Tactical RPG

I wrote that this game was competently developed, but the plot was entirely vanilla. Then I played through more of the game. There are some spoilers below the fold. I’m about thirty hours into the game and I believe I am heading toward the endgame. The game has managed to surprise me a couple of times so far. The broad outlines are normal enough – five avatars of ancient heroes and gods, one of whom is evil, come together to recreate an ancient conflict. A plot so normal, even the Power Rangers used it. ...

It’s a tactical RPG where you control an army on the battlefield made of several squads. It’s a callout to one of the most unusual tactics battlers of all time – Ogre Battle. In Symphony of War, as with Ogre Battle, you form squads of units and take them across a map, seizing towns and castles until finally meeting with the boss of the level. Each encounter takes you to a separate screen where the fight progresses. ...

It’s a story, or maybe a comic. Some friends gather together to save their town. Well, a couple of them don’t really get along. A couple get along really well – REALLY well. And then bad stuff happens, but some good stuff, too. Time passes and people get old, but there’s always a new danger and new people to step up to face it. It’s… everything I ever wanted in an RPG. ...

I haven’t played the sequel to my favorite Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy Tactics, in ages. And even when I played it before, back in the Gameboy Advance days, I never got that far into it – the tiny screen just didn’t work for JRPGs for me. So I spent a lot of money getting a Nintendo DS – the one with the GBA slot – and a complete copy of the game, and decided to give it another shot. ...

So, there, it’s done. 62 hours and 22 minutes from the start to the end of the game, LucasArt’s near forgotten cinematic tactical strategy gladiatorial combat RPG defied all my expectations. The last time I blogged about Gladius, I’d just left Imperia for the Windward Steppes. That gave us the last group member, Eiji, an archer, who was more than she first appeared. But who didn’t know that? Continuing on to the Southern Expanse brought us a cutscene where one of the many evil villains dogging our steps said she would be sending someone to us who would bring us right to her, followed by a new character joining us immediately afterward. ...

After adding another hero and a minotaur to their motley crew, the Viking twins conquer the fighting pits of Imperia and set their sights windward. I just spent an hour writing a shell script to take the PNG files that PCSX2 generates for screenshots into resized, blog-friendly JPG files. I do and do and do for you all :-) (…and now I just rewrote it in Python) (…and now I asked GitHub Copilot to rewrite it for me, which it did.) (and now I just rearranged my Github folders). ...

It’s hard to get your main characters killed, but not impossible. I did it :-) Gladius trades plot for deep strategical game play, and I’m there for it. Given Gladius is from LucasArts, known for deeply cinematic games, I expected there to be a little more plot in the twin stories of two Vikings, or an Imperial gladiator, who build their gladiator schools from scratch until they are large enough to challenge the emperor’s best fighters. ...

Welcome to the start of my playthrough of LucasArts’ “Gladius”, a tactical arena fighting game for the PlayStation 2. Wow. What to say about this game? I first heard about this game only a couple of weeks ago – I guess I’d entirely missed it when it came out in 2003. I ordered a copy from eBay. It arrived yesterday; popped it into the PCSX2 emulator and it came right up. ...

A lot of indie developers of turn-based, tactical RPGs were strutting their stuff on Twitter yesterday. So wait a second – Pawnbarian is a card based tactical strategy puzzle RPG? And the hero moves like chess pieces? That you can upgrade? And there’s a demo? Me? I’d already be downloading the demo. And did. But for those of you who need a little more convincing… The Goblin Caves, Floor 1 In the demo, you are Pawnbarian, a warrior from the northern Chesslands come to die in glorious battle. The full game has four different character classes with different abilities. Pawnbarian’s special ability revolves around pawn promotion – pieces are promoted when their move starts in the top rank, a pawn moves into it, or there are three pawns in the hand. ...

Everyone says that this game has no story and all the characters are the same and once you’ve played the first few levels, you’ve seen all the game can offer. But, everyone is wrong. I’ve played for 50 hours and not seen all there is to see. I’ve gotten most of the trophies (I played on the PS5), but not all of them. The end A man spent his life caring for his sickly brother. When his brother passed on, the man went to the Academy to find new meaning to his life. As he approached the Academy, he saw a dog waiting for him. When he looked into the dog’s eyes, he saw his brother looking back at him. Together, they entered the labyrinth. ...