Time to dust off your schoolbooks! It’s adventure RPG time with Adventure Academia – The Fractured Continent. Initially released in 2022 on PC, the game jumped to the Nintendo Switch last month. Time to find out if it’s worth your time!

Adventure Academia

Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent is a fully-fledged strategy RPG set in the world of Class of Heroes! Create your party of students in a fantasy realm! Please pick them up and guide them to victory against the monster hordes! Armed with an ancient relic – the Ruler Orb – passed down for following generations and plenty of support from the loyal students of Obsidian High, you will need to strategize, recruit, manage, and fight with everything you have to defeat the hordes of monsters threatening your home. Take command and forge the way forward…and to the truth once and for all!

So, what do you get? A game in which you can pick from over ten different races! You can customize the sex, traits, personalities, and abilities of your student teammates. Tactical grid-based gameplay – Guide your team in real-time as you battle out on the field. Yes, this is a real-time strategy game, but a bad one because it doesn’t feel like strategizing to win; it’s more of dealing with the game’s bad design to succeed. Your objective is to defeat the assigned targets while keeping your main character alive. Beating the targets is easy, but keeping your main character alive isn’t for several reasons.

You died!

Your main character moves at a snail’s pace, often slower than most of your summoned units (I will refer to them as students). I’ll touch on this point later. Melee DPS’es will continually go toward enemies when in range. However, they don’t care about protecting your main character, so if the incoming enemies are lined up in a single file, your melee DPS will go for a killing streak, thus leaving your main character wide open. As a result, you always have to pull your melee DPS back to your main character’s range, and it gets tedious to do this every time you get into battles.

Bosses will almost always target your main character as if they know your failed condition is to let your main character die. Often their attacks will leave your main character almost dead, so you have to heal him else you lose quickly. Remember that your main character is slow as a snail? You barely have the time to get your main character out of harm’s way, so if a boss starts to make a big attack, know that you’ll have to endure the hit. Even with the main character’s move speed buff from using his active, he can still not escape the attack range quickly. There has never been a case where I lost because my team was wiped out, leaving my main character defenseless. It’s all because the main character is too slow at moving around.

Grindfest

I don’t mind grinding a bit to play games like these. But the amount of grinding required to buff your characters is ridiculous. You consume SP to improve your students’ attributes, but the amount needed to go to the next level scales exponentially. I know that it’s common for JRPGs to have some grinding, but when I need to have 1500 SP to get to the next level while the most efficient way to farm SP only gives me 300 in 7 minutes, on top of the annoyances of having to drag your melee DPS’es to you all the time, it’s quickly becoming a chore. And the thing is, that 1500 SP requirement is still at half of the max level.