Tactical Indie RPGs - The sucessors of X-COM, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and Heroes of Might and Magic.

NerdShamer said:
Kind of, but it's just revisiting the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere with several waves of DLC.

Let's just say that the prerendered cutscenes in Mechwarrior Clans are firmly within the terrible side of things . As far as gameplay goes, your allies act like they've been lobotomized. And for the love of God, do not give them the Arrow missile.
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Are you mixing Battletech with Mechwarrior 5?
 
I've played a couple of the games that came up in the thread recently, both made pretty good first impressions but gradually soured as I kept playing.

Symphony of War - unique take on the formula where you have to form little squads instead of sending out single units to do battle. Interesting concept but you very quickly realise that there is definitely a correct composition (just get as many dragons as you can) and some units are pretty much useless. Once the novelty wears off it becomes a bit tedious and I'd say the game is far too long for its own good, could have trimmed the fat by about 10 hours. The controller support is also a bit buggy, I played on steam deck and its clunky to navigate and you constantly have weird issues like tooltips not showing up fully on screen. Still, I had some fun with the game, its a good 7/10 I'd say.

Those Who Rule - Fire Emblem on a hex grid. Unfortunately instead of doing something interesting it take all the worst elements of FE and magnifies them. It has perma-death by default and because of that the dev had the bright idea to throw new characters at you like confetti through the early chapters but there is no good way to level them up and no incentive to swap them into the party so they just rot in you reserve. There is no modern QoL so no battle save, turn rewind or anything like that and to restart a battle you have to quit to the main menu and restart a chapter. Mix that with bad RNG and enemy reinforcements showing up behind you and you'll be resetting constantly. There are also 3 forced story character and only 1 of them is decent so you either have to hide 2 in the back hoping they don't die or YOLO them into battle praying that they don't die and cause another chapter reset.

The tedium is much worse than Symphony, the dev had no idea how to make the end game interesting so every chapter is just dozens if not hundreds of enemies being thrown at you and it turns into an endless hours long grind every map.

Finally, the UI is borderline busted. Playing with a controller and its so buggy half the time in the menu you don't know what will happen when you press a button, the tooltips either don't show up, or show up and stay present in a different menu screen for no reason and the inventory is a nightmare to navigate.

I've not had a great time with some of these indie attempts at the genre. It feels like its just autistic spergs trying to ape Fire Emblem but doing it by copying the worst elements that no one likes. Maybe I should just give up on these modern attempts and play Shining Force instead or something.
 
Stasi said:
It feels like its just autistic spergs trying to ape Fire Emblem but doing it by copying the worst elements that no one likes.
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That's kind of normal for them to expect that shit can only be played in this one specific method and ignore the concept of probability. But

Stasi said:
so no battle save,
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This is absolute incompetence on their part
 
This indie srpg was revealed recently called Dyadem that raises the question: "What if we made Fire emblem but without combat animations?" and i guess the answer is why would you??



The dev is a single full name so if it's a one man game it's a bit more understandable but even then the game looks unfinished, with sprites simply morphing into arrows, no portraits other than not!Roy or dialogue. Not a good first impression.
 
frozen_runner said:
I want a new, real Shining Force.
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We did get Streets of Rage 4 and those Wonder Boy games in the last few years so its not outside the realms of possibility but I honestly wouldnt bet on it. For some reason SEGA hates Shining Force and Phantasy Star.

Anyway, after the disappointment of the modern indieslop SRPGs I decided to play Shining Force CD. I'm having a much better time.
 
Stasi said:
For some reason SEGA hates Shining Force and Phantasy Star.
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The vibe that I always got from them is that they just kind of hate narrative complexity if it goes beyond a certain degree. But after a certain point, it feels like they're just grasping at straws.
 
Stasi said:
Symphony of War - unique take on the formula where you have to form little squads instead of sending out single units to do battle. Interesting concept but you very quickly realise that there is definitely a correct composition (just get as many dragons as you can) and some units are pretty much useless. Once the novelty wears off it becomes a bit tedious and I'd say the game is far too long for its own good, could have trimmed the fat by about 10 hours. The controller support is also a bit buggy, I played on steam deck and its clunky to navigate and you constantly have weird issues like tooltips not showing up fully on screen. Still, I had some fun with the game, its a good 7/10 I'd say.
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It's a good Ogre Battle clone. I've enjoyed my time with it thus far. Will I finish it? Probably not, but that's less an indictment of the game than of my ADD ass.

Anybody who likes Ogre Battle should give it a shot. Though there's a question of why you would bother when Unicorn Overlord exists.
Stasi said:
We did get Streets of Rage 4 and those Wonder Boy games in the last few years so its not outside the realms of possibility but I honestly wouldnt bet on it. For some reason SEGA hates Shining Force and Phantasy Star.
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With the suprise success of Expedition 33 (a turn-based RPG in 2025, gasp!), yes, anything is possible.

But Sega really did seem to give up on traditional RPGs (not to mention SRPGs/TRPGs) years ago. Putting aside Like a Dragon (which I absolutely love), they don't seem to think modern audiences have an appetite for it. It's sad.

I just looked up the Shining Force remake for the GBA: 2004, over 20 fucking years ago. I really am getting old.
 
frozen_runner said:
It's a good Ogre Battle clone. I've enjoyed my time with it thus far. Will I finish it? Probably not, but that's less an indictment of the game than of my ADD ass.

Anybody who likes Ogre Battle should give it a shot. Though there's a question of why you would bother when Unicorn Overlord exists.
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It's the Great Value version of Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, not the Ogre series. Compare its turn-based nature to the quasi-RTS of March/Lordly Caliber/Unicorn Overlord.

Though I do agree, it's not awful, and its particular style of gameplay hasn't gotten oversaturated to the point to nausea. But there's room for improvement.
 
Froggy Fresh Sextape said:
Play FEDA for the SNES if you haven't yet, there's an English translation. It's pretty good but also uhh kinda...furry.

IIRC Sega fired all the Shining Force guys and they wandered off to do that, then hired them back afterwards.
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I really do need to get into that series.

Man, I'm a huge fan of Yoshitaka Tamaki's art style. The Shining series lost something when he stopped doing the illustrations.
 
I mentioned it in some other thread, but if any of you have programming experience and an itch to do your own turn based tactics game then there's the Lex Talionis editor. Uses FE8 as a base to work with but there's a lot of crazy stuff you can do with it. Much more powerful than the old FE editing tools, and you're actually coding as opposed to ROM hacking.
 
BiggestKai said:
Allegedly this mod endorsed by the devs(which is still in development by the way) FIXED EVERYTHING™
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I've just completed a playthrough with Terror From the Void.
The modded game is fun, and a worthy sidegrade to Xcom:WotC
  • The geoscape is far more involved. You have to preposition assets around the world to respond in time, and even then sacrifices must be made.
  • Factions are very important, they are a source of tech, trade and recruits, though you can raid them if diplomacy doesn't pan out. All have a multibranched, voiceacted questline.
  • Bases have no redundant noobtraps, everything has a useful purpose.
  • (modded) Classes are very balanced. (except spiderbomb spammers) .
  • There's optional missions on the map instead of xcom covert ops.
  • Aimed shots/ actual bullets are implemented well.
Downsides are there are almost no mods, and almost no videos.
Worth buying on sale.
Need for Sped said:
I'm not sure if anyone else from the original dev team was there.
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IIRC the studio had only released mobile games before.
Need for Sped said:
This is probably old as hell here, but I recently got to play Phoenix Point...and my God what an absolute turd of a game. They managed to both aggressively copy XCOM:EU and XCOM2, and make them boring as hell at the same time.
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Need for Sped said:
- Weapon upgrades are non-existent: There's a metric ton of different equipment, but 95% are just sidegrades of each other (Either more damage but less accuracy, etc), same thing with armor.
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TFTV makes this far better, Going from a conventional sniper to a AP one is night and day. Faction weapons are suited to different things instead of being straight upgrades.
Need for Sped said:
- Maps are seriously uninspired and repetitive.
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True, it could have done with more variety, but I like how each faction had its own terrain.
The tired cat said:
From what I recall, the biggest selling points in this game were that they had the OG Xcom dev involved, how you can do limb damage on enemies and how they would adapt to your attacks and mutate right on the battlefield.
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Targeted shots are a great feature, as it allows you to tactically pick apart a dangerous enemy.
The enemies don't evolve on the battlefield, but I like how the enemy gains more abilities instead of straight stat increases.
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Finally got around to completing Shining Force CD, really good game considering its a remake of the Game Gear games, I would recommend to anyone who likes 1 and 2 or SRPGs in general. Maybe not quite as good as Shining Force 1 and 2 but still a solid game, definitely worth a look if you haven't played it and like me are tired of the mediocre indie shit thats being put out in the genre.
 
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