You all know me. I love me some Skullgirls. I love me some 2nd and 3rd Encore. I love those animations and combos and characters, and I was always happy to see what Lab Zero would do next. And low and behold, after another fundraiser, we get news of another indie game by them, another visually impressive game known as Indivisible. Everything got me excited. The character design, the music, the intro that was animated by Titmouse and Studio Trigger. The entire game looked beautiful and got me excited. I waited for a full year for the game to get ready, and I paid the full forty dollar price tag, and was ready to be blown away by a more expansive game by Lab Zero…. So what happened?



Indivisible takes place in the country of Not-India where you play as Ajna, daughter of Inir, Chief of Ashwat Village (Yeah, get used to hearing that), as she is forced into an adventure after her village is burned to the ground and her father is killed. Along the way, she runs into all sorts of colorful party members, consisting of goth girl (Best girl), Matthew Mercer, plant child, a character that cosmic_fusion clearly made, a giant chicken, a dog, a vegetable, a lesbian pirate, royalty free Kamen Rider, and much, much, much, much, MUCH more. Indivisible’s story isn’t exactly the kind of game to blow you away. Hell, we’ve had purging the heroes village in almost every JRPG ever. I will say, I did like the games first curveball, where your first party member is Dhar, the very man that killed Ajna’s father. There are no punches pulled or some dumb twist that goes, “Oh, he didn’t kill him. He was innocent all along”. No, he’s forever a dad killer, and I really do like that. Dhar may be a dad killer, but he is still the best boy. So anyway, let’s discuss the gameplay.
Indivisible is a game that I like to call a jack of all trades and a master of none. It is a metroidvania, turn based role playing, fighting game with platforming. Outside of combat, you travel around open levels from a wide open forest, a tall mountain that you go to again and again and again, a giant iron kingdom, an aztec village and a neon city, my personal favorite. The backgrounds look nice, I will say. Each one has such a neat style to them. In these open worlds, you use your platforming skills to traverse the land, and just like party members, you get a lot of power ups. Higher jumps, wall climbs, ceiling climbs, pogo jumping, air dashing, and that’s just the few. By the end of it, Ajna gets so much unnecessary power ups, she may as well be Sonic…. I refuse to apologize for that. The platforming is fine on it’s own, but it’s not got a lot with exploration. Aside from power up stones and maybe one hidden party member, exploring doesn’t really reward you with much aside from an NPC from a famous Internet celebrity you may know, like PlagueofGripes, Super Best Friends, Super Eyepatch Wolf, or the best one of the bunch, Zone-Tan. Even then, once you reach the port town, the background characters start to dip in quality and look really… I don’t want to be rude and call them ugly, because I’m sure the artists did the best they could under the time limit, but… they look rushed. And speaking of the stones, I forgot their names, you collect those to upgrade your defense and how many attacks you get in battle. These stones can fuck off, because there is a point where you won’t be able to get enough for all upgrades. If you want a fully decked out set, you gotta accept that you need to make a separate save file and decide which is fully upgraded and which is forever a Level 4.
But what about the combat? Well, this is where the game thrives and where the game falters the most is in the combat. The combat itself is fun. Everything surrounding the combat? I legit hate everything about it. The combat is turn based RPG as you’d expect, but with the addition of combos in a fighting game. You start off with a single hit, but can soon upgrade to up to five strikes. With that, you can build up combos from your parties attack. That is the strategy to winning fights, using combos and juggles to launch enemies into the air and beat them up. Some characters will be better than others, but once you get the right team, you can really blow through the game… for the first half. Yeah, this is where the combat falters, because once you reach the Port town where the game opens up to you and you can explore, it becomes less fun and more of a chore. Here, you run into soldiers that can tank your hits. These fights can go on for five to eight minutes. I thought I was under-leveled for this area and needed to go grind, that is until I reached the “boss” of this area, a tank, that went down in very few hits. In fact, the tank was less of a tank than the basic soldiers I fought beforehand. And from there, that is what all fights are like. Every enemy, from massive tanks to tiny frogs in the jungle to fragile drug abusers (Yes, really) can tank your strong attacks. When a frog is able to survive a cosmic anime blast with still 60% health, that’s a problem. And I thought it was fine to explore older areas, but no. The enemies were still able to tank my hits there. When you explore an old area in an RPG later in the game, you feel like a badass by powering through enemies in a few hits, enemies that once gave you some trouble. But not in this game. I don’t get that feeling of accomplishment when I use a level 3 super move and enemies I fought in the tutorial are still able to survive the attack. By this point, I was avoiding fights entirely. I would just attack them out of battle to kill them because that was less dull than fighting them for real. Fights became a chore by the second act, and that sucks, because the combat itself is good, but they ruin it by making you always feel like a little orphan with no arms or legs and with progeria. (And that is my Hazbin Hotel reference for the day checked off the list).
But the real unbearable part of the game, the reason why I didn’t want to go back to it was the protagonist herself, Ajna. I do not like this main character, and I hate to say that. From the start of the game, I had this itching feeling in my side about how I felt about her. How she was always brash and never listened to people and did her own thing. I couldn’t feel bad for her father, not only because he died ten minutes into the game, but because I couldn’t understand Ajna suddenly lashing out at him seven minutes into the game. But this feeling came into full bloom around the 2nd act (It’s like every awful thing happened in the second act). Here, you can go to three areas, the aztec jungles of Kahnuul, the neon city of Tai Krung, or the military empire, The Iron Kingdom (Also, because I apparently love to bitch, you can’t even complete these areas unless you go back and forth between them and pick up abilities, forcing you to come back to each area later, and it is a giant pain in the ass), and here, Ajna causes more harm than good. Now let me explain something right now. I love main characters who are in the wrong, I love it when they do more wrong than good and flip things on their head. I may not be a big fan of the original NieR’s gameplay, but I love the story so much. Those monsters you fight aren’t monsters, they are just other people trying to live their life. That robot you see crashing into the ceiling, that’s not an attack. That is the robot trying to get out of the building because it made a promise to it’s friend to see the outside world. That giant pig monster you killed, that was just a mother protecting its children while a group of soldiers cheered at their demise. And you want all sides to stop fighting and you want NieR to understand, but you know he can’t, simply because they can’t understand each other. It’s a tragic yet beautiful way to turn things on their head…. However, the way Ajna goes about it is fucking childish and stupid. She refuses to hear out the queen of Kahnuul about why she is locking her people underground because she doesn’t care. She refuses to stop the spread of sticky goo in the Iron Kingdom that she causes because she has other things to do. She refuses to let Water Mom Thorani stay in Tai Krung and help the people, the highly dangerous and drug addicted people that is getting worse and worse by the day, simply because Ajna’s quest is more dire. You have like fucking twenty other party members! You can’t spare one to help the city?! Yeah, I get it’s all part of the big twist near the end of the game as to why she’s doing it and she does make up for it later, but you gotta have a better reason than just being a fucking stuborn brat and refusing to listen. Every time she left a city was the literal equivalent of that one Spongebob scene where she pats herself on the back as the city burns to the ground



So, with all that said and done, is there anything I like about this game? Anything at all… Well… I think some of the jokes are pretty well written. I do like Dhar being the voice of reason, even if people get on his case all the time. Yeah, I get he’s a dad killer, but it gets pretty obnoxious when everyone hates him. Ajna gets a pass, but soon, everyone just hates him because he’s not a member of the Ajna Fan Club (Goddammit, I’m trying to praise the game and still find myself bitching). Back on topic, I love Razmi’s sarcastic attitude and willing to burn things down just for fun. I really like Thorani’s motherly nature towards the group and I like the multitude of side characters you can get like the giant warrior mother Phoebe or the gun for hire Latigo. There are so many fun party members in this game, and each one of them has a side quest you can do. I really wanted to do those sidequests and help out the party members. There’s not one single party member I dislike (Except Ajna). All of them are great characters, even the ones that don’t get fleshed out that much. But the part of the game I really enjoy is the third act, after one of your party members (Won’t say who) is killed by the villain and Ajna, finally waking up to who she is, goes and fixes all the problems she caused before she faces the villain, and the ending doesn’t tie it all together with a big happy ending. No, there were stakes in this, there was a massive sacrifice that needed to be made. The game doesn’t pull any punches and it manages to finish it’s story nicely. Honestly, if not for the chore that was the second half, this game could’ve been better than Skullgirls… Emphasis on could have been.
Indivisible is not a terrible game. I… enjoyed it enough, and maybe enjoy is a bit much. But I liked the game enough to collect all the stones, do all the party member side quests, and even platinum the game. Indivisible is a game that is really hard to recommend to anyone. It does many things right, but it also does so many things wrong. But this doesn’t change the fact that Lab Zero is still a talented studio. I mean, come on, everyone makes mistakes. I can see Indivisible getting a few patches that fix some of the issues in the game. Make the fights less of a grind, fix the lag on some of the jumps, maybe work on the character art a bit, and add a few more stones for the players to fully upgrade their set. Indivisible has potential to be something more than what it is. What that is, that is for time to decide.