The post Indivisible Review – Wildly, maddeningly inconsistent first appeared on Killa Penguin.
Indivisible doesn’t have a great first couple of hours, oscillating between its serious and playful tones so quickly that both are meaningless. The game’s early boss fights are also horribly gimmicky thanks to a tendency to shoehorn awkward real-time sequences into the turn-based combat. Still, Indivisible finds its footing 5+ hours in and maintains a solid stride all the way to the final boss fight, which is one of the worst final encounters I can recall seeing in a game. Picture this: you’ve played for around 14-15 hours and created your ideal team of party members who complement each other, only for Indivisible to disregard your party and end with a one-person action minigame that can only be beaten by timing your blocks perfectly against attacks that aren’t clear about when or how many times they’re going to hit. This kind of blocking isn’t required outside of combat at any other point in the entire game, either, so it’s a gimmick that comes out of nowhere and that you’ll likely be unprepared for.
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Indivisible review navigation (click to jump directly to section): Story review | Gameplay review | Bugs and issues | Visuals and music review
Indivisible makes up for its shaky start with charmingly stupid characters
This game won’t be winning any awards for its creativity as far as storytelling is concerned, telling the tale of an imprisoned goddess who wants to destroy and remake the world. Naturally, you play as a ragtag group of heroes firmly opposed to the notion of being destroyed. Apart from a minor twist that creates a tie between the main character Ajna and the goddess in question—something that’s revealed in the first quarter of the game, bizarrely enough, leaving no surprises for the rest of the game—the story consists of Ajna blindly rushing into situations and resolving them with violence. Indivisible‘s story ends up being more about Ajna learning to be less impulsive and more thoughtful than it is a story about a deity.
Once you’ve acquired most of main character Ajna’s abilities, getting around can be a lot of fun.
It takes some time for Indivisible to figure that out, though, leading to an awkward beginning period that clumsily establishes a bunch of things without any care given to maintaining a consistent tone. For example, a cheerful recruitment cutscene plays within 10 minutes of her village being slaughtered. It’s hard to take anything seriously when the death of the Ajna’s only living family is played for a joke.
After several more hours, it becomes evident that this early tone yo-yoing was attempting to establish her impulsiveness. However, that’s hardly necessary given a plethora of other examples that are spread throughout a solid 80% of the game.
These later instances of impulsiveness are much more successful because they occur after you’ve recruited a cast of party members who play off of Ajna in interesting ways. The comedy becomes the clear priority, which allows Indivisible‘s dark moments to be a momentary contrast rather than a jarring tonal shift. It doesn’t hurt any that the party members are all interesting despite how many of them there are. There’s Thorani, a long-lived Deva who heals using water summoned from her hair and effectively becomes Ajna’s adoptive mom; Razmi, a pyromaniac with a dark sense of humor; Baozhai, a hard-living, hard-talking pirate with a thing for Thorani; and many others who don’t shine quite as brightly as those three.
The combat is solid for the most part, but gimmicks can be a serious pain
Indivisible‘s combat is inspired by the Valkyrie Profile series but informed by developer Lab Zero Games’ experience with Skullgirls/fighting games. Ajna and three party members enter combat and have icons under them that show when their attacks have charged/recharged, and not only do most of the numerous party members who you end up recruiting all have unique default attacks, but also additional attacks that can be performed by pressing up or down when sending them to attack. Some attacks hit multiple opponents, some juggle them in the air for extra damage, and others place hazards on the ground and require working around character positioning. You have a lot of options for how to approach combat and that’s great. Personally, I used characters who could all rush in at once and do tons of damage to speed up combat somewhat, relying on blocks rather than worrying about healing everyone. You can get away with this because Indivisible is a bit on the easy side.
It’s easy to confuse inputs once you have a ton of moves, but having options is mostly a good thing.
When enemies attack, the buttons that normally send your characters to attack instead take on a secondary purpose of blocking for those characters. Blocking is an important part of combat, significantly reducing the damage you take. However, blocking drains your Iddhi bar that’s used to perform special attacks (including a full-party heal/resurrect), so you’re encouraged to learn enemy attacks and only block when doing so is necessary. If you block a split-second before an attack lands, you’ll do a Clean Block and receive even less damage. In combat, blocking works as intended and is perfectly fine.
The problem is that bosses tend to kick you out of combat and force you to complete a platforming challenge or figure out some miscellaneous gimmick required to beat them.
During these sequences, bosses often become invulnerable out of nowhere, and you have a separate health bar outside of combat. Sometimes this bar refills between phases. When it doesn’t, you can lose a boss battle because it spammed some cheap attack outside of combat, resetting the entire encounter and forcing you to try again from the start. It’s also possible for a boss to sneak attack you out of nowhere, forcing you to start the next phase of the fight with reduced HP for the crime of not knowing that it was going to jump out ahead of time. Indivisible is a jRPG, and some of the worst moments in the entire game are the result of it trying to inject action into boss fights. On the bright side, you have enough HP out of combat to tank several hits.
Indivisible‘s final boss is terrible. The final phase of the final boss strips you of the powers you’ve become accustomed to over several hours and forces you to Clean Block a ton of her attacks without dying. Before this point in the game, I didn’t even know that doing so was possible outside of combat—the most effective method of getting a preemptive attack is to run into enemies at full speed, and making an effort to Clean Block the gimmick-phase attacks of bosses makes no sense when it’s faster to tank their strikes and hit them with an attack to initiate the next phase of the fight. Every time the final boss juggles you with a laser and kills you while you slowly figure out her attacks, the entire thing is reset and you have to sit through dialogue that takes several seconds to skip. This is the worst way you could possibly end a game like Indivisible. It makes no sense.
I encountered tons of bugs in Indivisible, so save often and in different slots
Outside of combat, you’re left to platform around the world, creatively making use of Indivisible‘s many movement abilities. The downside to having so many movement abilities is that it’s easy to use the wrong one accidentally. You won’t forget any of the times you successfully navigate past instant-death spikes, only to ground stomp them at the very end instead of air dashing to safety as you intended. Indivisible also has issues with recognizing the difference between your pogo stick move (which allows you to jump safely on electrified hazards and certain spikes, the latter of which you have to figure out on your own because the game is allergic to explaining how anything works in detail) and Ajna’s ability to stick herself in walls using her axe. Regardless, having a large assortment of movement abilities is fun more often than it’s frustratingly imprecise.
Being able to die to instant-death spikes in the middle of combat is pure insanity. Why is this a thing?
Combat and platforming occur in the same world, so there’s no loading screen or other long transition when you get into a fight. This comes at a massive cost, though, because all of the platforms and stage hazards remain active despite how little control you have over your characters’ movement in combat.
Your party’s attacks only regenerate when everyone has finished attacking, so someone getting stuck on the environment forces you to load a save and forfeit any progress you’ve made since. Possibly even worse, it’s possible to fall into instant-death spikes in combat if enemies are backed up against them. Movement in combat is automatic and only indirectly controlled by the specific attacks you select, so keeping all of these stage elements active is madness.
It’s also possible to get stuck while platforming when winds and other movement modifiers are in effect. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of bugginess; hitting spikes results in a popup about Clean Blocking that isn’t relevant to the situation and only shows up for a split-second, temporary stage elements have a tendency to glitch out, there are objects that haven’t been programmed correctly to respond to collision, and some enemy attacks that hit multiple party members don’t properly warn you about who the attack is targeting. Indivisible is decent overall, but there’s a serious lack of polish on display.
The visuals and animations are really good, but directional audio is a plague
Indivisible‘s art is fantastic and colorful, each area is easily distinguishable from the others, and all of the characters are so unique-looking that you’ll never confuse them despite how many of them there are. The animation is also top-notch, ensuring that every character is incredibly fluid in combat. This appears to have eaten up the budget considerably, with many cutscenes playing out as mostly static art, but it’s all well done regardless. The only real negative I could point out is that one static cutscene is so preoccupied with being overwhelming that it uses several full-screen white flashes that could be a problem for some players. Indivisible‘s soundtrack, meanwhile, is enjoyable and full of memorable tracks. The only downside is that a lot of the music repeats throughout the game, and the game’s sound effects use directional audio in an awkward way that hard-pans voices and other sounds to the left and right. This makes no sense given the camera’s perspective. It can be legitimately distracting.
Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 1.5/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean
