A SRPG that combines many games to form a unique and entertaining experience which has one fault, terrible voice acting.
Rin unlike most people can control these gates of transportation but most things require a key for access. Wile helping Rin escape from a mysterious order known as "The Luin" you set out to find your friends and find your way back home. Now Chaos Wars might seem normal after reading this bit it has one massive difference from most games. The plot is filled with various characters from a large variety of games such as Shadow Hearts, Gungrave, Growlanser, Spectral Souls, and many more titles. This allows the game to make a very nostalgic and creative cast that hopefully you recognize most of the characters from and enjoy. Now many would call this "unoriginal" but combining the unique story they each have and the story Chaos Wars itself has makes a very interesting and fun plot.
Being a SRPG Chaos Wars employs a unique from of strategic combat. Each character has a few traits that make them unique and then they have a "Realize", this pulls out their potential or weapons from the world they were originally from giving them special traits and skills as well as very improved stats. You can only stay in your realize from 2-5 turns dependents on the quality of it, using it requires you to fill your realize gauge which fills from attacking and defending. Also using your special skills and doing team attacks requires your realize gauge to be filled as well making it an important function in combat.
You do not move on a grid like many RPGs, although the grid-less SRPG is getting more and more popular nowadays. You get skills through "skill evolution" when used your skills both gain levels and can change into different skills and spells. You can also buy them from the store similar to how you would buy weapons, items, and armor. Each attack has a different weapon type that can use it such as fists, swords, spears, guns, staves, double swords, dolls, guitars, gunblades, double guns, and more also each skill has a different range and radius that it can strike. The realize and skill system allows for a good customization between characters and also a distinctive uniqueness.
Although the fun strategic gameplay with the nostalgic characters is what drew me to the game graphically I find it very appealing as well. Although the characters are cartoony and anime-ish I thought it fit the games less serious attitude perfectly and I enjoyed it a lot. The various skills, characters, and environments all looked great with a variety of effects and designs. This allows you to drift away from paying attention to detains and allows you to focus on the gameplay and plot.
The unfortunate downfall of Chaos Wars is a sad sad thing to bring up the voice acting. Now I have played a lot of games with terrible English voice acting but due to them rushing the game past second to come over seas Chaos Wars takes the terrible voice acting trophy. With a homosexual Uru (Yuri from Shadow Hearts, my favorite character! Noooo! Haha) among other embaressing and retarded voices you will cring everytime you hear a character talk. Seriously there are some characters that sound like they took the "special ed" class from your old high school and paid them to do voices. Now personally I can understand the problems and the way I fixed it was by immediately turning on the Japanese voices but the reputation of a game must take a hit when you ignore such a problem.
Now the terrible voice acting may take a toll of the game but I find it to be nothing more that a nuisance that is embarrassing to the game developers to have overlooked the quality. I would much rather have gotten the game translated into English than with terrible or no voice acting than not gotten it over seas at all. The gameplay and plot both were very unique and exciting making playing through the game with all the nostalgic characters a blast. The graphics are music are well done and fit the game well giving a good environment for the plot and characters. Due to the fun strategic gameplay and unique character cast I would rate Chaos Wars a 8.8 out of 10 . Although having to use Japanese voices was annoying (Being an avid anime fan I am very used to listening to Japanese voices and sometimes even prefer those voices) it didn't really damper the gameplay or the plot at all. I would suggest anyone who is a fan of SRPGs or RPGs to try this out and if you have played any of the tons of titles that Chaos Wars encompasses it makes it tons more fun to play as those characters and/or fight those villains.