Child of Light

My honest first reaction to Child of Light was something close to disbelief that a Ubisoft Montreal team built this thing. The UbiArt Framework engine, previously used for the Rayman games, is running a hand-painted watercolour world that looks like a studio Ghibli storybook had a child with a Yoshitaka Amano sketchbook. Lemuria is genuinely beautiful from the opening frames, and the score backs it up with something atmospheric and restrained. As someone who spends most of her time in grey-sky CRPGs and dungeon crawlers, just flying through these environments was its own kind of reward. The combat is the real argument for playing this. The system owes a clear debt to Grandia's ATB design: a shared timeline runs along the bottom of the screen, and if you land an attack on an enemy during its cast phase, you interrupt it, knocking it back on the gauge and cancelling its action. The firefly companion Igniculus adds a second layer by letting you actively slow enemies down, turning the whole thing from a reactive system into a proactive one where you're setting up chain interrupts rather than just reacting to them. Defending, which is usually a throwaway option in turn-based RPGs, actually matters here: a well-timed guard prevents you from being interrupted, cuts incoming damage, and speeds up your next turn. Boss fights, when the system is under real pressure, feel genuinely satisfying. The two-character active party, with free mid-battle swapping of your wider roster, keeps things from getting stale. But here is where I have to be honest. The RPG scaffolding around that combat is thin. The oculi system, your only real form of equipment, gives each character three gem slots across weapon, shield, and accessory, and you upgrade gems by combining three of a lower rank into one of a higher rank. It is clean and filler-free in a way that many JRPGs are not, but with only ten oculi types in total, the ceiling on build variety is low. You will hit it well before the credits. The per-character skill trees each offer three branching paths, and the late-tier upgrades do make a real difference to your damage output, but the trees are short enough that you can mostly see the end of them by the mid-game. Anyone who came here hoping for a system that rewards theorycrafting past hour fifteen is going to be disappointed. The writing is the game's other sore point, and the one that stings a little more for me personally. Every line of dialogue is written in rhyming verse, which is charming for roughly the first two hours, then starts to feel like a constraint the writers were fighting rather than celebrating. The villain has no real motivation beyond genre obligation, the supporting party members are thin sketches, and the narrative's emotional beats land more through the visual presentation than through anything the script actually earns. The story does a small pivot in its final hours, but it arrives too late to build the kind of character payoff that would justify the investment. This is not Disco Elysium. It is barely even a full JRPG in terms of runtime, clocking in around eight to ten hours on a first run. What Child of Light is, though, is a confident and cohesive piece of art direction with a combat system that deserves more credit than it usually gets. If you are looking for a short RPG that is easy to pick up, uncommonly pretty, and has actual tactical depth in its boss fights even if it lacks long-term build variety, this delivers that. If you need a story that rewards re-reads or a progression system that holds up past your first playthrough, look elsewhere.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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