, and it's a shame it doesn't get more attention.
4 acts/zones (5 planned) each with their own encounters and their own unique scaling difficulty modifiers, both a roguelike and roguelite mode with their own mechanics, almost 100 characters (classes) that each manage to feel entirely different from each other even if they have overlapping mechanics, in part due to the fantastic theming the game has.
Don't be put off by the fact you have to have the MC on your team at all times, either; she starts with 3 entirely distinct forms that slowly get more skills throughout the game, and she gets more when you beat an act, ending up with a character who can switch between 6(?) different forms at any time. She is amazingly fun to play, and can fill any role.
Any game where a clown character is one of the strongest is a 10/10 game in my books.
Steam User 3
Ever wanted FF FTL? Few Roguelikes have that instant "Oh, maybe I'll just take a minute..." "Oh, shoot, that was over an hour" appeal. This is one of those. There is no one particular reason, it's mechanically dense, charming as all get out, and insanely good at getting it's hooks into you.
Steam User 3
TLDR: Amazing Roguelite JRPG. If you like the classic Final Fantasy gameplay (Like V or VI), want a Roguelite twist on it (Satisfying meta progression, various builds), with a massive roster and straight-to-the-action mission loop where every fight feels like a mini-boss that lets your build show how they work (instead of just spamming Attack or one button like random encounters in FF), grab this game.
I pretty much only play the Chronicles mode, the main mode the game is built around (The Roguelite mode with progression), so I won't be talking about the Singularity mode (the true Roguelike mode).
Quick rundown of the game is that you're playing as Claire, a physicist who made a portal and then got involved with cultists kidnapping people from across time (ancient times, medieval times, modern, future). You go into a mission, make a party of 6* from the heroes you've unlocked, you can change their Relics (equipment), upgrade their Skills, and you just go through the Slay the Spire-like map that has nodes of encounters.
The Main Character, Claire must always be in your party at all times. This might put people off at first, since it means you're making a party of 5 heroes + Claire. To balance it out, Claire is a multi-classing beast (you unlock more classes as you clear the Acts) that gets more Skills on each of her forms as you also Recruit more Heroes. Every form she has usually has 2-3 swappable skills on top of skills that she might get from Relics, making her very versatile and you can then fit her in pretty much every team. I keep finding new ways to play Claire and she's a very solid party member who can't even truly die as long as there are other allies still alive.
On to the heroes, the roster is huge (The goal is to reach 100 heroes by full release), at the time of this review as of Act 5 there's 94 heroes and they are split between Wanderers (Recruited in Special Missions), and each Act (Act 1 heroes, 2, so on). Each and every one of them is unique and every hero can equip up to 4 relics to either augment or change their playstyle. As for Hero balance, at the time of this review I believe the game's balanced enough that every hero can shine and you'll have fun with all of them, it's just that some may be a lot easier to pop off compared to others who need more setup.
The Chronicles mode does have big meta progression where you have your Town upgrades that need Particles (basically money), Hero upgrades (upgrading their Skills by spending Skill Points from leveling up/completing quests/using Encyclopedia), and Relics (Random drop in missions, clearing Hero quests, Craft using Soul Shards by dismantling other relics). At first the grind may seem daunting but with how fun the gameplay loop is and how generous the drops you get, it really didn't take that long for me to unlock all the key upgrades and max out all the heroes.
Once you setup your party (Claire + 5 heroes and up to 4 backup heroes), you just jump into each Act (repeatable and each has a Challenge Level/Ascension that increases the difficulty and length of the Act as you go higher) and clear the Act by beating the final boss. And every run there are Distortion effects that can either help you or debuff you. Each Act has their own unique enemies and you might want to bring specific heroes to answer the unique challenges that each Act has (But don't worry about auto-losing due to not bringing specific heroes either, it's not that bad).
Overall I really love this game and JRPG enjoyers should give it a try.
Steam User 1
if you like jrpg combat with a lot of mechanics and depth this is one of the best games ever. extremely replayable and challenging.
Steam User 1
when i just want some RPG violence, this game hits it right on the head in the most perfect way. I"ll be playing this for some time
Steam User 1
If you enjoy True RPG style types and Mini + Boss fights in those types of games along with a almost thoughtless type of roguelike leveling and gear system, this game is for you. It is totally fun! Progression is steadyish and the auto fight function is handy for fights you know you do not need to try on. Only 4 hours in and going into the fourth chapter/scenario. Had to quit halfway through cause I got pretty messed up. But yeah! Cannot wait to collect all the characters and see what else it has to offer.