Annihilated – Four Broken Heroes and One Way Out

Annihilated made me care about a weapon with one swing left because I might need that swing to get my next weapon. The branching dungeon map looks familiar if you’ve played Slay the Spire, and stopping a moving cursor to land a hit reminded me of Undertale. Death Kumiai uses those ideas to make a failed rescue feel desperate. You’re an ordinary soldier, the rest of your rescue team is dead, and you can bring only one member of the Hero’s party back to the surface. Whatever gear gets you through this fight could break before the next one, so you learn to take it from the things trying to kill you.

That’s what makes Annihilated such a good fit for its own story. The companions are people who used to have an answer for every crisis, and now both of you have to make do with what you still have. After 20 hours and three completed routes, I’m incredibly glad I picked it up. I kept coming back to see how a different companion would respond when the situation went bad, and some of those choices sent the story much further from my previous route than I expected.

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The party you find and the person you leave with

The party looks like it belongs in a classic Dragon Quest, right down to the job titles, monsters, and weapons. The dungeon has taken something from each of them. The Hero can only say yes or no, the Mage has lost her magic, and the Warrior is delighted to be living in a doll’s body. The Priest can still heal and now follows something called the Great One. The game keeps what he lost a mystery, and the Soldier has good reason to be wary of him.

The Soldier has a personality of their own, even when you’re choosing how they respond. I like that an ordinary person can make these heroes reconsider what they believe simply by being there when their usual answers fail. The Hero can recover from death in combat, while the Soldier’s vulnerability helps keep the rescue from feeling like a victory lap for a legendary party. The villains are fun because they know which doubts to press, and some chapter bosses have personal ties to the companion you chose. Details that seem incidental in one campaign can explain a decision that changes the final act of another.

The main routes have their own cutscenes, events, and endings, and at least one has a mid-route split that leads to two different arcs. Both are worth seeing. At around six hours per route, replaying to test a single early choice takes time. There’s no event or route viewer to show where the story diverged, and the achievements track companion clears without telling you which endings you’ve seen. I still want to go back and see whether some decisions lead to a bad ending or a whole new branch, but the game makes that harder to investigate than it needs to be.

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A fight can change your hand halfway through

Your weapons and items are your hand, and each has a limited number of uses. Once you deplete an enemy’s break gauge, landing a weapon’s final swing in the Fatal Strike window can kill it outright and let you use its equipment in the same fight. You can deliberately break items early, and some get a stronger effect when destroyed. 

Enemy drops are consistent, so learning who carries a useful weapon makes it easier to spend the one you already have. With over 100 weapons and items advertised, there’s plenty to experiment with, and saving a multi-target attack for a crowded room can pay off more than spending it on an easy kill.

Timing mode asks you to stop a moving cursor within a target window. Overlapping windows let you hit two enemies, while a narrow Fatal Strike window makes a valuable steal harder to pull off. The probability mode removes the timing input and adjusts card effects around hit odds. The depth is mostly in those decisions about what to spend and when. 

I enjoyed trying different combinations, but once I understood when to stagger, steal, or finish an enemy normally, a carefully assembled build rarely felt essential. I went through my second route without dying in combat or coming close, even though the system still made acquiring a new weapon satisfying.

The branching floors give you fights, treasure, and stat-based roulette events, with silhouettes that become useful once you recognize the enemies. The event previews give you little to work with, so a lethal roulette outcome can feel arbitrary. 

Campfires let you recover, save, and upgrade equipment. Breaking items earns Curses, which you can spend through Defy to undo a bad result or convert into supplies and experience when retrying a floor after death. That safety net gives you room to experiment, even if the ordinary fights eventually become predictable.

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The art and music carry scenes the English script sometimes fumbles

Sabotenshi’s gorgeous character sprites and CGs give the dungeon and its inhabitants a beautiful look. The cute designs make the nastier scenes more unsettling, and NINOMIYA Yuji’s score knows when to let a moment feel hopeless and when to bring back some determination. I wish the game used that music more often. Some dialogue scenes are completely silent, down to the absence of a sound when you advance the text, and those stretches are especially noticeable over multiple routes.

My biggest complaint is the English translation. It reads like an overly literal first pass, with typos, stilted grammar, and pronouns that can change who a line is about. The Mage is referred to as “he” in places, and at one point she talks about “your” missing magic when she means her own. That can leave you wondering whether a character meant the opposite of what the sentence says. It also affects combat. Some card tooltips were so tangled that I had to play the card and work out what it did from the result.

At 17,25 €, Annihilated offers a lot for anyone who likes classic JRPG parties, branching character stories, and turn-based combat that makes you improvise. The battles get easier to read once you understand the break gauge, and the English script badly needs an editing pass. I still want to go back because I care about what happens when these characters make a different choice. Twenty hours in, that’s what makes the remaining route feel worth taking.

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THE VERDICT

Who is this for?

Annihilated is for players who grew up with games like Dragon Quest and want to see what happens when a familiar party of heroes loses the abilities it depends on. It’s also a good fit for visual novel fans who enjoy seeing the same characters from different perspectives. The card battles reward improvisation, especially when you break a weapon to steal its replacement mid-fight, but anyone looking for demanding buildcraft may find the combat too straightforward once they’ve learned the break gauge.