Some of those who wander are lost: Seven Knights – Time Wanderer review

As someone who didn’t play the original mobile Seven Knights, I really had no idea what to expect from Seven Knights – Time Wanderer, Netmarble‘s first console game that’s spun off the mobile property. Vanessa is in her Time Witness form for the game, accompanied by Sandy, a magical hourglass, on a journey transcending time and space.

FINDING DA WEI

In a lesson to kids not to play with weird magical artifacts they know nothing about, Vanessa’s little break in with her friends ends up whisking her away to probably somewhere between dimensions and timey wimey stuff that causes her body to get aged up. She needs to collect the Time Crystal MacGuffins and for good reason: people who aren’t Vanessa who come in contact with them go bonkers and will throw dimensions into a loop.

Well, that’s not the whole story, so fellow time wanderers such as yourself will go through the game to find out, and Seven Knights fans would pick up any references and plot threads much better than I.

Controls wise, I honestly find it a little awkward, especially when moving on the map. The map is akin to a grid, where you move from point to point. It’ll be much better to use the directional keys instead of the joystick for general exploration, because sometimes it doesn’t pick up the joystick input. Likewise with selecting characters in battle, with skills bound to X, B and A. Otherwise, there isn’t anything especially unusual about the controls.

TRAVERSING DIMENSIONS

Time Wanderer feels like it’s essentially imported the mobile game’s systems to console, down to the whole skill animations and art. It uses a turn-based battle system, with an action bar on the left as a turn timer. Skills will cooldown based on real time, and will count down during skill animations as well. That’s good, but also means there’s no skill animation skip, so that can be a nitpick when you see the same animation over, and over again.

Strike Skills are basically your ultimate skills, charging up whenever a character uses a skill. You can only use one skill per turn, gaining an additional turn if you hit the weakness of all the enemies on screen. To further elaborate, hitting enemy weaknesses will stun them, thus letting you take that extra turn. If you select another skill before the action timer ends, it replaces the previous command. It can be quite a fiddly system with this departure from typical turn-based games, but at least your enemies can also only use one skill at a time.

You will have up to five characters in a party in formation (front and back), with more characters to fill out your roster as you progress through the story. Monster spawns are at fixed, and a successful escape will despawn them from the grid point they were on. On Normal difficulty, it should be fine to just mash your face into the monsters and gain those levels to upgrade your skills. From what I can tell, new characters scale to your party’s level, so they’re not gonna just die in the area they should have an elemental advantage in.

In the Room of Sands, your hub area, you can buy equipment – expensive especially early game – and work on party wide upgrades with Magic Essence you find. The map will handily tell you how many of the hidden items you have left to find, so it’s just about exploring. Sometimes you might encounter the Joker who does pop quizzes, but since I know nothing about this game, without looking them up, I’m not gonna get em right, alas. There’s also hidden quests, basically side quests, you can encounter too.

Locked chests need keys to open, but you can also just jig them if you’re a cheapskate. Waypoints are pretty generous so you can just head back to the Room of Sands to heal up. Returning to the hub does reset your SP bar for Strike Skills, besides also respawning all ordinary monsters. There are potions you can use on the map so that’s something to stock up on too.

PONDEROUS TIME

It’s pretty obvious that this is Netmarble’s first console title, with that feeling of jank that permeates through the game. I’d argue this would be more for the fans of the original mobile game, as I feel that certain characters would hit much better if I already knew them.

At the end of a chapter, you get a cute little recap episode, which is a nice touch to help you remember the story. The game is serviceable on its own, if not the most ground breaking title out there.

FINAL SCORE

7 / 10

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