Siralim Ultimate
Are you an unemployed enough dude to challenge the gods?
Siralim is a series of monster-catching RPGs that has been iterated on for over a decade across four games. A few years ago, I played through the second and third installments, and thought they were conceptually interesting but a bit too unwieldy to really dig into past the main story. So when Siralim Ultimate came out, I held off and waited to see if there would be a Siralim 5, a Siralim 6, all with more imposing and 'complete' sounding titles. When it finally became clear that Siralim Ultimate really was the ultimate Siralim game, maintained and updated for multiple years, I broke down and got myself a copy.
The Siralim games may look like a cheap Pokemon knockoff, and for the first few hours, frankly, they kind of are. You warp from your home castle into a randomly generated map, zigzag around bumping into treasure chests and magic obelisks, and getting into fights with enemy teams wandering the screen. Battles are turn-based 6v6 skirmishes rather than one-on-one tag team brawls, and every creatures can attack, defend, provoke, or cast spells as a separate action, though early on you're mostly just bashing each other. Each monster gets three spell slots, and each spell has a set number of casts per excursion, rather than the mana system in earlier games. It all looks to be a bit overcomplicated for what is otherwise a superficially generic and proc-gen JRPG. It's not until you start getting deeper and the game hands you more of your toolkit that Siralim's identity comes into focus.
The main feature that distinguishes Siralim from similar games is the number of different creatures available - well over 1200 at current count. But the reason that number is impressive isn't the variety of sprite designs or stat differences like in most games. It's because every creature has a distinct and powerful inherent trait, nearly all of which radically impact that creature's effectiveness in some way, and many of them affect other creatures, your whole team, or the enemy's team. The traits range from the straightforward - your creatures get 50% more defense - to the convoluted, conditional, and confusingly contradictory. Some traits scale off of how many empty spell slots you have, some only affect creatures of a particular race, [think Tribal cards in Magic: The Gathering] and some seem outright terrible. Why would I want my creatures to engage in mass suicide?
The reason you might want that lies at the heart of what makes Siralim so special - there are so many traits, and they interact in so many ways, it gives you a nearly limitless potential for complex dynamics. Sure, setting up a party where five of the six members fall on their swords at the start of the battle seems stupid, unless that survivor happens to inherit a portion of its sacrificed teammates stats - and then resurrects them all to put them to the axe again, and again, inflating his raw power orders of magnitude beyond what you could do with straightforward stat-boosting spells alone.
Complicating matters further is the new Fusion mechanic, replacing the frankly terrible breeding of earlier games. Fusion allows you to graft a second creature's trait permanently onto the first, changing their class [5 color alignment system] and stat distribution, but more importantly, opening up geometrically more complex interactions. Let's take another look at that team of Kool-Aid drinkers. What if, instead of requiring the survivor to manually resurrect everyone, he could bring them back automatically while attacking the enemy? Or how about giving the blood sacrifices traits that cause them to auto-revive, trigger the on-death stat gain multiple times, cast spells on death or resurrection, or share in the gains they've contributed to, joining the fight directly after shedding their skin [and any debuffs]?
Tying the whole system together are the Specializations - focuses for your summoner that let you unlock perks that enhance a particular playstyle. You have a few to choose from at the start of the game, and can then unlock more and swap freely between them at the story's midpoint. Some are pretty general, and others are incredibly specific and require dedicated team builds to make use of them. Going back to the idea of half or more of your team exploding into gibs at the slightest breeze being a feature and not a bug, the Purgatorian spec was one of my first forays into designing a team around a particular playstyle besides 'cast random spells and hope my melee attackers can do enough damage.' Purgatorian doesn't just give you a way to instantly cull your own team members, or add extra stat gains to the process and protect a solo survivor creature, it also allows dead creatures to continue to contribute their traits for the remainder of battle, retain buffs and stat gains through death and resurrection, and even automatically attack from beyond the grave, untouchable and potentially very powerful, as long as your last creature doesn't drop dead too.
But wait! Things can still get more depraved. Every creature can equip a single artifact, a craftable item that you can stack with stat boosts, status effects, a conditional auto-casting spell, and a third trait. Trait materials are tough to come by for most of the main story, but having one more way to leverage the hundreds of potentially build-altering bonuses is enough to make you lean in and start analyzing the mathematics class word problem presented every time a new one drops at those early stages. Eventually, you'll get enough from random drops that you'll be spoiled for choice, but when you still haven't seen half the creatures that exist, getting a crazy sounding trait you can slap on anyone in your party for a test drive is genuinely exciting.
Now, it might be dawning on you that all this interaction and intimidating complexity could be a double-edged sword, and indeed, every enemy party plays by the same rules. Your opponents might have a series of compounding bonuses that make it difficult to damage them, they might have spells that annoyingly knock your heavy hitters to the bottom of the turn order and then keep them there, they could reflect the damage that you do, heal from it… or prevent you from performing the actions you do damage with altogether. You might have spells that resurrect your whole party, give your creatures every buff in the game, give every enemy every debuff in the game, cause cascading chain reactions of stat boosts, or even sweeping insta-kill superweapons… but what use are spell gems… if you're not able to cast them, Mr. Anderson?
Your saving grace, for most of the game, is that random enemy parties rarely have even accidental cohesion of any note. When two or three traits line up into a synergistic sucker punch, it's usually something that at best cripples your primary plan, putting you on the back foot and requiring a little bit of contingency response to recover from. But with the number of traits, the randomness of enemy parties, and the depth of the interactions, it's less a matter of RNG and more of a statistical certainty that your carefully constructed party will occasionally be unceremoniously flatlined without you even having a chance to provide any input whatsoever. If your team relies on a lynch-pin of some sort, be it stat gains, resurrections, particular status effects, or even attacking, a single enemy trait can completely nullify your build. This risk gets amplified if you start adding Instability to the realms you generate, giving them a random selection of inherent augmentations that make your life harder, most importantly by granting every enemy a random fusion of their own.
The solution, it turns out, is simple: just continue to over-engineer your party. If you can imagine [or experience] your primary feedback loop getting disrupted, you can incorporate some failsafe measure in your traits and spell selection to prevent or recover from the interruption. You'll [probably] never be able to cover every potential headache, and trying to prevent too many of them risks leaving you underpowered compared to investing those slots into further amplifying however it is you plan on wiping the other team before they wipe you. It's a balancing act that's never totally over, never really fool-proof, logarithmically approaching untouchable but always with that one loose scale covering your heart. Add in the other systems you unlock throughout the story, like being able to tweak base stat distributions, dozens of one-off 'Exotic' creatures to stumble across, collectable cards of each monster that provide universal permanent bonuses as you complete each set, and you can fine-tune a party custom built to slaughter their way through the realms… until they suddenly explode for obscure reasons.
All of this comes to a head with the boss fights, the real crux of progression in Siralim Ultimate, at least to complete the story. Every three maps you complete, you have to face a unique fight before moving on to the next realm, and the bosses often have inherent traits that, on their own, would be a nightmare to deal with. Some bosses have such oppressive gimmicks that you really do need to step back and rethink your entire team, or at least sub in one or two very particular new creatures just to disarm whatever trick or trap is giving you trouble. One might give its entire party double turns, or inflict you with a permanent and unremovable debuff. Another can only take damage from one 'class' at a time, cycling through them randomly each turn. One early boss a lot of people have difficulty with debuffs your creatures when they attack or cast a spell, preventing them from doing either action multiple turns in a row. And they're always in a full party, meaning that some otherwise 'common' creatures or spells might help it compound into something that is a nightmare to stop.
As you wrap up the story and beat the final boss, you might pat yourself on the back and move on. However, even moreso than in prior games with significant post-game content, that really is just the tip of the iceberg. The post-game in Siralim Ultimate might well be the BULK of the game, with dozens of new mechanics, new creatures, new specializations, and new challenges. From that point, you can enter any realm at any depth you've reached, and can proceed deeper, finding new minibosses that give you trait materials to boost party comps that revolve around their dedicated race. Every five floors, you then have to do a refight against one of the bosses, with their trait spun up to an even more unfair level. Beating those bosses unlocks similar trait materials in a specialty shop, but even more importantly, eventually grants you access to the Gate of the Gods.
At the Gate, you can spend keys you've earned challenging deeper and deeper Nether Bosses to make an attempt against the one of the gods themselves, in a fight that scales your party to level 100, and the god's party on a selectable difficulty that can be more than an order of magnitude higher level. The gods' traits are beyond unfair - some of them are things that at first glance seem impossible to deal with at equal level, much less when you're 1000 levels lower than the bully with 'I kill anything that hits me' as an intrinsic ability. But figuring out how to put them down anyway is the fundamental aim of this game, and you can spend hours wargaming a team just to beat one god… and not even at the highest level. The rewards for this are staggered and incredibly worthwhile. If you manage to kill a particular god enough times to add up to 10 'challenge' points [for example, difficulty 5 twice, or difficulty 2 5 times] you can then summon them as a creature… or rather, an Avatar of that god, with a trait that is definitely powerful and build-defining, but not quite as game-breaking as the original would be. You can only have one Avatar on your team at a time, but that's all you need… unless, of course, you're some kind of Fanatic.
Then, you can kill other gods, and use their mana [and emblems] to permanently enhance your Avatar with massive bonuses, like a flat 50% dodge chance, or two extra hits every time you Attack, no traits or equipment needed. Finally, if you manage to beat every god, at difficulty 10, with one specialization, you Ascend that spec, unlocking one final, insane perk for it, along with a unique costume. At least, that's what I've heard. I've managed to kill ONE god at difficulty 10, and even that was a lucky fluke.
Another thing that opens up in post-game is the Relic altar, a place where you can spend a new Piety currency to unlock, upgrade, and augment ANOTHER sort of equipment for your creatures to carry into battle. Each one is related to a specific god, and has ten tiers of perks that get unlocked as you invest in them. Some of them are tricky to see a use case for, depending on your already created builds, and others are just obscenely powerful. To earn all the Piety you need to start using them, however, you have two 'micro-goal' systems that come into play. The first is the Goblet, which randomly picks three of your unlocked specializations, and fills as you complete realm visits with one of those specs. The reward you get once it's full scales based on how many different specializations you've unlocked, meaning you're encouraged to at least make a passable attempt to prep a team for the majority of them, and continue unlocking more and building new teams to take them for a spin once in a while. You can, of course, spend some resources to reroll the choices if you really don't want to do a bunch of runs as something you've unlocked but not played with yet, but games like this including incentivized but not enforced novelty is really cool.
The second path to Piety is the Rune of Prophesies, a Bingo card that has a micro-goal on each square, and gives you multiplicative bonus Piety [and other loot] based on how many lines you complete when you turn it in. Some of them are pretty easy to grind out just by playing a bit on lower realm depths, but others force you to beat a god, climb up to the next Nether Boss, or luck into random encounters. You might even have to fill your Goblet to fully fill your ticket, but you can always hand in a partial and hope for less demanding requirements in the next.
One of the other things the Prophesies can direct you towards is one of my favorite additions, the new Arena. The Arena is a special challenge where you're forced to draft a team from random choices and then beat five random fights in a row with it. Both teams are scaled to level 100, every creature is given random spells from their class, and it's tough to set up strong synergies, but with five mulligans of three options for every slot, you've got enough control over your selection that it feels like you can do a decent enough job, without having to agonize over literally hundreds of pages of traits and effects.
Siralim is unusual in the realm of RPGs as it doesn't have a particular end-goal, nor is it really a roguelike. It is what I would call a 'scaling progression' game, more in common with something like Tactical Nexus than most RPGs. You're constantly pursuing dozens of ways to slowly improve your build, your specializations, or your baseline power, and all of it, frankly, is quite grindy. But to reduce the grind, survive ramping up the Instability and reaping bigger rewards, and to pass certain hurdles, you do need to constantly intellectually engage with the party composition mechanics, even to the point of removing the need for you to mentally engage with the combat itself. Not only are you able to choose a default action for each creature to automatically commit to so you can just hold down the 'confirm' button and have everyone attack, one cast a spell repeatedly, and another provoke, your eyes glazing over as dozens or hundreds of effects and status applications and damage values flicker by, you can even prepare more complex actions. With the macro builder, you can set certain conditions for the creature to check, toggling between different actions, targeting particular enemies, or even casting certain spells based on values like the current turn count, the presence of certain buffs or debuffs, the number of dead allies, and so on. The primary measure of success in Siralim Ultimate, then, is not in the gradual accumulation of power [although you will be doing that] but engineering and then programing a machine that automatically resolves the puzzle of combat instances for you, ideally as reliably and quickly as possible.
All of that means that Siralim is an incredibly compelling game, if you have the mindset and a lot of time. Almost scarily so, with hours vanishing into the 'one more run' realm if you settle into the zone too comfortably. But it all hinges on the idea of custom building and then tweaking a party of JRPG monsters into the ultimate killing machine, and due to the sheer volume of options, that can take just as long as mindlessly grinding out the materials and favor to make them possible. There is a search filter for keywords in the full list of Traits in the codex, but figuring out if you have unlocked the corresponding creature, or have one of its materials on hand, or have killed the creature enough to start an Assassination mission to guarantee their material as a reward, requires jumping through multiple screens worth of menuing, scrolling through literally dozens of pages, and remembering trait names, which are different from material names, and sometimes neither are directly related to the relevant creature names. I've spent an hour at times, just going through the giant list of all creatures, screenshotting ones that have traits I think might benefit the build I'm eyeing, and then wrapping up and going to bed without ever having committed to a thing. It does get much easier once you are familiar enough with each race to sort of remember the general thrust of their traits, but there are enough odd ducks, not to mention Exotic one-of-one options, to stall you out for ages.
And there are whole mechanics I haven't even touched on. How about Nether Stones, the final touch on your equipable artifacts? These exceedingly rare, randomly generated accessories are basically artifacts within themselves, and can add random stat bonuses, status infliction chance, autocast spells, or even extra traits. Take another look there. See how I pluralized that word. Traits. A single nether stone COULD have the key to taking your build to the next level… or next three levels, if you're lucky. Now, nothing in the game really requires that much power scaling… but I bet you'll want one. Then there are the specializations [and creature sets] that are only obtained from the arena and gambling minigames, but can be used as normal, with their own unique spell types and mechanics. There are hundreds of unlockable skins for you and your creatures, the ability to design and decorate your castle, a button to export your current build so you can paste it into Discord and have everyone laugh at you…
The game doesn't use Steam's standard for Cloud saves, which unfortunately means splitting your time between PC and a Deck, for example, is slightly more work than usual. The reason is that Siralim's cloud save system is technically universal, and allows you to transfer save files to other versions of the game, including mobile and Switch, requiring only a one-time input of a randomly generated key on both ends and remembering to manually save to the cloud and load from the cloud if you're bouncing back and forth. I don't have Siralim on any platform besides PC, but I've heard they're all fine, aside from slight lag problems on the Switch. Speaking of which, there are a few technical issues the game has, and I think most of them come down to your inevitable decision to ramp up the game speed to cut out the downtime. I've had a couple crashes-to-desktop while a particularly complex and crit-heavy battle zoomed by in max turbo mode, and the display sometimes glitches out when a lot of effects are flashing by and forces you to re-scale the window to clear them.
I do have a few problems with the game beyond glitches and technical limitations. The big one is how often battles kind of stall out with no real possibility for you to salvage things or extricate yourself. You can just forfeit a battle once you regain control, there's technically a command you can hold to manually interrupt an unending soft-lock loop if you encounter one, and death [or forfeiture, which is functionally identical] doesn't carry much weight - all you lose is a multiplier to your loot earnings, which is trivial to recover. The bigger problem is how often end-game squads will just kind of… spam meaningless things at each other for ages before actually getting to the damage, even on max turbo settings. And then once you do gain control again and decide to look at the combat log to figure out what happened to nullify all the things you thought would do damage and what trait or spell triggered to kill half your creatures, well, good luck, because the log is going to be exhaustively long, challenging to parse, and not searchable like it was in Path of Achra.
The game's grindiness generally isn't a huge deal, as you're mostly making meaningful progress in some way or another even if you decide to pull back and do chill runs at lower difficulty, but it does start to get frustrating when it comes to the artifact crafting and Gate of the Gods. Artifacts require a significant investment in Brimstone, one of the common resources dropped by just about every object in the Realms, and the thing that makes them different than any other common currency is that, if you're running multiple teams, and especially if you try to get setups going for some of the more unique specializations, you'll need a separate high level artifact for each member. Now, you can technically swap items between creatures, but doing so means you have to manually manage their equipment, remove it from creatures in storage, and then swap everything back if you change parties. It's less hassle to just make a new item, besides which you can then tailor the stats and traits to their role. But doing so burns through your stock fast, and my early post-game got stalled out multiple times because I felt like I needed to do mostly meaningless runs just to get some more Brimstone. You can convert other basic resources to any other, but at a punishing exchange rate, and I'm sure you can run yourself out of all of those too if you start getting really anal about gearing up multiple parties.
The keys required for attempting god fights are even worse - the only ways to get keys are to beat Nether bosses, which requires you to push into higher levels, and rewards you more key fragments if you kill them at higher instability, which can be very difficult for an unoptimized party, or to do a keyforge mission. The mission is infinitely repeatable, and doesn't take many runs to complete, but you're still only getting one key at a time, and it just sucks starting a god fight, having one of its random party members screw up your whole plan, and think 'I might waste an hour's worth of keys trying to do this.' I feel like some of the 'resource management' stuff makes sense in the early parts of the game, to restrict your options and force you to make difficult choices, but should've been dropped for the most part when it came to post-game.
You'll notice I haven't touched on the story yet, and that's not really a slam on the writing. I actually think Siralim has a surprising amount of really clever jokes, decent incidental dialogue, and a cool setting if you pay attention to it. But it's not at all the focus, and if you're clicking with the parts of the game that make it special, you'll probably end up hammering through all the dialogue boxes without even a glance even if you didn't hate the writing. I did really like the end of the story, which involves some pretty interesting fights and a unique final boss.
The game now has several optional modifiers for starting a new file - you can apply a creature randomizer to make the early and mid-game a lot more complex and potentially challenging, you can remove the story entirely and play the game from level 1 as though you're already in post-game, and most importantly, you can now start as the Royal specialization. Royal is normally a prestige class that functions by unlocking randomly chosen perks from every other specialization, letting you potentially make some clever and obnoxious builds, but Royal mode mostly acts like a randomizer for the perks on top of everything else. It's not something I'd invest a whole lot of time into yet, but the developer has hinted that Royal Mode will get more content later, which could ultimately turn it into a much more interesting way to replay the game.
Siralim Ultimate is one of those games that goes so hard on a niche that it's unlikely to ever be dethroned. I'm sure there will be other games sort of like it in the future, but they'll almost certainly have less variety, less depth, less psychotically complex interactions. It takes commitment to make a game this focused, and it might take a decade's worth of refinement to get to this point. And it really does obviate the existence of the earlier games, earning its grandiose title. The question of whether that's at all appealing to you is not for me to answer. Have you ever spent three hours looking through Diablo 2 item stats to make a poison dagger necro work? Have you ever tried to form a whole team of shiny Pokemon? Have you ever gotten out a whiteboard to draw a diagram of action order to win an argument in the middle of a 'friendly' game of Magic: The Gathering? If you're damaged enough to say yes to any of those, Siralim Ultimate might be the game for you, at least until it takes things too far and ruins your relationship.
Siralim Ultimate can be purchased on Steam, iOS, Android, and Switch