Still playing along. I checked my latest save and I’ve put in 26 hours and 50 minutes! That’s a lot of hours for a dress-up game with occasional battles. I’m at chapter 15 and a few things are starting to happen, but for the most part it’s still “Defeat the monster of the week and save Litinagard!” I also had to sit through Risa’s “I wanna save this puppy and by the way, I hate my mom!” story arc which was eerily reminiscent of Luca’s story in Ar Tonelico 2, right down to the frying pan wielding mother. Boy am I glad that’s over with.

The way Tactics Layer plays out reminds me a lot of Persona 3, come to think of it. In the morning you go to school, after school you pick a few spots to hang out and a few people to hang out with, and on the weekend (in P3 it was monthly), you fight the monster(s) of the week, rinse repeat. Along the way you make new friends and help them overcome their little problems. The similarities end there, though. Helping people solve their problems is not optional, and it has no effect on their abilities in battle. And of course in P3 if your protagonist got killed it was game over for you, but in Tactics Layer Takumi can’t even fight. His job is to outfit the girls in pretty costumes, and somehow the fact that he’s touched the clothes automatically makes them powerful. He’s some sort of “Savior”, you see.

Now that I’ve stopped expecting anything from the battle and the story, I’ve discovered that playing dress-up is fun! I love games where your characters’ appearances actually change depending on what they’ve got equipped. It’s one of the few things I really enjoyed about Dragon Quest 9. Here they’ve got even nicer costumes and far more of them too. Actually it’s a bit of a pain scrolling through all the different outfits: hairstyle, top, skirt, socks, shoes, weapons. It’s much better to just select an outfit wholesale, like Yuu’s lovely nurse outfit below.

As a matter of fact, wearing certain outfits is the most common way to learn new skills. For example, that nurse outfit comes with two healing spells. A few individual pieces also come with skills and attacks of their own, but this is not that common. It reminded me of Final Fantasy 9, or FFTA, where your choice of armor is determined not by how useful it is but by what kind of attacks you can learn from it. The deal is worsened in Tactics Layer because it’s not enough to wear the outfit, you also have to use the skill or attack a certain number of times before you master it. If you remove the outfit before then, you won’t be able to use it until you put it back on. In that sense it’s lucky that the enemies are so weak and the AI is so bad. If I spammed “Pretty Cure” non-stop against an enemy with half a brain, I’d probably be wiped out before I could say jack!

The other use of costumes is to take part in contests. Or, in my case, to lose repeatedly at contests. Several times in the story one of your girls will be required to take part in a contest. You can also visit the Event Hall and try to win some clothes by winning random contests. In the bottom left section of the picture down here you can see Sexy, Cute, Wicked and Health, right? Those are the criteria the judges use to rate you. Different judges favor different stats. Otakus like Cute girls, children like Wicked (cool?) looking girls, that sort of thing.

After the looks check, you get asked a series of totally random questions like “What is your favorite Japanese sweet?” and that sort of thing. It’s all guesswork, really. The last thing on the list is “Appeal Time”, where you preen and twirl to try and get the judges to like you. A Japanese FAQ I checked said to press YBAXBAXAXAXAX, repeating AX until the judges got fed up. I tried it on the otakus and it worked, but I still lost the looks part so…yeah. I had a 200-cuteness Yuka too, dammit. Lost by two freaking points, no fair!! I’ll have to try again later.

Anyway, dressing up and taking part in contests is fun and all, but I’m ready to finish this game now. You can only wear so many clothes before they all start to look the same, and only a few of those skills are really useful anyway. It’s an entertaining diversion, but I don’t think it’s deep enough to base a whole game around. Other dress up games like Ar Tonelico tend to have a lot of other elements going for them, this game…not quite. See you when I finish the game.

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