Review: Indivisible Conjures Up Nostalgia Without Being Derivative

Each part is so overflowing with jokes, ideas, characters, and charm that you won’t want to separate from the whole game.

Indivisible
Photo: 505 Games

Ajna, the impetuous 16-year-old martial artist at the center of Indivisible, has an odd mystic power: She can absorb her allies and carry them around with her in her Inner Realm, so as to call upon them when needed for advice or aid in battle. The game itself operates by a similar modus operandi, in that it’s absorbed a variety of disparate elements, all of which the developers at Lab Zero Games have mashed together in an attempt to create something entirely new and somehow more than the sum of its parts. While Indivisible doesn’t always succeed at combining its RPG and Metroidvania elements, the developer’s attention to small details ensures that these pieces are always at least separately entertaining.

The many ways in which Indivisible builds upon the elements it borrows from helps it to conjure up nostalgia without being derivative. The combat, which assigns each of your party members to one of your controller’s four face buttons, stems from Valkyrie Profile but is more varied here due to the mechanically unique heroes—everything from a revolver-wielding marksman to a trap-setting ninja. Elsewhere, the game’s combo-heavy platforming calls to mind challenges from Guacamelee, only with an even wider variety of tools, like body-swapping arrows. And as for Hiroki Kikuta’s soundtrack, it evokes the calming rhythms of his classic Secret of Mana score but frequently moves in surprising ways. All of these things thematically link to Ajna’s own journey, in which she eventually learns to work with and grow from her friends, as opposed to always just brute-force attacking everything.

Advertisement

The world of Loka, like Indivisible, has a little bit of everything. For one, a Buddhist temple sits adjacent to an Aztec ruin, an Arabian oasis, and a contemporary red-light district awash in neon signage and drugs. Throughout, you’ll have to do a good deal of backtracking between these locations, as the platforming abilities required to complete one region are generally learned by progressing through another one. But the sense of repetition never really sets in due to the combat and level designs pulsing with so much personality and charm. That’s evident in the novel battle mechanics, like those of one character who rides a dive-bombing bird, as well as in the game’s visual flair, like a piece of fan art hidden in a nightclub owner’s office, and the comedic one-liners, like a milk-divining prophet’s insults.

But in trying to avoid repetition, especially with its large cast of playable characters, Indivisible sometimes gets needlessly gimmicky. For instance, if you put Lanshi in your party, you can pet him during combat to generate energy for the team. But while this works as an obvious nod to the popular Twitter account @CanYouPetTheDog, it’s not a particularly useful skill in combat, which largely revolves around chaining together direct attacks as opposed to idly generating buffs. By contrast, given that you’re simultaneously controlling four characters, the sporty Hunoch and his undead twin, Xiboch, require too much active attention, since they fight by rebounding a disc off of foes, Pong-style. Then again, with 20 characters to choose from, you’re never stuck with an uncomfortable playstyle, and one player’s gimmick might be another’s secret weapon. Tactical players may be drawn to Nuna for her botanical landmines, which sprout up to entangle enemies that step on them, while bruisers may stick with Shieldmaiden Qadira, whose bonus attacks allow her to single-handedly combo enemies.

Advertisement

Indivisible’s combat, story, and exploration are independently enjoyable, but they rarely feel like parts of the same game. Outside of a few boss fights that task players with dodging attacks in a platforming section before clashing in the turn-based combat, these two elements are largely disconnected, to the extent that there’s an entire dungeon consisting only of acrobatic leaps without so much as a single enemy encounter. And while it’s always fun to try out new characters, the game’s second half is so unbalanced and easy that there’s little reason to master their various moves when mindless button mashing works just as well.

This lack of cohesion, though, is disappointing only in regard to how it tears at the game’s larger thematic fabric. Ajna’s growth, after all, is all about accepting and incorporating all of the elements she’s absorbed, and Indivisible never really requires players to do the same. That’s because it leaps between great ideas, such that what starts out as an RPG with platforming elements later becomes a Metroidvania with turn-based battles. Thankfully, this shift in focus in no way diminishes either component. Each part is so overflowing with jokes, ideas, characters, and charm that you won’t want to separate from the whole game.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Wonacott Communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Lab Zero Games  Publisher: 505 Games  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: October 8, 2019  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Suggestive Themes  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.