Talk to me about the tactical RPG

Foundational premise: I am bad at games and don’t try hard at games and play games for babies.

With that out of the way, I usually play RTS or builder-type games where I can just fart around and cheat if I want, or Football Manager, same deal. I recently played Banner Saga and really liked it so then I played Banner Saga 2 and really liked it. It’s the first tactical kind of game I think I’ve played, unless you count the Dragons Age, which you shouldn’t. My impression is that Banner Saga is very much TRPG for babies, which is why I like it. But maybe I like TRPGs!

I bought Shadowrun Returns and so far it seems cool but I do stupid things because I don’t pay attention and keep dying, so that seems at least slightly more difficult, which is my fault but again, foundational premise. Tried XCOM and it hasn’t hooked me yet – I keep dying, obviously. I think for whatever reason games where you’re shooting each other are harder for me to get into than games where you have axes and bows and stuff.

So talk to me about the genre. Give me like a spectrum from Banner Sagaish lighter fare to the stuff that will shoot me in the face and I’ll die. Is Banner Saga even a good example of the genre?

Try Disgaea, assuming you don’t mind hyper-anime style , or things being crazy in general. It’s easy to get since it’s available inexpensively right now on Steam. It’s also not too hard, gives a good tutorial, and has many ways for you to play around gaining power.

Broadly speaking, tactics games tend to fall into two broad categories. Lighter stuff, like Disgaea, is a bit silly and usually not too hard. You can out-level almost any challenge with a bit of grinding. If you want something slightly less goofy, try Valkyria Chronicles. It’s virtually guaranteed to go on sale for 75% once every three months or so, and the STeam Summer Sale is right around the corner. These are often JRPG’s.

Tougher stuff, like X-Com, is designed around a tight risk-reward curve that rewards playing very carefully and taking only carefully-chosen aggressive chances. These are usually western RPG’s and/or are built into straight RPG systems anyway.

Also, see this wiki page: Tactical role-playing game - Wikipedia

Battle for Wesnoth is free, basic, pretty fun, and pretty difficult on hard mode (vs. AI) or versus a good player. It’s pretty old by now and the graphics were never the top of the line even when it was new, and there aren’t a lot of bells and whistles, and the writing isn’t any great shakes on most of the campaigns.

https://www.wesnoth.org/

I have found that playing StarCraft I, if I use the cheat code ‘show me the money’ I can succeed at the game no matter how drunk I get. You get to build your little base with minimal micromanagement, and then take out the enemy in force whenever you feel like it.

Getting super drunk and destroying the AI in Blizzard games is a favorite pastime, for sure. Conversely, I’ve always imagined that tactical-type games are for a class of gamer who are into, like, thinking about what they’re doing.

Battle for Wesnoth looks interesting – thanks, Tom Scud.

Find a way to play Final Fantasy Tactics.

It’s the best I’ve played.

Shadowrun and Xcom 2 are both great, if you are having trouble try turning them down to an easier difficulty. The secret to both is to always stay in cover though.

I loved Banner Saga but my laptop runs many games too slowly so I haven’t replayed it or bought the sequel.

**Tactics Ogre**and **Final Fantasy Tactics**are classics from the 90s and laid the groundwork for the genre.

**Fire Emblem**games are Nintendo’s entry. Originally for Japan only, they are brutal in their challenge. Newer games have the option to turn off permadeath and easier difficulty paths. I believe Honest Trailers did a video on the series a few months back (on the Smosh channel).

Massive Chalice for the PC was released around the time of Banner Saga and is also quite good. I liked the overall game of Banner Saga better, but I prefered the gameplay of Massive Chalice.

Seconding the 3 Shadowrun games. Lots of fun and will kick your ass if you let it.

I’ve heard of that theory. I myself just like to have fun building my little empire. Then I advance the plot.

If you’d like to dabble with a similar style but a complete emphasis on stealth, I’d recommend invisible Inc.

Vanilla XCom (the reboot, not the '80s original) rewards caution like no other game I’ve played. In almost all scenarios, if you move every character forward into overwatch every single turn, except for your snipers, who just hang out in back sniping, you’re gonna do well. If you think, “hell with it” and move your full movement forward EVER, you’re gonna die.

I played Battle for Wesnoth for awhile; it was great, until I got to a level where I realized I’d built my army poorly, and I played the same scenario about half a dozen times and couldn’t get past it. That’s a problem.

Why don’t you count Dragon Age? I’m replaying the original, and find it very tactically pleasing. Getting my duelist opposite a taunting, shield-hiding Alaister, so bad guys beat on him while I whale on them, and Morrigan lulls bad guys to sleep and gives them terrifying nightmares, is pretty fun. Is it the lack of a cover system?

Speaking of cover, the Mass Effect series has some interesting tactical combat in it. It’s also a guns game, though, so may not hit your sweet spot.

Finally, have you played any of the D&D games? Temple of Elemental Evil was pretty tactically heavy, for example.

X-Com 2, on the other hand, will spank you if you only ever use those tactics.

You do need to go out and get the third party patches, though. The game was unplayable at release, it had so many bugs.

(My favorite was if you hired a follower. He’d insist on taking a cut of any treasure, which is fair, and you couldn’t manipulate his inventory to take stuff out of it or sell it off, which makes sense. It also meant that, after five or six fights, you’d have to abandon him, because he’d collected so many suits of armor and weapons as part of his “cut” that he’d immobilized himself.)

I haven’t gotten XCom 2 yet, but yeah, so I hear. Even “Enemy Within” punishes those tactics. But if Jimmy Chitwood is having trouble dying in vanilla XCom, he might need to learn the paranoid tiptoe rhythm that I had to learn.

“What’s up with Bjorn?”
“Dude loves armor. He’s got about fifteen sets now, so he’s decided to sit over there in the corner and play with it. I can’t tell if he’s crying or singing to it. Kind of creepin me out. Let’s go, y’all.”

I’m a pretty big fan of SRPGs. They hit that sweet spot for me between RPGs and serious strategic games.

Any SRPG list is going to have Final Fantasy Tactics at the top. It wasn’t the first, but it was the first really big one with mainstream appeal and in many ways it’s yet to be topped. It’s big draw is in how much customization it allows. Characters can freely swap between classes (and there are a quite a few) and then mix and match the skills they learn opening up a whole bunch of different options. It’s not super well balanced, but usually the game is lenient enough that you can get through it with whatever combination interests you. The story is… a mixed bag. It starts off as an emotionally complex, morally gray story about an idealistic noble and his lowborn friend trying to balance loyalty, honor, and morality and then succumbs to its worst JRPG impulses and becomes a MacGuffin Hunt where you eventually kill god. It’s the kind of plot that seemed deep when I was a teenager and now just seems kinda dumb. Still, the gameplay really is top notch. It originally came out on the Playstation and got PSP and mobile ports more recently.

The series had a couple more entries on the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS, Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced and Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift. They were much, much lighter story wise, trading the dark wartime politicking for much more lighthearted, cute adventure fare. FFTA is pretty skippable, in my opinion. FFTA2 is very solid, though, with good bite size gameplay suitable for a portable system. It plays pretty well when emulated on an Android tablet, I think.

Before Final Fantasy Tactics, there was Tactics Ogre. It came out originally on the Super Nintendo and got a port to the Playstation later. It’s much rougher than Final Fantasy Tactics, but it’s also a lot more consistent. There aren’t as many customization options, but you get more guys on the field and tactical placement matters more. Definitely harder than FFT, I would say. It has a pretty solid story too, in my opinion. It maintains thematic and tonal consistency, the main character has a solid arc, and it understands that MacGuffins are best used to motivate characters rather than interact with the plot directly. It got a remake on the PSP, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together which changes a whole lot and is generally better. It has some petty big flaws, but is still a great game which I would recommend highly. There was also a Gameboy Advance game, Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis which was very good, but frustratingly slow to play. If you can tolerate very slow animations, there’s a very good experience in there.

The Disgaea series is the other big one. I’m not as keen on them as others. They focus a lot on grinding, and generally there’s not a whole lot of tactics or customization. You level up your guys and if your numbers are higher than the other guys you’ll win, more or less. The numbers scale up to pretty wacky extremes and by the end you’ll be doing millions of points of damage with every hit. If you want a game where you can just sort of chill out and grind a lot with plenty of anime style wackiness, they’re quite decent, though. The first one recently got a PC port available on Steam.

The Fire Emblem series is also very popular, but has never been my cup of tea. If you are interested in big strategic battles, though, it definitely worth a look.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 have, in my opinion, the best tactical gameplay. They can be very hard and very unforgiving, but they do a great job of giving the player an interesting set of tools to deal with situations. You get a whole bunch of neat abilities for your soldiers and when you succeed it feels like you earned it. Of course, they can also be very stressful when your favorite guys get mercilessly gunned down after because of a bad run of luck. The difficulty tends to spiral, though. If you’re doing well, the game gets easier and if you’re doing poorly it tends to get harder, hence the big divide between people saying they’re incredibly hard games and the people who say they’re pretty easy if you know what you’re doing. Regardless, they’re great.

Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and Shadowrun: Hong Kong are all solid singleplayer RPGs that have a similar cover based tactical combat feel. Dragonfall is generally regarded as the best, with Hong Kong running pretty close behind. Returns feel like a kind of practice run. It’s fine, but it’s completely linear and doesn’t really change regardless of the kind of character you play. If you think you’re going to play all of them, I’d start with returns because it would be hard to go back to it after playing the others. It’s fine to skip if you want to go straight to the better ones, though.

If you can tolerate 90s PC games interfaces, Jagged Alliance 2 is still pretty much the top of the heap when it comes to guys with guns tactical gameplay. You’re the leader of a mercenary company trying to topple a despotic regime. It mixes larger scale strategy with smaller tactical encounters. It still has a big following to this day and a popular mod that adds a whole bunch is still getting updates. The interface is very obtuse by modern standards, though, and could be a big turn off.

The Silent Storm games are a bit similar. You lead a squad of soldiers on missions in an alt-history WWII. Not super deep, but they’re mostly solid. The big appeal is that all the structures are very destructible. It can be quite neat to watch an entire building topple to a well placed explosive. They’re on the buggy, unpolished side, though.

There’s also the King’s Bounty series. There are a whole bunch of them and they’re more or less the same thing with different skins. You run around various world maps and recruit guys into your army while doing quests and whatnot. They’re pretty good, but can be very grindy. When you lose your soldiers you have to go and recruit replacements, which can get pretty tedious. Still, they’re solid.

Valkyria Chronicles is a pretty popular more recent game. It takes place in a fictional universe with a strong WWII vibe. You control a squad of soldiers with a weird turn-based/real-time hybrid system. Kinda hard to describe, you basically get an allotment of time for each action, and the world only reacts while you’re moving. It’s got a pretty big following and it received a PC port not too long ago.

A bit more esoteric, but Freedom Force and Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich scratch a similar itch. They’re PC games from the mid 2000s where you control a squad of silver age style superheroes. It’s not turn based, but pausable real-time. Being superheroes, your guys get odd mixes of various superpowers and the game mostly revolves around picking the right powers for each situation. It also lets you make your own heroes if you so desire.

Those are pretty much all of the good options I can think of.

vandal hearts on the ps1 and number 2 on the 360 (live game store)

shining force 1 and 2 on the ps3 360 and pc via sega genesis compilation disc and wii vc (or emulation on pc )

theres a few more out there

How is that helpful, given the premise of the OP? :confused:

I also think Battle for Wesnoth, while good, is also likely to frustrate a casual player.

I really enjoyed Invisible Inc, and it might be fun to mess with - I lost a LOT before I got the hang of it though, even on lower difficulties (though I eventually got good enough to do quite well even on higher levels).

Valkyria Chronicles is probably an excellent choice for casual play.

Thanks everyone for the input. I did ask for the whole spectrum, so the ones that kill you are good to know, too.

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Vanilla XCom (the reboot, not the '80s original) rewards caution like no other game I’ve played. In almost all scenarios, if you move every character forward into overwatch every single turn, except for your snipers, who just hang out in back sniping, you’re gonna do well. If you think, “hell with it” and move your full movement forward EVER, you’re gonna die.
[/quote]

[QUOTE=Miller]
X-Com 2, on the other hand, will spank you if you only ever use those tactics.

[/QUOTE]

Yeah, to clarify, it’s XCom 2, and that is what is happening. It beat the shit out of me for about 20 minutes and then I decided to try something else for a while, which turned out to be Shadowrun Returns, which I like a lot.

Thinking back on Origins, you’re right; there’s no reason that didn’t count. I guess at this point I have equal memories of the series that are me just running around with a mage in non-tactical mode blowing things up and freezing things, and not dying, by which process I identify it as not the kind of game where I die because I just run pell-mell into the middle of the shit without thinking, but the first one definitely presented that kind of challenge.

I have played zero of the other games mentioned in the thread so far, so this is a ton to work with!

If you don’t mind old stuff here are some suggestions:

Master of Monsters (Genesis - avoid the ps1 version like the plague)

Warsong (Genesis) - the first of the Langrisser series - the only one to get a commercial release in the U.S. until recently.

Shining Force CD (Sega CD) - somewhat simpler (no towns to explore) than the other early Shining Force stuff - this features a challenging hidden battle with all of the best bosses from the game. Most of this game (but not all) was originally released on two Gamegear games.

Rebelstar Tactical Command (Gameboy Advance) - pretty much good for only one or two plays - but fun on those

Brigandine (PS1) - Lots of gameplay on this one - six different countries you can play as and lots of ways to play if you are creative

Dragon Force (Sega Saturn) - not my favorite (I don’t like the battle system very well) - but has some other attractive elements - and a lot of retro gamers like it quite a bit.

Dark Wizard (Sega CD) - where to begin - my favorite SRPG - the game is huge (you can have armies of 40 units - and you can customize 37 of those units in a myriad of different ways) with lots of secrets to discover and side quests to fulfill. Plus four rulers to choose from.


Another good game IMHO (although not a SRPG) is Nectaris (a sci fi strategy game - virtually no plot - just gameplay) for the PS1 - offers 104 scenarios and once you have completed the game you can go back in and replay any scenario to your heart’s content - so unlike most strategy games you can go back in and try different strategies as much as you want.

I briefly tried Wesnoth back in the day, and it frustrated the heck out of me. I think there were two reasons: One, the game has way too much depth and way too little explanation of any of it, so you were paralyzed with options. Two, there’s no random component to it at all, so if you try something and it almost works, you can’t just try it again and hope for better luck (and due to the complexity mentioned in the first point, you also might not be able to tweak it just slightly to get a better result).