The hardest difficulty setting is balanced around Shop purchases AND grinding in Fairyland AND reloading when customizing weapons. The three lower difficulties are more accessible.

Glorious Savior is the spiritual successor to Revenant Dogma and obviously created by the same team. Three optional superbosses are cameo characters from Revenant Dogma, Alphadia Genesis, and Alphadia Genesis 2. However, there is no direct story connection to these games; the cameo characters are just guests visiting from other worlds.

Like Revenant Dogma, Glorious Savior features 3D battle models, four difficulty selections, a weapon customization system, sidequests, and gigantic, technically optional dungeon(s) (called “Fairyland” this time instead of Revenant Dogma’s “Ethereal Est”) that yield much better experience and gold than anywhere else in the game world.

Like Revenant Dogma, Glorious Savior requires grinding AND Shop purchases to progress on the highest difficulty of Extreme. Unlike Revenant Dogma, the three lower difficulties of Glorious Savior are more balanced. Easy is almost a visual novel in both games; Normal and Hard were excruciating in Revenant Dogma but not quite so impossible in Glorious Savior.

PC/console versions of Glorious Savior start the player off with 1000 Shop currency, which is helpful because, on the highest difficulty, the very first battle in requires a Shop purchase to survive (I recommend the 500 currency armor). PC/console versions also allow the player to grind Shop currency through random battles not won with the battle shortcut. Judiciously selected Shop purchases are vital to defeating Glorious Savior on the highest difficulty – waste Shop currency on the wrong item(s), and the player’s only options are to grind more Shop currency or lower the difficulty (which can be done anytime out of combat).

Is Glorious Savior’s gameplay worth it? Maybe not. The battle system is Exe-Create’s bog-standard turn-based, stat-driven usual. There are no transformations like in Revenant Saga or Revenant Dogma. The one unique feature is the “Fever” system, which randomly allows a character to unleash a series of powerful attacks with various beneficial side effects.

In Glorious Savior, characters do NOT gain skills or spells by gaining levels. The ONLY source of battle skills or spells are equipped weapons (each character can equip up to four weapons as the story progresses). Therefore, each character has immediate access to no more than four skills or spells in combat.

Furthermore, character statistic gains from leveling up are quite weak. Higher difficulties require making use of the weapon customization system to raise battle statistics, but there is no way to fuse weapons and finding the “spirits” that raise battle statistics can be random and tedious. Weapons that have spirits can be “dismantled” to retrieve the spirit, but dismantling costs a lot of gold and has a high failure rate – be prepared to reload many times!

Attaching a spirit that raises statistics to a weapon also has a high “failure” rate in that the end result can randomly be as low as 1%. Even when a town’s “weapon fairy” is recruited to help (as opposed to attaching the spirit on one’s own in the middle of a dungeon), be prepared to reload many times!

One final note about the highest difficulty – occasional breaks from the main story to grind experience and gold in the Fairyland dungeons are technically optional, but for all practical purposes required. Enemies just hit too hard and have too much HP without the extra levels, and the gold to enhance one’s weapons.

Furthermore, Fairyland dungeons can be unbalanced – it may be possible to survive the dungeon’s enemies and have zero chance against the dungeon’s boss! Fortunately, the party gets to keep all their gold and experience if they die in Fairyland. Only the new weapons acquired in a given Fairyland visit are potentially lost.

If all of this sounds frustrating and obnoxious, well, it is. Yet it is also a perversely appealing challenge; it can feel quite rewarding when one’s carefully crafted weapons serve their intended purpose.

The story of Glorious Savior is nothing special. Glorious Savior does not appear to have any connection to Journey to Kreisia (or to Fernz Gate) other than the simple commonality that each game’s story has a Savior and an Overlord. Neither is Glorious Savior an isekai game; none of the protagonists are visitors from a modern world.

The one bright spot of Glorious Savior’s story is that the playable characters are likeable. The main hero Rain is a nobleman who dislikes the status and high treatment that nobles receive, and takes no pride in being a noble. The three women who join his quest each have a strikingly different personality – one is a stormy “tsundere”, one is an older woman with a keen eye for money and common sense, and one is a sweet yet naive aspiring troubadour with hidden depths. Their group dynamics and conversations are the most refreshing part of the game.

Glorious Savior is hard to recommend over other games. The characters are appealing but the plot is unoriginal. The gameplay poses a solid challenge, while also being very grindy, Shop-dependent, and reload-heavy (when customizing weapons) on the highest difficulty.

Glorious Savior ultimately works as JRPG comfort food – do you prefer yours mild, mid, or extra spicy?

Revenant Dogma's Bad Twin (SPOILERS)

This seems to be developed in the same engine that Revenant Dogma and uses much of the same assets from that game and recolors some elements of them and sometimes we get new assets such as the background for the final boss battles. It’s fair to say that this game is easily the weaker of the two.

Let’s start with the story. The story is interesting, but the pacing could have been done better. Cutscenes get derailed for a quick joke that are not even funny sometimes and hence feels like a drag when I am just trying to progress. The plot has a heavy focus on time travel, and while it was a welcome change. It felt like a cheap way to double the game time. Not to mention that it served as an excuse to leave much of the map in the present and past empty, which is a downfall. With that being said, the sub quests are heavily simplified (“battle this enemy to give me this”, “go to this place and find this”) and don’t help add much but they are a nice change and some sub-quest characters do have some personality I enjoyed.

The characters themselves are mostly standard for Kemco games for a few years ago. However due to the poor execution of the story, character progression felt non existent. The only time I even felt emotion was during Rufus’ passing and also Shungetz’ passing because you are not able to speak to them again. To me, the explicit and more adult-nature of the characters felt out of place but I got used to it.

Where it all really falls apart is the actual gameplay. The 4 weapon system was a welcome change and I enjoyed the customisation possibilities late game but that means level ups mean nothing more than increased stats which can already be done by enchanting the weapons with Spirits. The shop prices ramp up too fast and near the end of the game, XP given by enemies is so little that you’re better off just grinding in the Fairy Halls.
I also dislike the two character only battles as it felt disorienting to see Viola levelled below April for example and make grinding a tad bit longer. The Dark Lord boss also does this but that makes a lot more sense.

Speaking of the Fairy Halls, they are helpful to grind gold and XP. The level recommendations seem a little absurd as I managed to get by with far less. I would be fine being 5 levels below recommendation as you get more value for your characters. However even the pacing there was bad, I grinded 30 levels in the Hall of Pleasure (Hard) but STILL had to spend 200 GSP just to beat the boss. Overall, the end game is uneventful and a couple boss battles can be done. I appreciate the Alphadia Genesis and Revenant Dogma character battles. I dislike the feature of not being able to go back to the Fairy Garden when you find a point to progress to the next Distortion floor. You could do that in Dogma’s equivalent so it makes no sense.

The premium shop is very useless as everything is overpriced. The premium armor is optional and you’re better off with the one you already have by the end. Fairy Eggs quickly become useless other than just being sold so you’re better off just using 100 GSP to get weapons. Otherwise, the Premium version is only good for having no ads. It is even worse because of the lack of a PC port on Steam. The only way to play this is on phone (idk about console ports). The reason why PC port would have helped this is that you get 10 GSP per 3 battles.

Overall, the story is interestingly different but executed poorly. The characters are standard but some of the supporting NPCs have very good characterization. The gameplay is decent, however it was very grind intensive even on Easy mode. The end-game and side content is a bit lacking. Lastly, the Premium content is lacking HEAVILY. Would not spend money on Premium version, trust me.

6/10.

Good Concept, but Horrible Execution

The controls are fine. I do think that it would be better if you didn’t have to swipe your finger to use skills.

The story is decent. Most of the characters seem pretty generic such as the main antagonists and the primary protagonists. That said, one of the characters is fleshed out decently and does not quite fit the cookie-cutter mold. The time traveling aspect of the plot seems interesting at first, but in the end, it feels more like an excuse to arbitrarily extend the game. The very end of the game has an interesting twist that isn’t very predictable, so the game has that going for it.

My biggest complaint about the game is its balancing. First of all, the game ties skills to weapon, which while great in theory because it’s a new idea, isn’t that great in practice. In particular, leveling up doesn’t seem all that helpful since you don’t get new skills etc. Aside from that, the game is basically balanced around you using weapon skills 100% time. Thus, until you get weapons with “sp recovers while walking” for all four characters, the game is going to be really painful. I spent about 24 hours or so on this game, and at least 19 of those hours was spent grinding. I’m not satisfied with that. It’s also very possible to lose the first fight of the game if you set the difficulty to “hell”. (Even on normal difficulty, there is a significant amount of grinding to do.) Had Kemco focused on making the game properly balanced, this review would be very different.

Overall, the game isn’t bad per se, but it isn’t worth spending money for. Since you can download it for free, I guess it’s okay. Just don’t pawn out money for the premium version. There is nothing in the shop worth buying, and again, the game is not worth the money.

Glorious Savior

This game is hilarious

Good game

Kinda good
The storyline is good and the character lines/dialogue sometimes funny But the main character is pretty dumb
And I think the skill system is bad no the skills it self