Alice Fiction - 4 reasons why you should check out this immersive JRPG

WonderPlanet’s latest puzzle JRPG release, Alice Fiction, might be easy to overlook as just another gacha game in a market saturated by them. That could not be further from the truth, and here are four reasons for why you should be excited to try it.

A thought-provoking story

Every gamer at some point has thought it would be cool to have a fully immersive VR world, and this is what the story of Alice Fiction is based around. In this setting, The Metaverse of ALICE has become capable of replacing the real world. People can work, attend school, and experience food in ALICE as if it were real. However, what if the ruling AI gets out of hand?

Upon logging in, the game’s protagonist gets marked as a virus by the Queen, the AI who runs ALICE, and has their data erased as a result. When they arrive in ALICE, they meet a girl who claims to be their younger sister, and is then attacked by corrupted data that has become feral and takes the girl away. Thrown into a whirlwind of missing memories and mysterious characters, can you really trust what anyone says?

Intense high-speed gameplay

Every round in battle is an exciting, mind boggling affair. Pitting a team of four characters against the enemy, players will need to break as many panels as possible to deal damage to the opponent. Each character is represented by a colour, and if three of the same colour panels are broken together, a powerful Skill Panel will appear. Breaking this will unleash a strong attack.

The basics are easy to grasp, but the tactical possibilities run deeper. If you manage to break the Skill Panel next to two more panels of that colour, it will level you up even more. As the board carries over between turns, do you go for the quick damage? Or sacrifice a lower damaging turn to set up a big score on the next? These are decisions to be made whilst racing against the clock. A simple system in theory, but it keeps every round engaging and feels like a challenge.

Fascinating characters

The protagonist gains the skill to summon help from a huge cast of characters to fight battles for them. Whilst a few of these are characters from the story who are interesting in their own right, most of them are known as Folklore. In-game lore explains that a Folklore is born in ALICE out of various stories of both non-fictional and fictional people from all over the world, and recreating them in their universe to aid whoever contracts them.

WonderPlanet has drawn inspiration from a vast array of cultures to produce these characters. With Folklore such as Lancelot, Knight of the Round Table from Arthurian legend, to Musashi Miyamoto, legendary Japanese sword fighter, there are a myriad of fascinating lore to discover. Also, rather entertainingly, WonderPlanet has redesigned a lot of these characters to suit the anime world, so whilst you may expect Greek mathematician Archimedes to be a wise old man, he is a young woman who rides a mechanised turret and blasts enemies with torrents of water instead. Naturally.

An audiovisual treat

While the design deviations can be rather funny, humour is a big part of Alice Fiction's story and characters, that doesn’t mean the art style is bad, far from it. The designs of all the characters I have encountered look amazing, and the battle graphics are incredibly gripping. Each character is presented as a chibi version of themselves, throwing off very flashy attacks to some equally attractive enemies with a backdrop of an interesting technical stage. The Crash Skills for characters of base 3 stars also come with their own intricate videos, all of which are incredibly pretty to see.

Adding to this feast of the senses, the music in the game is incredible. The sound in general, particularly the voice acting, is pretty good, but the music is a proper stand out. Even the first introduction to the game, when just booting up to the title screen, the music is so catchy and I instantly wanted to hear more of it.

Alice Fiction launched world wide today for iOS and Android and can be downloaded right now for free from the App Store and Google Play.