Siralim Ultimate (2021) [PC] critique

“We are not superior. There are no clear distinctions between us and animals.”

–Michael W. Fox

Everyone loves having pets right?  Dogs, cats, hamsters, snakes, dragons, etc.  Okay well maybe that last one isn’t realistically possible for a lot of people, but plenty of games have attempted to address the question ‘What if you could own a dragon?’ in a lot of different ways.  For some games, the answer is fighting for sport to solve disputes and taking down international crime rings.  For others, the answer is fighting alongside your creatures and helping them in combat.  For Siralim Ultimate, not only is the answer to use your magic to dramatically increase the power of your creatures, but it even dares to take the question eight steps further than the original. Instead of stopping where many other games do with only one or maybe three monsters on the field if you’re lucky, the Siralim franchise goes all in with a six-monster party, which doesn’t sound too crazy until you learn that all six monsters from both teams are on the field at once, which leads to controlled chaos in the best way possible.

This isn’t the first outing for fans of the Siralim franchise. It is the fourth, and this latest rendition of the game continues to evolve and expand the series, bringing the monster count from a little over three-hundred in the first game to over one-thousand two-hundred now.  This outing into the many mystical realms owned by the gods of the lands of Siralim and Nex does more to expand on the world than just add some new shiny monsters for you to play with.

Individuality

The Siralim franchise is best summed up by that word, in my mind, and Siralim Ultimate dials individuality up to eleven.  Not only has the series always focused on making every monster feel unique, but player expression is also a huge draw of the game.  The games focus on letting the player choose everything about their builds, from what monsters are on the field and the equipment they have to the exact methods the player character supports their teams of creatures as they do combat.

Let’s see if this chaotic creature collector hits the mark on all the changes it makes to the franchise and achieves its moniker of being the ultimate experience for the series.

The 8-Bit Review

Visuals: 6/10

The game uses a really solid pixel art style, which serves it well in most cases.  The creatures all have separate status images that are higher resolution and overworld sprites that look good until you merge creatures, in which case the colors can make the sprite look like they’ve been deep-fried for an hour, which still has its charm to it.  The overworld also has a nice tileset-based appearance that always fits the theme of the god of the realm you’re visiting, and all of the tilesets look good, but a select few can be rather bright and a bit sore on the eyes when you load in and suddenly have to stare at a bright red flesh pit for a few minutes.

 Audio: 6/10

Siralim Ultimate’s audio does a good job establishing the feeling of its setting.  Everything in each realm sounds as it should.  Rustling through a web in the Arachnid Nest gives off an unsettling noise to make you wonder what you might find, wading through puddles of liquids across the realms gives off satisfying splashes, and all of the music is properly mystical or creepy depending on the overall tone a god wants their realm to have.  The audio associated with individual creatures and spells can be a little weird at times, but with thousands of sound effects, most of them still hit the mark pretty well.  

The biggest shame with the music is that so many of the tracks are exclusive to being background music in your castle, and there are so many good tracks in this game.  Overall the music and sounds are really good, but after a hundred hours, I regrettably find myself muting the game and playing different music on the side.

 Gameplay:  8/10

There’s a lot to unpack when talking about Siralim Ultimate. Going into full depth on every system the game has in place would likely scare off anyone who hasn’t played it before.  The game does a much better job of introducing the player to its mechanics in a more organic and piecemeal means than a written article could, where it follows a satisfying loop of meeting a new god and going to a new realm with a few new monsters each time before occasionally introducing you to a new piece of the puzzle.  There are however a couple of core features that are the beating heart of Siralim Ultimate’s gameplay, player specializations, and monster fusion in team building.

Player specialization is introduced as early as the first cutscene in the game, where the player picks their initial playstyle and starting creature, which complements the chosen class in all cases.  This has been how every Siralim game started since the beginning, but Siralim Ultimate expands greatly upon the system, separating most of the features into their own more powerful version than the five all-encompassing classes from previous games.  These specializations range from the incredibly simple Hell Knight, who mostly just helps make his monsters punch the enemy as hard as possible with undodgable guaranteed critical strikes to my personal favorite the Tribalist, whose focus is taking monsters like Griffons, which gain extra chances for certain actions based on the number of other Griffons on the field, and acting as though there are even more of them on the field.  Especially after the last update of the game that added a load of extras, there is a specialization for any way that someone wants to build a team, and once you start unlocking more, you’re free to swap between them at will, encouraging further experimentation.

Actually Building the Team

There are one-thousand two-hundred and one choices for who to put on the team.  It sounds like a lot, and it is, especially when you learn that there are no evolutions or alternate forms in this game.  There are simply that many unique monsters to put into your party. 

Each monster has stats and an element that changes which of the five brands of spell they can equip, but they also have a race that helps separate them into more recognizable themes with unified gimmicks among the race, which leads to the individual monster passives.  Each monster does something very specific for the team, from causing enemies to take damage from a debuff when they provoke to having a chance to take multiple turns in a row if there’s enough of the same race on the field.  Each passive is impactful and has a distinct purpose, but that’s not where the team building stops.  Monsters can possess multiple passives.

While adding passives to monsters has always been part of the series, Siralim Ultimate makes it easier than ever to get up to three on your monsters, greatly increasing their potential. There’s also a fun endgame method of going even further beyond that with a bit of extra randomness and luck involved! The first extra passive comes from rare weapon upgrade materials that give that weapon access to a monster passive.  The second comes from fusing monsters together, which does a bit more than just giving the passive, offering a range of mixed color palettes for your new creation and merging and averaging stats.

These two features, along with the game’s brilliant pacing and easy to pick up controls, make it a very enjoyable experience of discovery finding every creature along your journey and seeing how they fit into a potential team.

Accessibility: 7/10

For a game with as much content and information as Siralim Ultimate, it risks falling into a trap of making the info either hard to find or unintuitive to read, but fortunately, it managed to sidestep this issue.  Almost all essential info is available without the need for any outside resources.  Data is stored neatly in easy-to-read menus, from the basic information such as creature status, currency, and held items to an entire codex and bestiary complete with a search bar to make it easy to locate the one specific creature that has the needed ability for the team.  And if for some reason the player wants to record something specific for quick referral, the game has a notebook feature for recording up to a hundred notes.

Siralim Ultimate also doesn’t shy away from giving the player the same control over their buttons and play experience as they have over their teams.  The game has ways to influence the difficulty of the experience and gives full remapping of controls, the ability to change the placement of or remove UI elements entirely, and change the text speed and how it’s displayed.

Challenge: 4/10

This main story isn’t particularly difficult, but that’s hardly saying anything since the story is so short. All content can be scaled up on a difficulty slider that starts at one by default, increasing the overall level of enemies for adjusting difficulty on the fly.  For a little more spice, players unlock the Realm Intensity system partway through the story. Intensity can be turned up to five, each level adding a variety of random buffs and debuffs to the next realm the player loads into. 

This is an interesting system and can be a true test of one’s team-building skills, but the chaos of the system is both its greatest strength and weakness.  In a game with so many potential combinations of monsters with different traits, it’s easy to load into a battle and discover they have an exact combination that shuts off a key player on your team, causing a loss that might not have been predictable.  Overall though, the lower Realm Intensity ratings do provide a decently fun challenge for the well-prepared.

 Replayability: 7/10

Siralim Ultimate is a game that lacks in replayability in the traditional sense.  However, it keeps its gameplay fresh for many, many hours.  The traditional realm diving of the game has plenty to work towards through increasing god favor to get new spells and creatures in their shops, random monster card drops that give permanent buffs to the party for each one, and the nether stones, a weapon upgrade material with wildly variable stats that has no perfect form.  The general gameplay loop has plenty of optional side content the further you get in to break up the monotony as tens of hours become hundreds of hours. 

The Gate of Gods allows you to do special boss fights that take stats out of the equation, testing a player’s ability to deal with specific issues.  The Arena, changed from Siralim 3’s iteration, is no longer engaged with other player-built teams, instead letting you draft a team from random creatures to go against other randomly built teams in a gauntlet of fights.  The game also does an excellent job of incentivizing the player to experiment with new classes with the Goblet of Trials, which provides rewards for completing realms with a randomized class selection.  There are even more systems in place to grind through that ensure the player always has something new to work towards or a goal they can try to achieve whenever they pick up the game, and the ease of play makes it very simple to pick up a save even after months away.

Uniqueness: 9/10

I personally have not seen another creature collector tackle the sheer scale of customization and upper limits of strength of a team that Siralim Ultimate attempts to reach, which puts it into a niche for the genre that is filled in other RPG subgenres like tactical and action by games like the Disgaea and Diablo series respectively.

Personal: 9/10

When Siralim Ultimate was introduced to me, not only was it introduced during a time when I was between games to play with no exciting releases in sight, but it was introduced as a combination of my favorite things, excessive force and fun creatures, and the game from the moment I launched it never disappointed on that front.  I’ve played a little over two-hundred hours between a main file and multiple story playthroughs, and for every hour I’ve played actively, two have been spent theory-crafting to find a new way to take my team to the next level. 

Aggregated Score: 7/10

700m has played a lot of games in the last 20 years, and thinks way too much about them, so now they’re here to share those too many thoughts with the world.