I’m about halfway through my second playthrough of this game. Why a second playthrough when I said it was bad? Well, it turns out Tactical Guild has three different heroines to pursue and the only way to get the full story is to pursue all three. Since I had no idea when the choice was coming up, I couldn’t save before it, so I have to play again with another heroine to see some more. The bits of the story I got last time didn’t make much sense. Characters appeared and disappeared for no good reason, made reference to incidents I hadn’t seen, the final boss showed up just like that, I killed him, the ending took all of two minutes to watch, the end. Hence the second playthrough to get a different perspective on this game.

To be honest I was truly shocked at just how bad it was when I first started, but then I did some reading on the rationale behind the game. Apparently it was meant from the start to be a “budget” game, which is why it retailed in Japan for about $40 instead of $50-70 for the same kind of game. Dunno about you guys, but $40 doesn’t sound very budget to me. As far as Japan goes it’s a low price, but this game still doesn’t deserve that much. $15 at most, and even that is kind of pushing it.

Just by looking, you can tell the developers Ninja Studio obviously didn’t put much effort into it. The graphics have been called “retro”, but I’ve seen better looking SNES games, and that’s not an exaggeration. It looks like they used RPG Maker to make the game, then ported it to the DS somehow and released it. They called it “budget” so people would think they were getting a good deal, but all along they were just being ripped off. There are only three kind of monsters: wolves, golems and pink birds. Then apart from the important characters, everyone has a generic sprite. And those generic sprites have the same color palette whether they’re friends or foes. They don’t even vary according to job class, it’s just like 5 or 6 different sprites used to represent just about everything. You can’t even tell what someone’s class is unless you move over them with the cursor, how dumb is that?

And it’s not just the sprites and the graphics that look bad, the music is bad as well, and I’ve already mentioned that the story is incomplete unless you play all three parts. Even if you do play them all, the story is still crap. “We are looking for the 7 Reti-Arts for flimsy reasons that involve the resurrection of a god that you can kill in two turns, also the Army is evil.” That’s a “budget” story, is it? I could have written that myself, thank you very much.

Gameplay and related matters

I didn’t pick this up for the story, though. Just as I did with Tactics Layer, I tried Tactical Guild because it had “Tactic” in the name. Also I watched the trailer on Youtube and the battle system was reminiscent of the GBA Fire Emblems. Top-down grid-based SRPG instead of isometric, that kind of thing. That was all I needed to know. But then I started playing. Man… This is so bad… I don’t know where to start with the battle system. The biggest flaw: if you move, the only thing you can do is Attack. The minute you move a single step, your character stops being able to use Items or Special Attacks or Magic. Seriously. It just makes no sense, I mean, are they so stupid they can’t walk and think at the same time, is that it? Geez. Anyway, as you might predict, that reduces your battle strategy to either waiting for the enemy to come over to you, or just using direct Attack every time.

Direct Attack is almost always a bad idea, though. The game has three kind of attacks: long-range, mid-range and short-range. Long range is stuff like magic and arrows, mid-range is spears, short-range is swords and fists. The game is overwhelmingly skewed in favor of long-range attacks though, especially magic, because of the aforementioned Move=No Special thing. Trying to attack an enemy directly 1) Exposes you to a counterattack which is often stronger than your attack and 2) Usually misses. This is one of those games where if your hit percentage is less than 99% you will miss 9 times out of 10. Look at the screenshot on the right. That Hit 85 you see? Probably going to miss. It’s easier to just assume you’re going to miss than to get worked up over it, ‘cos it’s going to happen a lot. Meanwhile enemies with 40% hit will beat the crap out of you every chance they get.

So physical attacks are a waste of time, which means most of the job classes are a waste of time as well. There are quite a number of them too, sadly enough. Priest, Paladin, Sniper, Assassin, etc etc. When you reach the required stats to class up, e.g. 120 INT for Sage, you just pick the job change option and switch, no special items required. Due to the stupidity of the battle system, however, only two of the classes are worth changing to: Pirate and Alchemist. Pirate because they can use Special Attacks after moving, and Alchemist because they can do the same, and they have the highest magic attack (MAT) stat in the game.

Back to how overwhelmingly useful magic is, though. Talk about game breakers, there’s this magic attack called Search that you can get right at the beginning of the game. It can hit enemies in an 8×8 area around the caster. That’s 64 squares, people! It’s also stupidly accurate and stupidly powerful for a magic attack you get so early. With the enemy dodge rate as high as it is, and the aforementioned difficulty in moving and attacking, you’ll quickly realize that it’s much smarter to stand still and snipe the enemy with Search as they try to approach than to move out and fight. Thus all battles are reduced to one-way Search spamming fests in the end. I hired myself a witch and a wizard at the Guild and raised them into Alchemists. Ah, the pain they dished out! The pain! No one compares to Lia though, the main heroine. She’s just…ouch. If you like broken battle systems and doing sick amounts of damage, you’ll enjoy that part at least.

Of course if you don’t want to take the easy way out, you could try to go out and fight physically. “Oh, but I’ll get a Game Over!” you cry. No you won’t. “Yes I will!” No you won’t. You can’t. It’s not possible to get a Game Over in this game, it is not an option. Win or lose a battle, the game will still play on like you won and the story will continue. Sure you’ll miss out on whatever monetary reward there is to get, but so what? I repeat, win or lose, the game goes on. There is zero motivation to win. ZERO. You might think, “I should level up so I can take on tougher enemies” or something like that. Uhh, even if those tougher enemies take you out, the story’s still gonna continue, so… Might as well not bother, don’t you think? Well, gamer’s pride kept me going at least. I switched the difficulty to Easy though, no sense suffering more when you can suffer less.

The battle system isn’t the only thing that sucks about Tactical Guild though, but I think I’ve gone on long enough for one day. Color Cross awaits me, just a few puzzles left!

Related posts:

Tactics Layer – Litinagard Senki(1) Tactics Layer – Litinagard Senki(2) Tactical Guild – Bad Budget Game (2) Tactical Guild – Bad Budget Game (3)