Is Quartet the next Indie JRPG masterpiece? Am I going to have a bunch of people down in the comments arguing about what constitutes a JRPG? Quartet is a long-anticipated indie game from Something Classic, a small developer and publisher who previously brought us Shadows of Adam. I hadn’t played that earlier game, so I came into Quartet not having much in the way of expectations one way or the other, aside from loving the gorgeous pixel art. What I walked away with is a feeling of intense nostalgia mixed with a sense that I just experienced something truly new and exciting. So let’s talk about why Quartet works, and why you need to at the very least have this game on your radar.
Quartet tells the story of eight characters, despite the four-ness the title suggests. However, each character is paired with another, so you’ll experience each of their quartet of first chapters in any order you choose. It’s a setup reminiscent of games like SaGa Frontier or Live a Live, though admittedly with a much, much greater emphasis on story, along with a promise that all four of these stories are soon going to come together in a significantly meaningful way. This feels like a logical place to talk about those eight main characters, so let’s do that. I started with Ben. Ben is a chef, he doesn’t have hugely grand ambitions, he just wants to lead a quiet life and hopefully be able to make rent on time. That dream is crushed when he suddenly manifests magic, something very uncommon for a guy in his thirties, even in this world. He is soon sought out by Agata, a woman who works for an organization that keeps an eye on mages who might or might not be dangerous. Next, Cordelia. She’s a mage who works for a university of magic, but her family gets embroiled in some silly scandal and she loses her job prospects. So she moves out to the boonies and inserts herself into the position of sheriff in an Old West-style frontier town. All the while, her childhood friend Jerome is working to take down a gang of thieves, and naturally, her and his objectives neatly overlap. Next is Nikolai. He’s a sergeant in the military, and his country is going to war with a group of people they refer to as barbarians. When they find themselves having to firebomb a city full of innocent people, Nikolai starts to have second thoughts. He runs into a robot named Zikaron, who doesn’t say much but who clearly has some secret greater purpose. And finally, there’s Alexandra. She’s a tech-savvy kid in her late teens who has been dividing her time between caring for her family’s shop along with her uncle and looking after her comatose mother. Her brother, Alvin, is involved in some dirty dealings around town, which he ropes her into, and she finds herself having to flee. On her way out of town, she meets Juna, a Euruphant – or a hippo, she’s basically a magic talking hippo. But the two of them make their way out of the city together in the hopes of returning Juna to her herd.
This is an eclectic bunch of characters for sure. They couldn’t be more different, in fact. But learning the way in which all their stories come together was extremely cool, and it makes me a little nervous to talk about the story particulars. I’ll just give a really broad overview of the setup. The introduction shows us a team of four heroes – none of the people I’ve introduced to you so far – fighting back soldiers and taking on some Big Bad Guy. They defeat him, and they wonder what will become of the power of magic. Well, given the setup of all the characters’ stories, I think it’s safe to say things don’t necessarily go super well.
Quartet tells a story that brilliantly mixes tragedy and comedy. It is not afraid to laugh with its characters, and it’s equally unafraid to put them through horrors. It’s never cruel for the sake of cruelty, or just to give the proceedings a grimdark veneer that might appeal to goth teens. Are teens still goth? Do they do that anymore, or was that just my generation? Gen Alpha goths, comment below so I know you’re out there. Anyway, this is a game that does not pull punches. It will hit you with some horrible moments, but it always offers a hand of redemption afterwards. It’s extremely difficult to balance the light and the dark in storytelling, and Quartet does it incredibly well.
The characters go a long way toward making the hard times bearable. Their personalities are so distinct and so well-realized, you’ll realize you already have an idea of how each is going to react no matter how out-there a situation might be. And the way they interact with each other is precisely the sort of thing I love in video game storytelling. I’ve previously talked about this in regards to the Xeno series, but I’m happy to say Quartet practices this technique as well. The characters are simply allowed space to talk to each other sometimes, and not for the purposes of conveying information about the plot. It’s banter, it’s character development, it’s the way real people talk to each other. The only downside is, the briskness of the plot means there isn’t as much of this as I would ideally want, but it’s enough to make you feel connected to these characters.
The world is also super interesting, and again, even though the game isn’t overly long – I finished in around 20 hours having done most everything – it still manages to convey useful and interesting facts about how the world works. It even addresses some questions I always have in the back of my mind when I’m playing JRPGs, like why are there just a bunch of super-aggressive monsters out there in the world, attacking random travelers all the time? Sometimes, it even incorporates those explanations into the gameplay itself; like, for example, if I have eight people in my party, why can’t all eight of them be out front and attacking at once? (In this case, it’s because canonically, they all need time out of the line of fire to recharge their magic, which makes sense in-universe and also is what happens in the gameplay. More on the battles in a minute.) This is the kind of attention to detail you’ll typically only see in a much bigger series, and even then it’s pretty rare.
Okay, the combat. This is one area where I think some people are going to be a little critical, but only because of what Quartet DOESN’T do. It doesn’t have convoluted Break systems, it doesn’t let you, say, charge up attacks for multiple rounds or stack multiple attacks like Bravely Default or Octopath Traveler. It’s not making you master any esoteric systems to just get through every battle. It’s straightforward, turn-based combat. All those different types of more complex systems I mentioned aren’t bad – I’ve enjoyed a lot of them myself – but Quartet uses a more intentionally pared-down system that focuses on the basics. There’s a timeline on the side of the screen showing turn order. When a character’s turn comes up, you can have them attack, use a Skill, use an Item, or run away. Different attacks might affect the turn order in various ways, just like it does in games like Final Fantasy X or the Trails series. Hit an enemy with a certain special move and they might be delayed by a few turns. Cast a spell that increases a character’s speed, and watch them jump forward in the order. Speaking of casting spells, Quartet uses a stamina percentage system to handle all special attacks. Each character starts with 100% stamina by default. Each special skill costs a certain percentage, but every character will also regenerate a percentage of stamina every round. You can find various pieces of armor or accessories that either increase your total amount of stamina beyond 100, or that increase the amount of stamina you recover each round. Once you have all eight of your character together, this is where the front and back lines come into play. Only characters in the front line are seen and attack. Those in the back are fully on standby. However, while back there, they still recover that percentage of their stamina every round, and the game helpfully lets you know when a back row character’s stamina has fully recovered. On any character’s turn, you can swap them out for someone in the back row with no penalty. You can even do it multiple times if you change your mind about who to swap to, and you can still perform your attack. Having a generous swapping system, along with the stamina recharging system, makes it much more feasible to fully utilize everyone in the party. I’m someone who typically sticks with one group of characters in a game, but in Quartet it was so effortless to switch between them, I did it all the time. Each character has a bunch of unique moves, and they gain more as they level up and as the story progresses. That’s another reason to use each character consistently – most characters specialize in only one or two type of spells and attacks, so in order to hit enemy weaknesses you’ll want to bring in the best character for the job. It’s worth noting that the battles are actually a lot of fun, and they don’t get monotonous. There aren’t random encounters at all – there are a set number of enemies on each map and you run into them to initiate conflict. I kind of wish they had moved around a bit more, for the most part they just sit within chokepoints in the environment to gate your progress, but that’s a small gripe. Plus, it keeps you from ending up under-leveled, since you’ll have to defeat at least the minimum number of enemies per area to advance.
Characters advance along a set path that you can’t deviate from, but you can customize them to an extent with accessories. Just like in Final Fantasy VI, every character has two accessory slots that you can use to give them different abilities. Some accessories block certain status affects or increase your strength or magic, basic stuff like that. Some increase your experience and money. And some do more interesting things. My favorite character is Agata, I love her design and her personality and the way she’s the only character to fight with two weapons. That means, every time she attacks, she essentially swings twice. By the end of the game, I had decked her out with two different accessories that I found off the beaten path in dungeons. One lets her attack twice every round – which means four attacks per turn. The other makes her attacks affect all enemies. This means every time I hit attack, each enemy on the screen is getting smacked four times. I love stacking effects like that in JRPGs. Now, it’s balanced out by the fact that her base attack stat is not the highest. However, there are hidden tomes around the world that can permanently increase a particular stat; I just fed all of the Strength tomes directly to Agata, and by the end of the game she was pretty impressive. That’s the other thing about the combat, each character is so unique in how they play. Agata is super agile and physical, whereas Ben, for example, is the character who most relies on the Luck stat that I’ve seen in any game I’ve played. His spells are capable of Critting, which isn’t the case for anyone else. And beyond that, his most powerful move, called Zap Zap, attacks random enemies between 2 and 5 times. By boosting his luck into the stratosphere, I turned him into a reasonably reliable damage dealing machine. There’s a lot to do in the combat beyond just mash attack, and if you’re not exploring the characters’ abilities and strengths, you’re really missing out on a lot of the joy of playing this.
The areas of the world you’ll explore are beautiful, every scene is just bursting with that 16-bit aesthetic. Everything is colorful, and there are nice, subtle effects that make the screen feel alive. Not everything is beauty, though, like I said there are some pretty heavy scenes in this game, and the graphics portray those brutally without being gratuitous or super bloody. It HAS to show the violence, because how the characters react to the violence is sort of the point. If it’s fully sanitized for us, we’re missing the message. The graphics do an overall admirable job of conveying the visual storytelling. You’ll run into the occasional background that’s maybe a bit too busy, something I’ve seen in other indie games with this sort of aesthetic. But nothing too distracting, and by and large everything is just gorgeous.
Speaking of gorgeous, let’s talk about the music for a minute. There are giant AAA games that don’t have music this good. Not just music this good, but this MUCH music. There are 94 tracks in this 20-hour game. And they’re not thrown together with a synthesizer over a weekend, this is a soundtrack seven years in the making that involved dozens of musicians. It’s exceptional. I may have gotten a code of the game from the developer for review purposes, but I bought the soundtrack on Bandcamp with my own money, it’s that good.
But not everything is good, naturally. I have a couple quibbles. For one, using items outside of battle is more cumbersome than it needs to be. Using a healing item plays a sound effect, and then you have to watch your health meter fill up. You can’t use another until the sound and animation has played, which is a bit of a nuisance. Really small gripe, I know. The other thing is a bit bigger, but it’s also an issue you’re less likely to have than I did, and that’s bugs. I ran into a few in my playthrough, nothing game breaking or anything like that but some weird visualizations and whatnot. But the ones I’ve found have already been worked on by the devs, so the version that launches shouldn’t have them. So I can’t really say that it’s a problem for YOU, since I was the only one who had to deal with them. I did it for YOU, you guys. I did it for YOU.
I’ll be honest. I fell in love with this game. I’ve always been someone who aspires to like and play indie JRPGs more than I ever actually do, but this one grabbed me and wouldn’t let go from the first hour. The writing is exquisite, the battles are a ton of fun and surprisingly strategic, the characters feel real, the music is gorgeous, the story is moving. I’m just very glad I got the chance to play this, and I really hope you’ll give it a shot. If you love the classics, you’ll probably love this. Even if you don’t really know the classics, this game should give you an idea of why so many of us do. It’s an A+ effort in my mind, and I can’t wait to see what this team does next.