Tactical RPG

DM: You see an encounter before you Party: I don’t recognize this one. Hmmm. Okay, everyone, brace up, we’re heading in! DM: It is a black hole. It immediately begins to suck you in. Party: Run! RUN! DM: You can’t get away. You are sucked in, everyone dies. Roll up a new party. After my original party was sucked in by a black hole, and I’d taken a new character with no experience or equipment down through the labyrinth to do a CR, I got to thinking how I would defeat the Black Hole next time I encountered one. Use the stopwatch we got to keep resetting its Action Time Bar (ATB)? Try and petrify it? ...

Foolish Mortal Games’ new monster battler pits you and your hapless military against giant, unstoppable beasts. Can Major Danger and kaiju scientist Dr. Wagner help you out? Or are they responsible? Ooooohhhh… No, Feedly folks, this is not Kaiju Wars From the dawn of computers, all I’ve ever really wanted to do with them is allow me, by day a normal human, to by night become a giant monster and destroy Tokyo. Crush, Crumble & Chomp was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day, and for my money, nobody has done the whole guy in a rubber monster suit inspired game better. ...

Rise Eterna claims to be a modern successor to the legendary tactical rpgs of the past. Can Rise Eterna really wear Final Fantasy Tactics’ crown?

Unsung Story, by Little Orbit, is the game I never thought I would see. It was due to be released five and a half years ago, but is only hitting early access on Steam now with a lot of work ahead of it. I had written it off. But, here it is – mostly. When the Kickstarter campaign for Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians launched, it pretty much promised to make exactly the game I wanted to play. A tactical adventure crafted by the master Yasumi Matsuno, legendary designer of Final Fantasy Tactics, Ogre Battle Let Us Cling Together, Ogre Battle March of the Black Queen and Vandal Hearts, among others. This is a genre he created – and now he was back with a game that moved a step beyond his earlier triumphs. Square grids? Unsung Story would use a hexagonal grid. Job tree? Unsung Story would use a job decagon, with ten different qualities coming together to form a unique job. ...

I haven’t really been blogging, streaming or even talking about my progress in Ogre Battle lately. I’ve been mostly just working my way through the story. The last time I wrote, my character was headed for the very worst of endings. Her alignment was the absolute worst. Her charisma was headed to the same point. Cities hated me. I couldn’t get the good character promotions. I found a solution. It was obvious, really: I had to stop playing the main character, and I had to stop liberating cities and temples if there were any possibility that the enemy could retake them. ...

In a little bit of serendipity, fan site RPG Site posted up on Twitter yesterday that the successor to : turned 25 yesterday. ...

Before Final Fantasy Tactics, my favorite fantasy tactical battle RPG, there was the Ogre Battle series. I discovered the franchise the other way around, though: after loving and completing FFT on the PlayStation back in the day, I looked around and found Ogre Battle: Let Us Cling Together, the second game in the series, and was again blown away. Both games shared a creator – Yasumi Matsuno – who, along with the Ogre Battle series and Final Fantasy Tactics, also went on to work on Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIV, and the Vagrant Story PS2 game (which I also found). ...

Banner of the Maid has been my constant gaming companion over the past several weeks. In short, Banner of the Maid takes place in an alternate fantasy version of the French Revolution. Napoleon has fended off a British incursion and is now in Italy fighting against an Austrian invasion. Almost all the important NPCs existed in our reality, but in the game reality, there are the Maids – heroes imbued with divine powers whose powers arise when France needs them. The first, most famous Maid was Jean D’Arc. With France consumed by revolution, new maids have arisen. ...

I was a little frustrated the last time I played Banner of the Maid, the tactical RPG for the Switch (et al) about a fantasy retelling of the French Revolution. I hadn’t leveled my characters evenly and it became clear I was never going to be able to beat a certain fight as I had no opportunities to grind my poor performers to higher levels. The other issue that really killed my interest in the game was not being able to take screen shots. Not in the prologue, not in the cut scenes, not ever. The capture button, when pressed, displayed a little box on the screen saying that screen captures were disabled. ...

I was initially a little unsure about playing Banner of the Maid. It has a lot of things in it that I like – deeply tactical gameplay a la Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem Houses. It’s set in a sort of alternate French Revolution era which isn’t all that familiar to me, though I’m pretty sure Napoleon didn’t have a little sister as one of his generals. But why wouldn’t he? She is, after all, a Maid, a hero that, like* *Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orléans, would rise to save France from her martial ambitions. She and her fellow Maids will command the revolutionary forces throughout their European conquest. ...