That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime: ISEKAI Chronicles – Game Review

That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime: ISEKAI Chronicles

(available for PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox Series X & S, Nintendo Switch and PC. Nintendo Switch version used for this review.)

If you’re a watcher of the Anime Amigos Podcast (for the love of god please watch it we’re desperate), you’d know that I’m a massive fan of the anime That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. The light novel by Fuse came out in 2014, and has since gained a manga adaptation, an anime – whose third season is ongoing at time of writing – a movie and is hailed by many as one of the best of the ISEKAI genre. That being said, if you asked me which anime I would like a game for, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (I’ll shorten it to just Slime when referring to the anime for now) would probably not have made the list, so it was pretty surprising when out of nowhere Bandai Namco announced That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime ISEKAI Chronicles, scheduled to be released only a few months later. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime ISEKAI Chronicles was developed by ZOC and Monkeycraft, published by Bandai Namco and was released on 7th August 2024 for PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X, Nintendo Switch and Steam. 

Story

This game is essentially an abridged version of the Slime anime. The story follows Rimuru Tempest, who was originally a man in modern day Japan who ended up getting murdered and was reincarnated as a slime in a fantasy world. Not long after being reborn he meets a dragon called Veldora, the two quickly take a liking to one another and form a pact. Eventually Rimuru stumbles upon a goblin village being attacked by a band of dire wolves, utilising the skills he obtained with his Predator ability, he defeats the wolves and inexplicably becomes the ruler of the settlement and has the opposing sides form an alliance. The story follows Rimuru’s adventures, encountering and allying himself with different monster races and developing a tiny village into a mighty nation. The game also includes two new arcs, not in the original light novel, that was written by the original author.

As said, this is a pretty abridged version of the main story, to the point where the game basically gives you the cliff notes of the first eight episodes of the anime: blasting through them within the first five minutes. Despite that, I’d say the game does a fairly good job at adapting the story. It gets the main plot points down to the point where you at least get an understanding on what’s going on, there are some characters that are clumsily introduced, mostly because we originally met them much earlier in the original source, so the game has to hastily explain how the characters met, but aside from that it’s done pretty well. 

Presentation

To start off, this game does a really good job with adapting characters from the anime into the game’s art style. Character models are chibi-esc, so they don’t go full on chibi with the characters, but they are fairly close. Most of the dialogue scenes are portrayed by moving character portraits in small squares, a lot like the optional conversation from the Tales series. 

While in-game character models look incredibly smooth, the same can’t be said for the character portraits, they look very blurry, to the point where it gets very distracting. I was hoping that I would get used to it eventually, but sadly no. 

While most of this game is told via blurry character portraits and stills from the anime, there are occasionally in-game cutscenes. These cutscenes are surprisingly well animated, though the framerate is cut in half during these, it’s not distracting, and I will admit that it does stylize them somewhat, but they are a bit choppy if that’s an issue for you. 

One thing that might be a downside are the language options, or more accurately the lack thereof. Unfortunately, the only language you can play this game in is the original Japanese dub, which for me isn’t too bad, the original voice cast reprise their roles and are just as good as ever, but if you’d rather play in English, whether it’s because you don’t want to be reading dialogue or are more used to the English cast, you’re going to be a bit disappointed. 

Level Design

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime ISEKAI Chronicles is a 2D action game focused on fighting scripted battles along a linear pathway. You go into each level, unless the story dictates otherwise, with a max of three playable characters and two allies off to the side. If I had to compare the level design to any game, strangely enough it would be Miitopia. Each level is a series of pathways that move down with branching paths taking you down different corridors. Within each level are a series of what I’ll call “rooms”, these rooms will contain one of two things, an encounter with a couple of enemies, or a treasure chest containing some materials. Aside from the backgrounds, the difference with each of these levels is very minimal, as they only have one direct pathway, with each other path leading to an optional room, and while one or two of those rooms might have a slightly tougher enemy on occasion, they are incredibly similar to the encounters you’ll have to fight anyway, so there’s little incentive to go down those paths. After a while, each level just blends into one another, making the game feel incredibly samey and monotonous very quickly.

Combat

This game goes for a very different combat style than other games based on anime. Usually, you’d have some kind of Dynasty Warriors clone, or a fighting game akin to Dragon Ball FighterZ or Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm, though this one decides to do its own thing. 

As mentioned in the level design section, a number of “rooms” in each level will contain a small handful of enemies – never more than 3 – that you’ll have to slay before you can continue onwards. The attacks you can pull off remind me of what you can do in Super Smash Bros. Your characters have a number of combos or single swing attacks, and which one you use depends on which direction you’re pushing or pulling the left thumb stick. You don’t really get an advantage on which attack you pull off; it mostly just depends on what attack you feel like performing in the moment. Each character also has their own set of special moves, again the attack you perform depends on which way the left stick is pointing. Most characters’ special attacks are set in stone and will be unlocked the further into the game you go, meanwhile Rimuru is able to learn one of his friends’ attacks by building up his bond with them, so his attacks can be swapped in and out. 

On top of those, each character has what’s called their Secret Skills. These are basically that characters’ ultimate ability; what the skill does, and its range depends entirely on whose Secret Skill you’re using. For example, Rimuru’s will launch an attack across the screen, and will heal you if you kill any enemies, meanwhile Sumire’s will heal and buff your allies. To use these, you need at least 100% in the secret skill gauge, this will build up on its own over time so there aren’t any further requirements to use these attacks. 

I mentioned before that you enter levels with up to two allies that aren’t playable, well these are your support characters. Support characters aren’t playable but do have their own secret skill that can be used in battle. These skills are devastating attacks that will heavily damage multiple enemies. Just like your playable characters’ Secret Skills, these will also require at least 100% in the secret skill gauge, so you’ll have to decide whether to use theirs or your allies. 

At the end of each battle, you’ll get a ranking from C to S. What ranking you get depends on two factors, how many hits you performed and how much damage you dealt. How well you did will dictate how good of a reward you get. I’m not really a big fan of this if I’m entirely honest; not the ranks themselves, but how you get them. Damage dealt is fine enough, but the amount of hits you manage I just don’t like. It means that, if you care about the rankings, you’ll prioritise using fast characters that hit multiple times, meaning that some characters (Shion’s one that comes to mind) will be pushed to the side. Plus, as you play the game more and go back to earlier levels – which you will do in the story and side quests – you’re less likely to get a good ranking in hits because you’ll be killing the enemies faster. I would have preferred it if it was different factors deciding what rank you got, the amount of time it took or the amount of damage you’ve taken, something like that.  

Building up Tempest

Seeing as a big part of the anime and light novel is Rimuru building and developing his nation of Tempest, it’s pretty much expected that it would play a part in this game as well. You have plots within your town where you can place buildings, including a couple that you’ll have to place for story purposes. You build these buildings using materials you gather with each level, either from defeating enemies or from treasure chests, you’ll also gather some from beating story and side quests. 

This was probably the bit of the game that I was looking forward to the most, I was expecting it to be like the shelters in Fallout or possibly the ISEKAI version of SimCity; where you’re trying to maintain the stability of the town and make sure all your citizens are happy. Unfortunately, this ended up being the most disappointing part of the game. Why? All you get for putting down buildings are stat increases… that’s it. Now there are some that have further purposes, like the hot springs letting you bond with your allies or the harvest buildings giving you items on occasion, but there’s not much else. In fact, I don’t think they give you stat increases all at once, you have to interact with the facilities to get the buff. This portion of the game could have been much deeper, but instead they decided to, in my opinion, go below the bare minimum, and that’s not nearly good enough for me. 

Monotony

Yep, I decided to use an entire section of this review to talk about how monotonous I think this game is (aren’t you lucky). But I mean it, this game gets really tiresome insanely quickly, and there are a couple of reasons for it. First of all, it’s the lack of variety. I’ve briefly mentioned this in the level design section, but each level really does start to feel the exact same after a while. Yes, the layout is a little different between levels, but that doesn’t stop the fact that you’re just walking down straight lines with no obstacles for multiple hours at a time. This goes for enemy encounters as well, very few of them fight differently, the only real difference being whether they have close up or ranged attacks. Aside from that, you can go into every battle with the same strategy and win – with the exception of boss fights as they do have more attacks. Even side quests don’t give you any reprieve, as they just force you to do the same as the main missions – go through one of the same levels you have before, but this time there are extra chests for you to open or you get extra rewards for beating encounters – my god it gets so tiresome.

But a lot of that could have at least been durable if it weren’t for my second and biggest complaint. Now, I’ve played and reviewed a lot of easy games, it’s probably known by now that I’m a fan of difficulty, I like to be challenged and enjoy conquering menacing threats, though even then I’ve still rated easy games very highly, ones like Final Fantasy XVI and Granblue Fantasy Relink come to mind. So, you know that I have a massive problem when the difficulty of this game really bothers me. I’m not kidding when I say that this is quite possibly the easiest game I’ve ever played. For starters, enemies rarely ever attack, I don’t mean that it takes a couple of seconds to wind up a strike, in fact it can take them even longer to even start an attack. I’m not kidding, I once stood there waiting for the enemy to try and hit me, it took at least twenty seconds, and not just once, it consistently took tens of seconds for them to make any kind of attack. And even when they did and managed to hit me, the damage they dealt was pitiful, never mind not dying I don’t think my health ever went to the halfway point. On top of that, I was constantly seriously overpowered despite never going out of my way to grind. One of the story missions was to unlock 15% of Gobta’s and Ranga’s passive skills, and I already had over half of them simply by playing the story missions. Now you could argue that it’s story accurate, as there is very little that actually challenges Rimuru and his allies in the story, but for me, no challenge means no engagement, if I’m not struggling at least a little bit, I’m not having fun.

Conclusion

I will admit that I didn’t actually beat this game. I spent over seventeen hours on it, and I started to stop enjoying it around hour four – honestly the only reason I think I managed this long is because I had Taskmaster on in the background. There is some fun to be had at first, but once you realise, you’re just going through the same levels and fighting the same fights over and over again, you really start to get tired of this game. I am a really big fan of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, so it was cool to re-experience those early moments that made me fall in love with the series, but that’s the most enjoyment I honestly got out of it. I’d only suggest getting this game if you’re a Slime mega-fan and even then, only once the price has dropped tremendously, because it really isn’t worth what they’re asking for. My final words on this game, I expected little and even then, I was disappointed. Rimuru deserved better.

3.9/10