For some reason, I’ve always avoided Strategy RPG’s - I’m not even sure if that’s the term for them, but I’m talking about video games like Final Fantasy Tactics and the like - games that are usually fantasy-themed, but almost entirely based around battles. They’re usually really light on story and have no exploring or dungeon crawling. I think I can trace my dislike of them back to a bad experience with Shining Force on the Sega Gensis, and I’ve always really played RPG’s for the story and characters instead of for the “action.”
Well, I recently picked up a copy of La Pucelle Tactics for PS2 at Toys R Us - it was on super 50% off clearance, and I walked with it for about $7. My friend had described it as “one of the single most addictive games I’ve ever played,” so I figured it was worth checking out for that price.
Well, I love the game to death - I’ve been playing it nonstop. I love how intricate the system is - there are so many ways to play out any given battle, so many different items and weapons with their effects and modifiers, so many ways to chain up different combos and counterattacks and so on.
So what else will I like in this genre (for Playstation 2 or Nintendo DS, the systems that I own)? The friend that turned me on to La Pucelle also recommended Phantom Brave (currently on clearance for $15, tempting) and Stella Deus, both of which I believe are by the same publisher as La Pucelle. I’m also interested in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which will play on my Nintendo DS, since the original FF Tactics for PS1 is supposed to be the game that reinvented/recharged the genre.
So what are your favorite games of this type? Why? Are there any non-fantasy ones out there? It seems like a nice Sci-Fi themed one would be hot.
Disgaea was the first of the Atlus Games Tactical RPGs in the batch that produced La Pucelle - and while La Pucelle lost its luster relatively quickly for me, Disgaea remains a potent addiction just waiting to rear its head. It is fantasy themed - mostly. There’s a little genre-mixing.
You would probably love Disgaea (made by the same company), and indeed, anything made by Nippon Ichi in this genre. That, at least is where I would start.
I think the order is…
La Pucelle Tactics
Disgaea
Phantom Brave
Makai Kingdom
You have a DS, right? Then I would go pick up both the Fire Emblem games release for the GBA. They are absolutely fantastic, and I highly, highly reccomend them.
For a quick fix, do a Google search on Vantage Master. The game’s English is laughably bad, but it was released for free, so I wouldn’t complain too much.
Going back to DS games, you said you wanted a different setting? You might possibly want to try out the Advance Wars series of games. If I were you, I would just pick up the very first one, and see what you think. The sequels tend to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary (I’m being nice here). I have heard good things about Onimusha Tactics, but cannot say I myself have tried it. Same goes for Tactics Ogre.
Finally, you might look into picking up Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSX (unless a port to something will be released in the near future). Again, this isn’t a personal reccomendation, just based on what I’ve heard.
I’ll even be a little stronger - FFT Advance is probably NOT worth buying. Both of the Fire Emblem games are tons more fun, though somewhat less customizable.
The Advance Wars games for the GBA and DS come highly recommended, though I must say that I have not personally played them. All three, however (two for GBA and one for DS) have received extremely good reviews from virtually everyone.
Tactics Ogre for the PS1 was another good game, in the same general vein as FFT, but part of the Ogre Battle series/story (notable other games on SNES/PS1 and N64).
Re: PS2 and what has been mentioned, I’d put my preferences in this order:
Stella Deus
Disgaea
(pretty big drop)
Phantom Brave
La Pucelle
(drop)
Makai Kingdom
The following gets a little confusing. A Japanese company named Nippon Ichi developed four of those five; Stella Deus is the exception, developed by Atlus. Atlus was the NA publisher for Stella Deus and Disgaea, while there were other (seperate for each) NA publishers for each of the other three. With me? Good. Atlus is a pretty big old-school name in strategy RPG type stuff (Ogre Battle series, among others). Nippon Ichi is one of the biggest modern names in the genre. In my opinion, Atlus tends a little more towards classical feudal fantasy type storytelling, while Nippon Ichi tends a bit more towards anime style stuff. YMMV.
Best of luck with finding some stuff you enjoy - maybe even more than purer RPGs, I absolutely LOVE turn-based strategy.
I agree with both of those. Final Fantasy Tactics is still my favorite game ever (although Half-Life 2 and Suikoden 3 come close).
And Tactics Advance was promising, but disappointed me to the point that I gave up and haven’t gone back to it. For one thing, there were too many different races and classes. Also, it was a pain to equip characters because the interface was so limited. And the card/rules system was just unwieldy and annoying.
I’ve been looking for a spiritual successor to FFTactics for years and haven’t found one I like as much. Disgaea is pretty close, but it was a little too shallow and repetitive to hold my interest – the jokes are really really corny and it got just a little too “cute” for me at times.
A series I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Front Mission 3 (for PS1) and Front Mission 4 (PS2). They’re both by Square and are tactical combat with battle mechs. It’s a pretty neat battle system, where you upgrade your mech instead of your character. And the storyline was pretty engrossing as well. I recommend 3 very highly; 4 I’m a few missions into and it has yet to really grab me.
And one I’m looking forward to is Suikoden Tactics, due out in November. I’m going to buy the hell out of it when it comes out. I haven’t heard anything about it, but considering how much I loved Suikoden 3, I’m optimistic…
I do. It’s prequel of sorts, telling a wholly diferent but related story. Some of the characters from Suiko 4 will show up for sure, and the batle system is made much easier (it just shows you what you can do from any given position) so you can play quickly. In keeping with Suiko radition, upgrading characters is a big part and it happens while running around towns lie in traditional RPG’s. If you did beat Suiko 4, you can pull your save data from it for a little extras.
If you (or anyon out there) liked Suikoden 3, try Suiko 4. It isn’t as deep in the character reactions or explorations, but the game plays far faster and it looks much better (no more chunky characters). It has many of the characters that will appear in Suiko Tactics, although you don’t need to know anything from Suiko 4 to play Tactics. It’s just a little extra treat.
There are roms of some of the old favorites, but we can’t really talk about that. If you get the cartidges, so it’s legal, we could make some reccomendations.
I can actually say (embarassingly) that I hadn’t heard of Suikoden Tactics yet - in my defense, I don’t actually own a PS2 (but rather play the games on my housemate’s), so I don’t keep up with what’s coming out nearly as much as, say, PC games. Hearing about it makes me pretty excited, though - I’ll dig a little further back and say that Suikoden 2 was one of my favorite RPGs ever, and 1/3/4 were all quality games as well (IMO, I just didn’t think any one of them got it all together the way 2 did - 1 was fairly badly translated from the Japanese, I didn’t find that 3 played particularly smoothly - to the point of distraction at times - and 4 was somewhat weaker on the characters). In all of the cases, though, it’s pretty cool how many of the 108 they can make you actually care about, despite the (relatively) short amount of time they have for most of the non-main characters.
The company released it as freeware for whatever version, but you might have some trouble getting past the rather marginal English translation. Once you do, I’ve found it to be quite a fun day.
And with a PS1 save cartridge you can play it on your PS2 system, I did and it was great after a couple of minutes getting used to the blocky graphics.
And just to hijack on top of your hijack: up there I meant to say that Suikoden TWO (2) is the one that I loved. My numbering was off. 3 was neat enough, but just lacked something that made 2 so cool. And 4 just annoyed the hell out of me; I remembered the Suikdoen games having frequent random encounters, but this felt like another battle every 10 feet.
Agreed. There were a lot of problems with it, although I think some of the ideas they used were good ones. Much too slow about getting things going, though.
Are all these games (e.g. La Pucelle Tactics) like FF Tactics, or Ogre Battle? These are the only games that I actually played. Is Disgaea the one where you play a prince of hell? I probably can’t play any of these games anyway, since I only own a GBA, XBOX, and a GC.
Advanced Wars Dual Strike for Nintendo DS - It just came out and it looked really hot. I like it a lot, so far - it seems really simple at first, but soon you realize that not only can you strategize, you have to - a few of these missions surprised me by not being anywhere near as straightforward as they looked!
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for Nintendo DS/Gameboy Advance - Maybe you guys were right about it - It’s not nearly as immediately engrossing as the other games, though I love its style. There are a few really annoying quirks so far - the whole “battle judge” thing, with the different, arbitrary rules for each battle, like “no swords” when every one of my characters is armed with a sword is really bothersome, and the controls are bizarre - but I got it cheap and can use another game to play on the commute.
Disgaea - I found a used copy, and I like it a lot - I can see now how it and La Pucelle are related, though I still like La Pucelle more. Basically the same thing, with some differences.
I’m considering getting Stella Deus next - I really like the style, more modern and realistic rather than 16-bit retro.
I also recently bought Duel Strike for my DS, and like it a great deal (though the text scrolls too slowly for my taste).
I do think that the people that wrote the dialogue should be sacked. Nintendo is perfectly capable of fantastic writing (see Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, Zelda, etc). While the translation itself is fine, and the English is perfect, the actual script is sickeningly bad.
You might also like Fallout Tactics. It’s not as much fun as the real Fallout, but one of my favorite features is that if you hold down control and click the ‘credits’ button on the main screen, my name appears as one of the winners of the caption contest they had when it was released.