Despite having a shallow tutorial, Battle Chasers is perfect for RPG lovers and beginners in the genre, bringing everything a great RPG should have: an engaging storyline, dungeons full of loot, extensive Bestiary and a very different status/upgrade system. Even with time-consuming loadings giving a "brake" on the "flow" of the game, the player is compensated with magnificent artworks and tips on the loading screen.

Battle Chasers: Nightware is pretty typical as far as turn based RPGs go, but its tight combat, beautiful production values and faithfulness to its source material make it worth checking out on Switch.

Atmospheric and very pretty dungeon crawler with tactically thrilling and complex turn based fights in a living cartoon world.

Battle Chasers: Nightwars is a damn good update to JRPGS of old, carrying the genre into 2018 without sacrificing what made it so appealing to begin with. The fact it’s now portable on the Switch just makes it better still.

Despite a title that suggests it came out of a name generator, Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a satisfying slice of JRPG that forges a confident, colourful character of its own from formulaic ingredients. The approachable comic style, plus a couple of neat mechanics that encourage experimentation, give it a freshness that belies the age-old systems at its core, and it doesn’t waste your time with filler. Depending on your skill, you’ll probably spend around 30 hours on the critical path – comparatively breezy in RPG terms – though there’s plenty of side content to occupy you beside the main quest, plus a trio of heroes you’ll probably shun on your first playthrough.

Even though the content updates from the other platforms are included from the get-go and make this a decent port of the tactic role-playing to Switch, there is still too much grind, too many fights against weak opponents. Plus you encounter performance problems that were not present on other systems.

Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a solid RPG with a strategic battle system and challenging dungeon-crawling, but it’s held back by its harsh reliance on grinding. Regardless, its slower playstyle can work in spurts thanks to the Nintendo Switch’s handheld mode, which works well aside from some lag. If you are a retro RPG fan who won’t mind the grind, the game’s worth checking out.