Some of the best weapons and tools at your disposal are the traps that are strewn around every level. There’s also the need to manipulate the environment. Throw in the need to achieve (often difficult) optional objectives in each battle to earn enough experience to keep your side levelled to meet the escalating challenges, and Reverie Tactics finds a way to make every single skill and ability that you take into combat worthwhile. You’re going to need to manage the environment (making sure that you’re not attacked from all sides at once), inflict status effects on your opponents, and in general make sure that you’re not taking too much damage on the counter-attack, because even the lowest-level enemies can do a lot of damage. Rarely is simply doing as much damage as you can, as quickly as you can, going to be enough. Make no mistake about this if you don’t master the complex way that the skills of each character work together, you’re going to face total party wipeouts from the very earliest levels. Firstly, the sheer difficulty of the game and secondly, the intricate way that many of the maps work. There are two things that make this particularly interesting. Unlike most of those games, where you control a skirmish-sized force, in Reverie Tactics you only have a couple of heroes to lead into battle, which lends it a vibe closer to a standard RPG at times. On a basic level, it’s a tactics RPG – think Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem or, for a recent western equivalent, Fell Seal. The narrative is all the more grating when you realise that the game itself is actually designed beautifully and, unlike the narrative, respects the intelligence of the players. It pretends to, but it handles it in such a superficial manner that in the end, it’s a textbook case of key jingling aimed at people that would find fantasy literature to be, like, totally boring. Unfortunately, it’s backed by a story that’s shallow, tonally at odds with the setting and situation, and ultimately pointless. For the second time this year, I’ve gone into what looks like a really interesting game only to be deeply disappointed when I discover that it is written with all the depth and maturity of a YA novel.
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