BRIGANDINE ABYSS Review – Return Of A Legend

It has been literal decades since the last game in the BRIGANDINE series. There is a new one on the horizon that aims to bring the game SRPG series back into the minds of gamers everywhere: BRIGANDINE ABYSS.

Game Name: BRIGANDINE ABYSS
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PC
Reviewed On: PlayStation 5
Developer(s): Adglobe
Publisher(s): NIS America, Happinet
Release Date: August 26th, 2026
Price: $49.99

In terms of the story, the preview I wrote two months ago is still accurate. You choose between six factions, and regardless of the faction, the beginning is the same. You see a council with one woman asking the king how he plans to change and improve things. Then, before the king can answer, his advisor steps in front of him to feign answering before he unsheathes his sword and immediately kills the king. The advisor then summons a large suit over himself, aiming to begin the Abyssloa Empire once again. The next section changes based on which faction is chosen.

Conquering The Continent

There are 30 seasons essentially in BRIGANDINE ABYSS. The first season is more like a tutorial that has your first event battle. The second season is where the meat of the demo comes in. You have multiple phases in a season. The organization phase is about managing your troops, buying equipment, hiring more troops or beasts, training troops, or giving quests to your forces. Then you have the invasion phase, where you can use your troops that don’t have orders to invade and attack bases. There are event battles that take place after an allotted number of seasons. These are basically your story battles.

Usually, an event battle is every 10 seasons. Once your first event battle is done, your next event battle will be in Season 10, 20, and finally 30. So let’s dive first into the seasons. BRIGANDINE ABYSS feels very satisfying while building up your forces and earning Mel, or money. You use Mel for basically everything. Buying units, gear, accessories, and monsters. You get Mel based on the number of bases you have under your control, and you can sell items to the market to get more Mel. In the beginning, it might be worth it to sell some items to get Mel, as you won’t make a lot of it based on the small number of bases you will own. Once you get to the later seasons, though, you are making Mel by just existing.

Operating bases isn’t the only thing worth accomplishing during organization phases. You can upgrade your bases by using materials and a significant amount of Mel. You can also train your units with quests or go searching for items. When you finish an invasion and succeed in taking down a faction, you might just convince them to join you. Afterwards, those units can now be used for quests or for invading other bases.

Materials are important in organizing your units and bases. You will get a good chunk of materials just by conquering and holding down bases, but if you want a faster way to get rarer materials, then you will need to use your units to search for them in quests. Weapons, class ascension items, and accessories are only findable through quests. Luckily, most of the things you can find, once found, can be bought in the marketplace. When you are equipping items to your units in the managing units section, you don’t even need to go to the shop to buy weapons or accessories. If you can buy one from the shop, it shows as available if you have the funds to buy it. Sadly, this doesn’t translate to buying class ascension items.

Class changing lets you evolve a unit from one class to another. It only moves forward. You can’t go backwards in your class changing. That doesn’t matter particularly with leader units, as they all have one single evolution route except for some generic leader units. Monsters, however, can evolve into multiple routes. At least some of them can. Evolving into the highest form of a unit’s class, it requires a special ascension item.

You can only find an ascension unit from a quest on a level two or higher base. The one downside of this, though, is you can’t use the same QoL feature that equipping an item gives you. Rather than auto-buying the ascension item if you can, it just lets it stay red. You have to memorize what item you need, then buy it from the market and then come back. Ordinarily, that isn’t too big of an ask, but if I am trying to class change like five units at one base, it requires me to remember all five items I need to buy in order to evolve them.

Defeating The Abyssloa Empire

The bread and butter of BRIGANDINE ABYSS is its tactical gameplay. You have leader units and monster units. Leader units are named characters, but you can buy generic named characters with classes. Leaders can rally a monster unit. If you rally a unit, it removes it from the map and provides a stat boost as well as a passive ability to the leader.

You can remove the monster from the leader at any point after the turn you rally them. Leaders are strong units, but if they kick the bucket on the map, all the monster units under them also leave. Just because a leader is strong, don’t put them into the bulk of the fire. On the opposite side of that, if you feel like you are being overwhelmed, focus your firepower on the enemy leaders. It is quite a satisfying feeling when your surrounded unit becomes free once the leader is dead and four other units disappear from the map.

The terrain also impacts combat. Higher elevation gives a better chance of hitting and dealing damage. You have access to skills. Some skills require you not to have moved. Other ones you can use after your unit moves. It is important to make sure you figure out which ones are which.

In Gran Dragnica, it also has requirements to be next to a dragon troop or leader to use special skills. It is important to know the strengths of your characters. There are colored icons next to the skills of your units, too. These icons impact the rock, paper, scissors combat. One beats another one; one loses to another one. Luckily, if you aren’t sure, you will see a summary of the skill before it hits. It will be green power if you are strong against the creature, or red power if you are weak against it.

Misson Mode

Saving the world from the Abyssoal Empire isn’t the only thing to do in BRIGANDINE ABYSS. You can choose from any of the 24 factions in the game. Each faction has a different mission. The one I tested with was the BRIGANDINE faction. It felt right. I also love white-haired anime women in kimonos. The mission I got was to make 160,000 Mel for the marketplace. It encourages you to find more materials and sell them for Mel. Granted, you can also conquer the continent for your Mel. It doesn’t matter how you make the Mel, just that you earn enough to pay off the debts the BRIGANDINE faction incurred with the market.

Mission Mode might be a way to spend a lot more time as it can basically become its own Free mode in the game. You can choose any faction, and sure, your goal may not be to defeat the Abyssoal Empire, but you can have the freedom to accomplish your goal in whatever manner you want to. You can still conquer and use unique heroes from the other factions around the continent. Heck, even if someone runs away after you conquer them, you can sometimes find them in a base you control for hire. You can also hire unique leaders at random while you search for materials. The higher the level of the units searching, the more likely they are to find a new ally for your faction.

Improvements To BRIGANDINE ABYSS

I spent over 40 hours in the game and only accomplished one and a half story modes and a mission mode. So overall, I have a lot of love for how this game feels. I also think part of that love comes from being a big fan of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. That said, there are some things I have some gripes about, especially whilst in the Organization Phase. First off are the class ascension items. It would be nice to give us a location for the unit you are trying to evolve and give you a base to capture for it. Also, let us buy the ascension items from the Manage Troops screen, just like we can with equipment and accessories.

Another gripe I have is how difficult it is to get a good overview of the map. You have an overview screen that shows all the factions, but it doesn’t let you see your units. Basically, if you are close up on a base, it will show you the units stationed there and whether the units are doing anything or not. This is extremely helpful to see if you need to change anything inside the base. If you have free units that aren’t guarding a base, you are basically wasting them if they are not training or looking for items and materials. There is a nice little symbol and a number next to the troop number. Super easy to see when you are zoomed in. When zoomed out, you don’t see anything other than whether you own the base or not. This might just be a problem with the later half of the game, but it makes the later half much longer for me than it should be. I have to meticulously look at each base while zoomed in. Make a better overview screen that lets us toggle troop numbers is my suggestion. There is a manage overview that has each troop individually, but that is also a huge hassle to sift through.

One thing I also wish that could be added is the ability to set a goal for the quest repeats. When you send a unit on a quest, you can tell it to repeat that quest for the next phases. It will just stay on that quest forever unless you manually change it. On some missions like stone and ore missions, this helps a lot with leveling up bases and getting materials. On other missions like class ascension quests, I generally had things I was particularly looking for. I would generally not always get the right item, as there are multiple class ascension items in a quest. When you get a lot of units, you have to sift through them individually to figure out if you found the item you wanted. I wish I could have it so that the troop would stop searching if it found a specific item. Then it would be idle, and I could see it being idle and assign it a different quest.

Return Of A Legend

I had a really enjoyable time with BRIGANDINE ABYSS. As someone who only heard of the series and didn’t play it initially, I don’t know how true it is to the series. That said, it has a lot of unique elements to it that made me enjoy it a lot more than I anticipated. I love micro-managing forces a lot, and letting me do that with the organization phases adds a lot of depth to leveling up forces and building your bases. I do wish I could have multiple types of auto battle AI given to me rather than just one default, so if it was an easy mission, I could just let auto battle AI take over and prioritize not losing monsters or leaders. It is a very aggressive auto battle AI that wants to attack everything and everyone. Sometimes to its own detriment.

If you like micro-managing forces, then this is definitely the SRPG you will want to play. If you are hoping for a Fire Emblem clone, then I would not recommend this to you as it does not have the same blueprint as those games. I do wish we got more time with the characters in the game, but I didn’t think it was as important since the gameplay was the focus.

BRIGANDINE ABYSS will release on August 27th, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

If you enjoyed this review, explore more of our in-depth video game reviews across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: BRIGANDINE ABYSS was provided to us by NIS America for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.