Galanova Adventure · Systems
How it plays
It starts as a party of four in over their heads. Where it goes from there is mostly up to you — including whether it stays a JRPG at all.
The scale of it
- 110+ Classes
- 40+ Combat skills
- 40+ Non-combat skills
- 18 Minigames at launch
- 5–40 Raid party size
- No limit Character bench
What you decide before you start
Are the finer points of JRPG tactic your topic of expertise? A save file's modes are decided from the start and cannot be changed after. Every file is either normal or hardcore, and on top of that it can carry none, all, or any combination of the four below.
That is the whole reason they are locked. Your scores go up on the leaderboards against others of your conviction, and a run you could soften halfway through would not be worth ranking.
- Hardcore
- Character permadeath. Every save file is either normal or hardcore.
- Solo
- No party members. Just you, for the entire game.
- Chosen One
- Start the game as an Archon, with access to every skill.
- Iron Man
- No shops.
- Turtle
- No autobattle. Every fight is fought by hand.
The shape of it
A JRPG that grows into two other games
Galanova Adventure is a JRPG with an autobattle setting and a hexgrid layer. It is a JRPG that grows into an incremental game and a turn-based strategy game, as slowly or as quickly as you want it to.
Autobattle is there because most of the interesting decisions happen between fights rather than inside them: who's in the party, what they're carrying, and which thread to pull next.
The hexgrid
Never in the way, and where the variety lives
The main storyline is never gated by the hexgrid battlefields. You can follow Lati's story to the end without fighting a single one.
But those battlefields are where Galanova Adventure's sheer variety shines. With 110+ classes, each being unique combinations of 40+ combat and 40+ non-combat skills, and an unlimited character bench, fielding a scrappy party of dungeon delvers can give way to battles between hundreds or even thousands of units if you choose.
Gear
The best of it comes from dungeons and raids
Not from the battlefield. High-level dungeons and raids are designed for parties of 5 to 40 characters, and that is where the gear worth rebuilding a party around lives.
So the two halves pull against each other on purpose. The hexgrid is where scale happens. The dungeons are where the loot is.
Minigames
Eighteen of them, and you can play while you fight
The game is currently planned to launch with 18 minigames, all playable while autobattling with your party.
The demo has one — Planet Breaker, a brick-breaker analogue — and it is the real thing, leaderboard included.
Leaderboards
One for every skill, every enemy, every drop
There is a leaderboard for every skill, enemy and drop in the game. So if you've always wanted to conquer a board but just aren't THAT competitive, now is your chance.
They are fully operational in the demo and demo support is never slated to cease. Even after full release, free demo players will remain able to compete on the Planet Breaker board and in any collection log progressable on Rath.
Multiplayer
Single-player, first and foremost
Multiplayer capability is limited to leaderboards, and eventually chat and minigame multiplayer. Nobody else is going to turn up in your campaign.
From the developer
I describe the game as "light grimdark space fantasy", which is kind of dumb, because light-grimdark is an oxymoron. I still feel it's accurate, because the Galanova Universe setting is equally inspired by the brutal grimdark worlds of Games Workshop and Blizzard Entertainment and by the idealistic high-pulp space fantasy of George Lucas and C.S. Lewis.
Not that any high-minded aesthetics can truly come through yet. The demo in its current state contains placeholder art and dialogue throughout — the former requiring funding to fix, the latter merely requiring time.
— gorepaw
The fastest way to find out whether any of this is for you is to play it. It's free, it runs in a browser tab, and there's nothing to sign up for.