Elegy of Fate is a singleplayer RPG where players can control up to five characters in their quest to save the world. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Elegy of Fate Review Overview
What is Elegy of Fate?
The story of Elegy of Fate follows a resurrected hero in an unfamiliar world. After unintentionally acquiring the power of a sealed goddess, the hero must learn to wield said power as they venture through the vast continent of Eusyad. Powerful enemies are in hot pursuit, however, and it’ll take more than borrowed power to face the final moment of the apocalypse.
Elegy of Fate features:
⚫︎ A variety of builds and characters to play with
⚫︎ Real-time party-based combat
⚫︎ An ability to issue commands to members while time is frozen
⚫︎ Dozens of hours of playtime.
⚫︎ A massive map with many dungeons to explore
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Elegy of Fate's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |
|---|---|
 Steam |
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| Price | $11.99 |
Elegy of Fate Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Core Gameplay Is Fun The Card Minigame Is Addicting |
The Grind Is Soulless Baffling Visuals And Navigation Poorly-Explained Terminologies Completely Forgettable Story |
Elegy of Fate Overall Score - 58/100
Elegy of Fate is one of those games with a great concept that’s shackled by its confusing layout and terrible design choices. While grind-heavy games do have their audiences, it’s only rewarding if the results somehow manifest in a satisfying manner. In Elegy of Fate’s case, your only real reward is progress due to its artificial difficulty. It certainly doesn’t help that its visuals and audio are nothing special, either.
Elegy of Fate Story - 4/10
While Elegy of Fate does have an acceptably intriguing story, the plot progresses extremely slowly due to developments having excessively wide spaces in between. In fact, trying to finish the story is just as much of a slog as its grind is. The narrative also lacks direction, meaning that half of the time, you’ll be wondering how you even got to certain points in the game.
Elegy of Fate Gameplay - 7/10
Surprisingly, Elegy of Fate’s core mechanics makes for enjoyable gameplay. The real-time combat system it uses, in conjunction with the decently large skill tree and upgrade options, allows for a variety of experiences whenever you start a new game. However, the game is extremely, even excessively, grindy, guaranteeing that you’ll spend a few dozen hours just farming for things you might not even end up needing.
Elegy of Fate Visuals - 5/10
Ignoring the fact that Elegy of Fate uses AI-generated assets, particularly for its character portraits, the vast majority of its visuals are only "good enough." Unfortunately, the result embodies that phrase with its complete lack of defining charm and characteristics. You’d even be hard-pressed to remember what anybody looks like after a few seconds of not seeing them anymore.
Elegy of Fate Audio - 6/10
Although the lack of voice acting doesn’t hurt Elegy of Fate’s narrative delivery or gameplay too much, what audio it does possess lacks personality. Like its visuals, the game’s background music is entirely forgettable, while the sound effects are generic-sounding things expected of cheap titles.
Elegy of Fate Value for Money - 7/10
Despite all of Elegy of Fate’s issues, it does have quite a lot of replayability to it. The game allows enough freedom for you to customize a different experience each time you make a new save. However, whether or not you get to the point where you can "replay" the game is doubtful at best. Due to the excessively grindy nature of strengthening your characters, you’ll likely get stuck with one playthrough for at least a few dozen hours.
Elegy of Fate Review: WoW, It's Bad
To preface this review, I would just like to say that I love grindy games. Clocking out of work just to sit down in front of my computer and clock in for my "other work" (grinding in games, I mean) is basically my everyday life. However, what makes a grind satisfying?
It entirely depends on the person you ask. Certain people do it to defeat powerful bosses, such as Soulslike and Disgaea players, while others like crafting or farming equipment that they can see and use, such as Monster Hunter and Borderlands players.
Elegy of Fate fits into the former category. The purpose of its grind is to simply see numbers go up, just like Disgaea. However, it lacks one extremely important thing that the latter possesses and why people adore the franchise so; focus.
You see, while it is true that you can grind for levels and equipment, it’s also true that you have to grind for ingredients. Cooking is vital to your survival in Elegy of Fate, as it is the most reliable way to obtain Shelter Points. These are essentially Elegy of Fate’s equivalent of stamina. But unlike mobile games, which simply kick you back to the previous menu if you run out, Elegy of Fate will kill you instead with a very unfair boss fight.
In other words, your survival hinges on a fishing minigame that’s not even fun at all.
That is a massive problem. The reason why excessively grindy games can retain their players is because these were directed and focused on your efforts. Essentially, the grind contributes to your purpose of overcoming a challenge. But in Elegy of Fate’s case, it eventually circles into itself. Instead, you just push through so that you can run out of stamina and fish on open waters. Then, you cook just to regain the stamina to continue grinding.
While there is an end to all of this, the end result is still a soulless slog.
Pros of Elegy of Fate
| Things Elegy of Fate Got Right |
|---|
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Core Gameplay Is Fun The Card Minigame Is Addicting |
Core Gameplay Is Fun
Elegy of Fate’s core gameplay is basically what you would get if you took World of Warcraft and stripped it of most of its bells and whistles. They then turned it into a single-player game despite still allowing you to control a party of up to five characters. Surely enough, that alone already makes it a fun romp. However, Elegy of Fate also has something else that truly makes the gameplay great.
The game refers to it as the Command Mode. Essentially, it pauses the game and allows you to make individual commands to your party members without the urgency of having to do them within a fraction of a moment. No need to have the APM (actions per minute) of an average Starcraft 2 player.
To add to the excitement, the game also offers a wide variety of ways to build your team through the skill trees and "Goddess Power," which are essentially just bonus stats. Together with the runes and equipment you can obtain, Elegy of Fate has a great thing going in terms of making each essential fight accessible and enjoyable. Heck, even the AI that pilots your party whenever you don’t specify commands is actually pretty decent.
The Card Minigame Is Addicting
Aside from the dungeon-crawling and real-time combat sections, Elegy of Fate also has a card minigame that you can play against other NPCs. Strangely enough, it doesn’t have a proper name and is only called the "Card Game."
It’s kind of like buying a Bugatti Veyron, and people would just call it "a car."
The way it works and plays is very simple. It’s basically a combination of Tic-Tac-Toe, Othello, and Magic: The Gathering, where players must claim the most cards in a 3x3 grid by "defeating" enemy cards using higher-value numbers than their counterparts in a particular direction.
That simplicity is the foundation for a lot of creative and accessible strategies to be viable, which can take advantage of every card’s high and low values, as well as their placements on the board. Honestly, if the entire game was just this, then I wouldn't mind.
Cons of Elegy of Fate
| Things That Elegy of Fate Can Improve |
|---|
|
The Grind Is Soulless Baffling Visuals And Navigation Poorly-Explained Terminologies Completely Forgettable Story |
The Grind Is Soulless
Elegy of Fate is an extremely grindy game. Essentially, everything in the game needs to be grinded for, from equipment to levels, to even the fish you need to not immediately get shanked by an over-leveled stalker.
While this could have been acceptable if the hurdles you had to overcome were legitimately challenging, what you face instead is just a bunch of enemies that take and deal hits like a champ. In other words, Elegy of Fate’s difficulty is mostly artificial. This has caused some players to recommend methods of speeding things up, albeit unofficially. On top of that, there’s barely any reward from grinding aside from seeing numbers go up.
Having it attached to your ability to survive at all is an especially bad idea. The only reward there is the opportunity to engage in more grind. If you’ve ever heard of the term "negative feedback," then this definitely qualifies.
Baffling Visuals And Navigation
There are many ways to tell just how negligent the developers were in designing Elegy of Fate’s visuals. One glaring example is how the character models barely resemble their AI portraits, which initially made me second-guess if the artwork was displaying a completely different individual.
Navigating the menu is also a baffling sequence of strangely mismatched icons, mysterious numbers, undefined text, and an unintuitive layout. One particularly egregious example is how using certain items from your bag would confusingly lead you to the character stat page and activate it there again.
This was intentionally designed, perhaps, to indicate that the characters themselves use the items. However, it would have been far more intuitive if the game had just let you select the character to use the item on after you activated it from your bag. It’s even more strange if you consider that consumables that affect your entire team are also used the same way.
And why is your team formation and character equipment modified on their ability page?
However, perhaps the most problematic part of Elegy of Fate’s visuals is how it makes navigating Trial Stages a nightmare. Not only do certain traps and mechanisms have colors that blend in with the background, therefore becoming almost completely invisible, but objects that come close to the camera will also block your view.
Sure, you can just move the camera to get around your visual obstacle, but that shouldn’t happen in the first place.
Oh, and the sparkling effect that indicates where treasures are found doesn’t go away even after you retrieve the loot.
Poorly-Explained Terminologies
Speaking of bad menu design, Elegy of Fate is also chock full of terms and abbreviations that are barely, if ever, covered in the game’s introductory sequences. The character status page, or, rather, the "Ability View," as they call it, is chock full of examples such as DAMD’s "coefficient to offset final damage." How does it offset the damage values? Does it work on the minimum or maximum? And what the hell does DAMD even mean?
Yes, the game does have a glossary. However, there is no page, as far as I’ve seen, that explains the specifics of certain stats, as well as what their abbreviations mean. So, by rule, just simplify the matter as "bigger is better."
Completely Forgettable Story
Elegy of Fate’s story is decently intriguing. Unfortunately, that’s basically where the compliments end. Even if it does possess the best plot for a fantasy title (it doesn’t), it’ll simply be ruined by all the grinding you have to do just to read it.
And even if you completely disregarded the massive gaps between each exposition, the game’s narrative itself feels like it’s lost direction with where it wants to go. In a way, the script is like being asked where the nearest Wendy’s is, but you answer with "Yes."
The only redeeming quality about the story is the amount of world-building Elegy of Fate has. Unfortunately, not even that is safe from its poorly explained terms, as each reading simply assumes that you’ll just take the information without questioning anything.
Is Elegy of Fate Worth It?
It’s A Hard Sell
Games like Elegy of Fate scratch an extremely specific itch, one that a few other titles can scratch better. It does have a few charms that certain demographics can be attracted to, but it’s nothing worth paying attention to if you’re looking for a decent title to spend several dozens of hours on. Hence, I really can’t recommend this game unless you specifically seek what Elegy of Fate offers.
| Digital Storefronts | |
|---|---|
| Steam |
|
| Price | $11.99 |
Elegy of Fate FAQ
Does Elegy of Fate have multiplayer?
Elegy of Fate is a single-player game.
Does Elegy of Fate use AI-generated images?
Yes, Elegy of Fate uses AI artwork for some of their character portraits.
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Elegy of Fate Product Information
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| Title | Elegy of Fate |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 28, 2024 |
| Developer | MILLIDIA |
| Publisher | MILLIDIA |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Action, RPG, Adventure |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | N/A |
