Chaos Reborn... set in a magic, future tech, far-flung future. Magic vs. Science themes and creatures. Chaos Reborn mechanics.

Interesting topic.

I've always defined it in two ways.

As a hard definition; it's sci-fi if you're talking about something that 'could' happen, in particular through scientific progress; it's fantasy if it 'couldn't' ever happen. So landing on Mars is (currently) sci-fi, using magic is fantasy.

Another similar definition is that it's sci-fi if our universe's laws of nature apple, it's fantasy if you're changing the laws of nature.

According to both of these definitions Chaos Reborn is fantasy rather than sci-fi.

There's some hole in that definition though. Time travel is classed as sci-fi, so is FTL. And it's more than likely that neither of these 'could' happen. They're classed as sci-fi due to historical publishing categories being applied to stories written at a time when it was consider that these things 'could' happen. Also the fantasy genre didn't really exist when those stories were written.

So another any maybe more intuitive definition is that it's sci-fi if it has man made environments, metals and machines in it. It's fantasy if it has natural environments,wizards, and mythological creatures.

To that end Chaos Reborn is stil fantasy with sci-fi elements.

On reflection this is probably a part of why for me I don't enjoy things like the Icarus Tower being in the game. Chaos Battle of Wizards was pure fantasy, I feel that I'd rather Chaos Reborn was the same, the sci-fi elements jar with the rest of the game.

Science-fiction in my book is "science by fiction", i.e. scientific theories explored/discussed through a fictional setting. That's why Star Wars will always be 100% fantasy, no matter how much esoteric technobabble they tried to cram in as the franchise started to grow, that's why Star Trek is scifi even at its silliest (and the technobabble is actually entirely irrelevant to its SF status), and that's why something like the Strugatsky brothers' Hard to be a God is rock-hard scifi even though the main gist of the story is set in an exaggerated medieval feudal state.

The way I see it, what makes Chaos ultimately qualify as scifi is Allen Stroud's alt-history dabblings. On its own it would just be another fantasy setting.