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The game takes place in a universe where a form of magic called Arcanum exists, and humans exist alongside Arcanists, a race of individuals often discriminated against and perceived as "sub-human", who can use Arcanum. On the last day of the year 1999, a mysterious phenomenon simply known as "the Storm" caused different eras in time to shift backward and forward between the 1900s, causing people and objects from the affected era to disappear, which is referred to as being "reversed".
The Storm always reverses humans, but Arcanists may survive it if they reach shelter in time. The Storm also causes something known as the Storm Syndrome approximately 24 hours before its arrival, causing humans to experience severe hallucinations and delusions that are directly tied to themes relevant to the era, such as perceiving money as food, developing a strong desire for war, and so on. As a result, time does not progress beyond the year 1999 and different eras throughout history will disappear, then later reappear in a more unstable state.
The speed at which the Storm arrives depends on how much social unrest exists at the time; events such as assassinations of political figures, economic recessions, and wars will increase the speed at which the Storm takes effect and the severity of the Storm Syndrome.
In this world, two main factions rival each other. The St. Pavlov Foundation, a massive public organization with several branch offices across the globe, seeks to study and control Arcanists for the benefit of humanity, and to find a way to counteract the effects of the Storm. The Foundation directly rivals Manus Vindictae, an extremist group considered by the Foundation to be a racist terrorist organization, led by a mysterious woman named Arcana. Manus Vindictae seeks to exploit the Storm to recreate the world without humans and mixed-blood Arcanists (i.e., Arcanists with some human lineage), allowing only Arcanists to survive.
Synopsis
The game currently has 7 chapters and a prologue, each taking place in a different year throughout history.[3]
The player takes the place of Vertin the Timekeeper, an Arcanist from the St. Pavlov Foundation. Vertin is the only person known to be naturally immune to the Storm, so she can experience the effects of the Storm unharmed. Vertin and her team work throughout different eras of time to prevent the Manus from exploiting the Storm, and to investigate clues on how to prevent the Storm.[4]
Prologue
The game begins in the year 1966, showing a 15-year-old girl named Regulus hosting a pirate radio show with her partner, APPLe, on a ship, where two Foundation investigators have been abducted as retaliation for them following Regulus in an attempt to encourage her to register with the Foundation as an Arcanist. Regulus speaks to her listeners and criticizes the British government, but is interrupted as a Manus Vindictae ship attacks her and sinks her ship. Vertin and Sonetto were tracking the missing Foundation investigators and saw these events, so they rescued Regulus, APPLe, and the investigators. Vertin then explains to Regulus that the Storm will fall within the next thirty minutes, and brings Regulus and APPLe into her suitcase, which has natural immunity against the Storm, as Sonetto and the Foundation investigators return to the Foundation's shelter. After this, time is reversed to the year 1929.
Chapter 1
Vertin and Sonetto then arrive in 1929 on St. Valentine's Day to stop a group of humans from performing a massacre against Arcanists. Upon arriving, they find a girl in a feather dress named Schneider shooting the humans and stop her from killing the last human who was still alive upon their arrival, but he shoots himself after he realizes that the people who saved him are Arcanists.
After talking further with Schneider, they learn that she is a young Italian-American mob member being housed by Manus Vindictae, with her agreeing to do whatever they tell her in exchange for protection and a place to say. Upon Schneider's invitation, the group heads to a bar that is being managed by a member of Manus Vindictae and has a few dozen people inside it gambling money. However, upon arriving, the group realizes that the Storm has arrived sooner than expected. The stock market then crashes, and the corresponding societal unrest causes the Storm to progress further, and the people in the civilization begin to eat money and gold bars as a result of the Storm Syndrome. While in the bar, Schneider meets Druvis III, a Manus defector, and realizes that one of her sisters was attacked by the Manus and poisoned, so she agrees to join Vertin and Sonetto in attempting to provide aid to the civilians.
Chapter 2
After the group finishes providing aid and the Storm has almost reached its conclusion, Schneider informs the crowd that she is not a real Arcanist, but has been able to use some Arcane powers for unknown reasons. She hugs Vertin and asks her to comfort her before disappearing.
Chapter 3
After the conclusion of Chapter 2, Vertin becomes distraught and falls unconscious, after which she is put into an induced coma inside a St. Pavlov Foundation medical facility. The game then goes through her memory to show a prologue of the current events involving Vertin's early childhood when she was 12 years old.
Vertin was a student of the St. Pavlov Foundation, but, like all other students, was not allowed to perceive the outside world. Unbeknownst to her, this was done because of the Storm outside having the possibility of reversing students, and the Foundation feared that anyone unnecessarily knowing of the existence of the Storm could cause unnecessary panic. It was known to the teachers that Vertin had snuck outside during the Storm and survived unharmed, but they were afraid that attempting to investigate this may draw unnecessary attention to the Storm.
Vertin gathers several classmates to attempt to break out of the school, as they believe that ongoing maintenance would grant an opportunity to sneak through unlocked doors. However, some students involved in the process got caught, and when the Foundation's director learned of this, she deliberately rescheduled the maintenance to the date the Storm would arrive, causing all of the students involved to be reversed, except for Vertin. After these events, Vertin was approached by a Foundation member and asked to become the Timekeeper.
Chapter 4
The game then goes back to the present. While Vertin is asleep, several Foundation employees, in addition to Regulus and APPLe, who Vertin had met previously and introduced to the Foundation, meet and discuss their desire to make the Foundation protect the interests of Arcanists as well as humans, and believe that Vertin had only been hospitalized because of a fear that Vertin would fail to comply with the Foundation policies after experiencing more trauma.
They successfully executed a plan to cause protests in the Foundation building regarding the events with Vertin, allowing them to break into her hospital room to awaken her, then successfully pass a new Foundation policy to give Vertin the independence to investigate on her own, bring back new Arcanists without prior Foundation approval, and require less Foundation oversight and regulation.
The Foundation then forms a team of investigators called Team Timekeeper, with Vertin as the team's leader, Sonetto as the team's chief assistant, and the additional investigators Regulus, APPLe, Druvis III, and Sotheby, an alchemist who had assisted in helping survivors during Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
Chapter 5
During the first mission of the newly independent Team Timekeeper, time travels back to the year 1913 in Austria-Hungary. Vertin and her team intend to start their mission by investigating a Manus base they believe may be immune to the Storm, but their navigation system malfunctions and they are sent off-course to a nearby inhabited island.
Vertin is awoken on the beach of a Greek island in the Aegean Sea by a girl named 37, who tells Vertin that her watch is telling the wrong time and that it is actually 2007, leaving Vertin shocked and suspecting this island may be related to the Manus base.
After further discussion with 37, Vertin and the team learn that the island's inhabitants use mathematics to predict the next Storm, and that they believe everything in the world can be described and predicted through numbers.[5]
The group is invited to a mathematics ceremony on the island, and they agree to attend. Upon arriving, Sonetto notices Arcana among the islanders, and reflexively attacks, causing a brief fight between the two, before 6, the leader of the island, demands the two stop and proposes that Sonetto be sentenced to death for fighting on what they consider to be holy land. However, Vertin successfully petitions that Sonetto should be given leniency, but both Arcana and Vertin's team are required to wear a bracelet that will kill them if they attempt to fight further. The team regroups later to discuss the presence of dead Manus soldiers across the island, who they suspect may be sacrificing themselves.
Chapter 6
Meanwhile, as the St. Pavlov Foundation finds more evidence that the Manus can survive the Storm, they decide to send two investigators, Greta Hoffman and Marcus have been dispatched to Vienna to follow another lead on Manus Vindictae. After arriving and interacting with the locals, the two start investigating an art museum curated by a strange man named Heinrich. They find an opera singer named Isolde displaying a painting named The Circle, which is the last surviving painting of her brother, who died from self-immolation.
During the investigation, Marcus meets a therapist named Kakania and gets distracted talking with her. Hoffman leaves to pursue Heinrich, as he had been acting suspiciously during the auction, and instructs Marcus to stay where she is. Marcus then saves the therapist from entering a deliberately rigged duel that would have caused her death. Kakania talks with Marcus for some time, and then Marcus leaves to meet with Hoffman. Marcus and Hoffman then find a newspaper showing that many politicians and prominent figures have been assassinated and that World War 1 will arrive sooner than it had before the Storm.
Kakania goes on to treat Isolde, who had come to Kakania with symptoms of trauma due to her brother's suicide. During the session, Isolde realizes that her brother had convinced her to fire a revolver at him to end his pain during the fire. The shock of realizing this causes Isolde to become more unstable, and when she leaves, she meets Heinrich, who reveals himself to be a Manus Vindicate follower. She is manipulated by him to join the Manus, and her first assignment is to kill a Foundation member.
Kakania is outraged by this and demands Isolde to leave the Manus. Isolde attempts to prove her loyalty to Kakania by killing Heinrich, who Hoffman and Marcus had been following at this point because they wanted to interrogate him for information regarding the Storm. Hoffman attempts to stop the shooting but fails to do so, and is hit by the bullets herself, leading to her death.
With very little time left before the Storm, Hoffman demands Marcus to leave and not seek mental attention for her, and to instead pursue Isolde and Kakania to ask what they know. Marcus uses her Arcane skill on Isolde and sees a memory Isolde's brother had experienced, showing Arcana displaying the ritual for Storm immunity, and then they conclude that the painting The Circle was likely based on it. Marcus returns to the Foundation with Isolde and Kakania and informs them of the ritual she saw.
Chapter 7
The researchers at the St. Pavlov Foundation suffer a wide range of casualties as they attempt to test the ritual sent by Marcus. While performing it would always affect the person casting the ritual in some way, in 99.5% of cases, it would either kill or seriously injure the performer, and no indication existed on whether it affected Storm immunity.
Meanwhile, the people on the island find that they are no longer protected from the Storm, as Manus Vindictae deliberately leaked information regarding the island, and soldiers from surrounding nations begin bombing the island to lay claim to it amidst the accelerated start of World War I. 37 and Vertin enter a cave that island mythology claims will lead believers to a god named Apeiron who will answer any question their followers ask. The answer they received came in the form of a long string of numbers, which, due to her faith, 37 believed they could decode.
Meanwhile, the destruction caused by the war causes many islanders to lose their faith Arcana convinces some of the island's inhabitants that their god has forsaken them and allowed the island to be destroyed by humans, leading them to join Manus Vindictae. Upon returning from the cave and learning of this, Vertin and her allies carry out a previously decided-upon plan to use an Arcane skill to teleport Arcana to a military base to detonate a thermobaric bomb directly on top of Arcana and kill her, preventing further interference with the island.
37 then asks Vertin and her team to contact the Foundation with information on what they learned. After an exchange of information regarding the experiments, 37 believes that the string of numbers they received from Aperion would fit a mathematical formula for creating the geometric shape of a knot that had several circles in it. Upon further testing, they were able to replicate the ritual without serious side effects and created a device that would replicate the ritual automatically by harvesting Arcane energy from the Storm, allowing both humans and Arcanists to survive during the Storm, but does not prevent time from being reversed
Gameplay
A battle in Reverse: 1999 showcasing its turn-based combat system with card-based gameplay
Reverse: 1999 is a strategy role-playing video game with turn-based battles with combat designed around a card shuffling mechanics to cast incantations.[6] Players will be able to select up to four Arcanists that they own to take into battle with them. The Arcanists each have unique passive skills, two Incantation cards, and one Ultimate card that they will be able to use in battle. In addition, players can equip and build each Arcanist with a "Psychube" for additional benefits, or upgrade their "Resonance" to improve certain statistics.[7][8]
Once in battle, the player will start with a hand of 7–8 Incantation cards to choose from, and can play as many cards in a turn as there are active friendly Arcanists on the field. Once their turn is done and both sides have played their cards, the player gains extra cards at random from their Arcanists' combined deck. Each card ranges from one to three star-level, and players can upgrade incantations by merging the same cards together, increasing the damage they do, the amount of "Moxie" the respective Arcanist gains from their use, and sometimes unlocking extra effects.[9][10] When a character gains enough Moxie, they will automatically be granted an opportunity to unleash their Ultimate skill. However, this applies to enemy units as well.
Outside of combat, players have a chance to build their own "Wilderness," an island within Vertin's suitcase made up of hexagonal pieces taken from various sets. From here, players can gain some free Dust and Sharpodonty, as well as build out the Wilderness to their liking, limited only by the sets that they have unlocked for placement and a certain maximum number of tiles.
Development
The game's first beta test began on January 7, 2022, and the second began on June 10, 2022.[11] On March 23, 2023, Reverse: 1999 was granted an ISBN, which means a permission for its official release in mainland China. The game started a third beta test on April 14[12] before officially released in China on May 31, 2023. The global version beta test ran from August 4 to 13, 2023, and the game rolled out fully on October 26, 2023.[13]
The Official Global Reveal Trailer was announced on July 21, 2023,[14] and on September 23, 2023, the worldwide release was announced for mobile and PC on October 26, 2023[4]
Reception
The game garnered a "strong positive reception" at launch, with praises towards its voice acting, character design, artstyle and story.[15][16]
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