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Chaos Gear (or Chaos Gear: Michibi Kareshi Mono) is an interesting strategy title for the WonderSwan that, while it has its faults, is a fairly addicting game where different factions wage war with weapons and creatures summoned from special cards. It's based off of the original Japanese TCG (Trading Card Game) of the same name by Bandai in 1998.

Developed by the obscure developer and publisher, Lay-Up (known primarily for their strategy titles and visual novels / adventure games), the game has a basic general story. The player (the nameless protagonist) is summoned to the world of Chaos Gear by a beautiful and mysterious woman to fight on the side of good against those seeking to ruin the land. There are various stages that each have a minimal plot summary. There are five main factions from which characters in this world stem from: "Ereal Brigade", "Mana Kingdom", "Gaia Tribe", "De-Birth Empire", and the wanderering "Chaos Formers" (who are potentially the most powerful).

The gameplay is fairly complex on the surface. Each stage begins with you choosing where you'd like to position your main base on the map by placing it on pre-determined spots on the stage. Once situated, the game takes place in three phases: "The Planning Phase", "The Action Phase", and "The Enemy Phase". The areas you don't select will become "unoccupied" territory that can be taken by either the player or the enemy and you start with a small amount of money and resources. You really don't want the enemy to gain another HQ, so steal territories as quickly as possible, even if you begin to run out of money. How do you do this? By creating teams that can be sent out to areas from the five types and two sub-types (which are necessary to make teams).

The units you can get adhere to the same basic principles found in most fantasy-themed strategy games. They have various traits such as long range special attacks, the ability to move well or gain bonuses in certain types of terrain or fly over everything to move quickly, have very different financial costs and stats in a variety of categories, and are effective at dealing with different kinds of units. The main difference here is that they, like many things in this game such as special events or castle attachments, and special items, are random. Additionally, different sub-type characters determine how many characters can be put in a group and each member contributes to the overall strength of a force.

You can gain passive income by occupying territories each turn, can buy attachments randomly (they change every time you leave and enter a shop), can spend 10G on a roulette which bestows positive or negative items or effects (like losing all your money), can spend 10G to view the stats of any particular enemy unit on the field, and can spend a truckload of cash on units. When you beat a stage, you can choose a small number of characters from previous stages to join you at the start of the next one. While somewhat challenging, once you learn the system, it's easy enough to follow.

The basic flow of the game is like this - You start on a map with almost no money. You spend what you have making some starter teams and send them on their merry way to unoccupied areas (usually by attaching cheap units with the ability to fly). Then make even more units as you're making more money. After a turn or two, you'll start adding attachments to kingdoms as they're necessary to increase earning potential, make new units, etc. Once you do that, you can either send some teams to destroy the enemy castle if you're gutsy or pre-occupy the enemies until you make more money (defeating foes gives Castle EXP which increases what you can do in shops) or meet a random special character (who usually costs a small amount of Gs to recruit and is uber powerful). Wash, rinse, repeat.

The graphics are pretty simple for the most part, though the card and character illustrations are pretty nice. One "interesting" (for better or worse) aspect is the battles, where forces battle and it shows short FMV clips of the attacks and stage victory. The audio is decent; it's pretty nice, but there isn't enough music to go around. The gameplay is fairly deep overall as there are loads of combinations you can use, though going in and out of shops just to get the things you want to appear is pretty annoying. The game is pretty slow-paced, but that's to be expected.

This is a video of some stuff in the game during the first Chapter, "Advent". Enjoy.