Once again I have learned the importance of not writing a review too early, especially if the game is from a genre you like. Atelier Lina taught me that sometimes a game might seem to suck at first, but then once you get the hang of it it can be excellent. There are also games that suck in the beginning but then get better as you go along. And then there are games like Tactics Layer, which has taught me that sometimes a game does actually suck, but then once you stop expecting it not to suck and throw away your expectations, you’ll come into a new appreciation of the game and its features.

So yeah, I’m actually loving the game now at about 15 hours in, but if I’d written this review just a few days earlier it would have been all about “OMG this game is awful! Someone fire the developers! This is horrible!” etc, etc. I haven’t finished the game yet so my opinion might change yet again. I’ll blog with my final, overall impressions of the game once it’s all over. For today what I’ll do is to list the main reasons why I would have criticized it, and how I learned to enjoy the game.

It’s not really a Tactics game

“But it says Tactics in the title…” Exactly! That’s why I tried it, because I was looking forward to something along the lines of Luminous Arc or Summon Night. And when you do get to fight it does play out like an ordinary strategy RPG. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between. The gameplay is more like 70% visual novel, 20% dress-up game and beauty pageant and 10% actual fighting. If I’d done a little bit of research into the game before trying it I would have found that out, but dammit it had “Tactics” in the name. What did they expect me to think?!

So it was really hard for me in the beginning. There was just sooo much reading to do! Talk for an hour, fight one battle, talk for another three hours…ugh. It was driving me crazy! Plus you couldn’t save anywhere except on the world map, so if you wanted to interrupt a conversation you’d either have to fast forward it, thus missing the whole event, or just turn the DS off and revert back to your last save. And they weren’t even important conversations, most of it was just girls bossing Takumi around left and right, or bickering among each other, or some other petty random events you just selected, bleeeh.

Even when it’s a Tactics game, it’s not that good

Well, it’s not that bad either. It’s just that battles feel really, really slow for some reason. Think Luminous Arc 1 slowness levels. There’s no way to speed up battle, so you just have to get used to it. Of course I’ve never let slowness stop me from enjoying an SRPG and I’m not about to start now. No, my main problem is the lack of challenge. First off, the storyline enemies show up only once a week and they’re at fixed levels. This means if you do even the tiniest bit of training in the dojo before show up, you’ll vastly outlevel and overpower them. Plus you’ll quickly learn all kinds of abilities that are outright broken, like Shark or Order! which can do massive amounts of damage very easily. Then there’s the enemy AI, which is outright terrible. I’ve lost count of the number of times an enemy will be right next to me and it just won’t move. It won’t attack, it won’t use a spell, it won’t run, it will just sit there and let me kill it. Just like that. Some enemies will move forward a little, move back and little, move forward a little, until you go kill them. Of course since I’m going to kill them with my broken attacks anyway, I can see why they decide not to bother. 😉

Some of the character designs are extremely ugly

Horribly ugly girls are horribly ugly. Don’t be fooled by the nice-looking cover and promotional art. Look at the CG on the right. The squashed up faces. Those droopy pancake-like boobs. Ugh! Doesn’t it just make you sick? And CGs are supposed to be nice, so what about the rest of the art that isn’t supposed to be? Looking at it will make you shudder! Again, though, it’s all about getting used to it. In the beginning it really bothered me. I’d be thinking “eww” in my head the whole time I was playing reading the game because the main girls were so fugly. Later on I got used to it and cuter characters like Mimiko-sensei and Nana joined my party and then it wasn’t so bad after all.

The characters are annoying at first

If you’ve watched any harem or romance anime at all within the past 10 years, you’ve seen the entire cast of Tactics Layer. The childhood friend, the student council president, the older-sister type, the main character’s loser best friend, the main character who complains non-stop about the girls pushing him around but who lets them do it anyway, etc etc. I found them all extremely irritating at first, but again I got used to them little by little. After reading their little stories and helping them through their problems I started to feel some affinity for them, an almost paternal feeling. Not to mention we dealt with the story of the evil bitch Kiriko (ol’ pancake boobs up there) really early. Once I didn’t have to see her so much any more the game got 10000x better.

Apart from the 5 main girls Yuu, Yuka, Kiriko, Emiko and Risa, there are some other, very interesting optional characters you can get. Nue (mai waifu), Nana (mai loli), etc, etc. The sad things is that because they’re optional they have absolutely no relation to the plot whatsover. They join you for the flimsiest of reasons (I want to paint weird scenery! I want to keep stalking you!) and then completely vanish. They don’t take part in conversations, you can’t hang out with them, you rarely run into them in town, etc. And that’s really sad because for the most part I preferred them to the main cast. Oh well.

…And so on and so forth. Once I got over the disappointment of this not being a “proper” Tactics game, and once I got over the shock of how hideous some of the characters were, I was able to put my expectations aside and to start enjoying Tactics Layer for what it really was. I’ve put my complaints down for now, next time I’ll tell you why I’m having a real blast with the game right now.

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