To really lock in the identity of your party members, the game demands a fair amount of grinding. The downside is that while using certain abilities to unlock them in a character's primary class, they can be pretty useless on the battlefield. At first, I intended to make one tank, one ranger, one assassin, and one support, but as I progressed through the game unlocking new weapons and abilities, I found more interesting ways to combine certain skills and more utility by having characters learn certain things that didn’t fit his or her archetype. There are 16 different classes each character can be and plenty of overlap and complementary abilities between each one.

I found this system to be flawed in some ways, but ultimately quite engaging. Related: Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time Nintendo Switch Review - That'll Do Bandicoot, That'll Do In order to build strong, well-rounded characters, it’s necessary to use a wide variety of weapons and abilities and frequently switch each party member between classes to unlock as much as possible. Each class also has a number of abilities that can be unlocked by using different class-specific weapons. As you use abilities, you will unlock them and make them available to use while specialized in a different class. Your class is defined by your weapon, while your abilities and armor type are defined by your class. The other half of that process is character classes, which Black Legend also puts a unique spin on. Practically all of the strategy in the game comes from the way you build your characters. You can’t even push an enemy or otherwise move them into more favorable positions. You can mitigate some amount of damage by protecting your back, but otherwise positioning and elevation have really no effect. It’s an interesting system that helps to spice up an otherwise drab turn-based experience where both you and the enemies are meant to just throw yourselves at each other until one side is completely eliminated. The strategy, then, comes from creating characters that can apply a wide variety of Humors at different ranges in order to efficiently build stacks on enemies and quickly kill them with combos.

Once an enemy has enough stacks of two different Humors, say red (rubedo) and black (negredo), those stacks can be catalyzed with a special attack that deals massive damage. However, each attack applies a stack (or two) or a specific Humor. Into fairly late in the game, your attacks do very little damage to enemies. While the combat itself isn’t particularly deep, the game finds a tremendous amount of strategic potential in the class customization and Humorism system. Related: Monster Hunter Rise Review: Hunters Rise Up Your party will need to master an alchemy system based on the old concept of Humorism to defeat groups of enemies in grid-based combat as you make your way back and forth across the city completing quests for the resistance. Black Legend is an alternate history turn-based tactics game in which you control a group of four townspeople on a mission to save the city of Grant from an evil alchemist named Mephisto who has clouded the city in a madness-inducing fog.

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