Black Clover: Quartet Knights

My first honest reaction to Quartet Knights was cautious interest: a class-based, third-person magic shooter using the Black Clover cast is genuinely a different angle for an anime tie-in. Where most shonen adaptations default to arena fighters with 1v1 brawling, this one puts you in teams of four, assigns you a role, Fighter, Shooter, Healer, or Support, and drops you into objective-based modes like Zone Control, Treasure Hunt, and Crystal Carry. On paper, that is a fresher structure than yet another Dragon Ball clone. The problem is that the bones don't hold up under pressure. The four roles sound meaningful, but in practice the balance is badly skewed: damage dealers output so much that support characters rarely swing a match, and melee Fighters can dominate at close range in a way that makes the tactical framing feel like a costume. Spells are flashy but the move-sets per character are shallow, and once the screen fills with particle effects it becomes genuinely hard to track what is happening or who just knocked you out. The lack of any reliable auto-targeting makes precision frustrating rather than rewarding, and the chaotic visual noise is a recurring complaint from players across the board. The single-player campaign is short, clearable in around three to four hours, and functions mostly as a tutorial for the multiplayer. The original story, centering on a mysteriously de-aged Yami Sukehiro and a cursed-necklace villain invented for the game, is a mild curiosity for series fans. It is presented through a mix of animated cutscenes and static dialogue boxes with Japanese voice acting, which gives it the feel of a side OVA rather than a full story mode. The campaign locks you to Asta and Yami for most of the runtime, saving the broader roster for repeat playthroughs that few players will feel motivated to attempt. Progression does unlock ability cards that buff cooldowns and passive heals, but the card system is shallow enough that it barely changes how any given character plays. The biggest structural issue in 2025 is the player population. Quartet Knights was designed around 8-player online matches, and that pool never grew large enough to sustain full lobbies even shortly after launch. Today, finding a complete human match is close to impossible on PC, meaning the game quietly pads out teams with AI bots and quietly collapses its own reason for existing. There is no cross-play to pull from other platforms. For a title whose entire identity is cooperative PvP, that is a ceiling that no amount of patch work will fix at this stage in its life. Credit where it is due: visually, the game captures the anime's style well. Character models are sharp, animated cutscenes have real production quality, and the magic effects look suitably wild even when they are also part of the readability problem. Fans of the series will find the roster satisfying to browse, and the faithful Japanese voice cast sells the fiction. If you have a full squad of four friends who are also Black Clover fans and you pick this up at a steep discount, a few evenings of chaotic brawling are genuinely on offer. Expect nothing from the solo experience and nothing from public matchmaking, and you will be fine. Expect more, and disappointment is the outcome. Alex, Scout Team