I want to talk about Fae tactics today. I kind of want to talk about more than that, but let’s start off by talking about Fae tactics. It’s the newest offering from endless fluff games, who in the past put out Valdis story, a game that’s still one of my favourites to this day. Fae tactics follows on in the tradition of final fantasy tactics, tactics ogre, and I’m sure other things with tactics in their name. The game came out to middling reviews.
We follow around Peony, and do combat on a grid with a party of 3 + 3 helpers you can throw in from the games cast of generic enemies. To begin with, you don’t get locked into menus like you would in the usual tactics game, instead everything being based on your character. You get an attack which works the way you think it might, a wait skill that buffs you up, and an ally skill that buffs your friends up. On top of that the main party members also get 2 more skills using the games version of meter, a buffed attack and an ultimate. And just to get it out of the way, the games beautiful, the music is good, the cast is likable and the story was fun. It’s not Moby dick. Don’t expect the whale.
You get spells which act as cooldown based big abilities, and there’s a big elemental septagon you’re trying to play around, which means picking good helper Fae in each fight is important, since there’s a lot of countering and the like going on. Every character has a bunch of traits that change how they do things, bird fly, arrows are good at shooting down things that fly, etcetera etcetera.
Here we get to our first troublesome non-issue, the menulessness. I really like the fact that the game is stripped back in its UI elements. We don’t get bogged into the menus in menus problem you happen on in a lot of rpgs, but all of your characters still have a lot of roles they can fulfil in a fight. It isn’t the 45 spells per character thing you usually get in games like this though. We don’t have the white mage using curaga in the back row, or the dark knight with cool sword attacks, you have complex game pieces, with a variety of modifiers, that remain pretty easy to control. It’s kind of the opposite of what you get in classic tactics games in a lot of ways. Usually a character will use their best ability as their resource of choice allows, so all of that menu surfing is always to get to the same place. Fae tactics it looks much more like a baby game but all my characters need to do all 3 of their actions to do their job properly in a fight. The mechanic of holding an action so you can act later is used even when grinding for materials, they use every part of the animal so to speak. Some people like using the big spell to make a big number pop up more though. That’s not a problem, and is a large factor in the feeling of funness for a lot of people who loves this genre, but it doesn’t have to be the only factor.
The game is pretty hard. It starts off easy but the enemies level up with you meaning you can’t really escape the difficulty curve. I never get why games do this to be honest, dragon age origins had a similar system. I think I like it when games do the thing of it just being easier at higher levels because you out scale your enemies, but it definitely isn’t the case in Fae tactics. I think overall you do get stronger per level than the enemy encounters, especially around power spikes around level multiples of 25, but it mostly seems to be a mechanism for giving you more customisation as opposed to more power. You can upgrade generic pieces of gear that gives your entire team buffs, which means that's kind of what the power progression is about. I maxed out everything almost immediately.
I think you may get the picture as to why this might suck for fans of the tactics genre. For the most part, in the classic versions of these games, you eat massive shit for the first couple encounters and then scale absolutely through the roof. That is a lot of the appeal for me too, but there can and should be more than just a few appeals in something as wide as a genre. Fae tactics had the lowest percentage of time spent in autopilot in one of these I’ve ever had, especially on hard. Certainly I would have liked to turn all my characters into nutso map nukers, but I learnt more about the game as I went on and I just made smarter choices with what I already had, to get some nutso combos that were there the whole time. Maybe the real treasure were the brain cells we made along the way.
I remember this square enix rpg, the last remnant, that actively makes the game harder the more you grind. It felt like a pretty weird thing to do at the time, but I guess it makes sense that you make the game easy for people who want to get through it as fast as possible, and harder for the people wanting to spend more time on it. I don’t want that mechanic to come back mind you, but I can see where it comes from. It isn’t the case here but in a genre spell bound by exploring just how busted your team can get, it may as well be.
Of course its not perfect, for the same reasons why it isn’t like other games in the genre. Levelling up can feel meaningless and missions can be obtusely hard with little to nothing you can do outside of it to better your chances. You don’t get any stronger as the game goes on, it’s just hard mission after hard mission in an engine that doesn’t offer you anywhere near as much choice as you were expecting. If you don’t try to engage with the games world and story, it can feel meaningless, and if the gameplay is actively trying to be not what you came in for, it can feel like a slap in the face. It has a huge cast of characters, playable and otherwise. It also has a very long campaign, but that can be a detriment for people trying to get through the game fast or keep a core party. In short I think the game is technically excellent, albeit a bit slow, but it’s design choices are like barbs for fans of the genre.
If you like games that look like this, no doubt you’ve seen things like Disgaea or Xcom ufo defense. The thing about those games is, the people who liked them are still playing them. Disgaea has a new game come out every 3 or so years that’ll take a decade to properly get to the end of, and the Xcom guys gave up on every other video game a long time ago. Final fantasy tactics fans either haven’t accepted their admittedly very extra boy, or don’t want to get past the first 10 hours of FF tactics advanced again. I don’t blame them.
I loved A2, and advanced as well, but it’s a shame that so many games become casualties of not living up to those titles’ design philosophies. La Pucelle and tactics ogre are long gone. It’s deeply disappointing that so many classics have had noone come to succeed them, and in Front missions case, actively try to forget about them. Maybe phantom brigade will be good who knows.
Now I’m not saying people are wrong to not like the game, or they have bad taste. That’s what I came into the review feeling, but playing it some more and thinking about it I think it comes down to an aesthetic of taste. Some people come into this genre open mindedly and attach to certain elements, and I’m a victim of that as much as the next person. After playing so much dark crusade, dawn of war 2 offended me pretty badly when I tried it for the first time, and I still haven’t managed to give it much more of a shot than beating the campaign. But it is sad that you can’t put the word tactics in your title without getting put into a metaphorical Bermuda triangle. All that being said it’s still very positive on steam, it’s just that all the longest reviews are negative ones from fans of the classics.
Fae tactics has offered something new, exciting and worthwhile but got swept up in not being the same progression heavy team trainer as its predecessors. While carrying influences to do something different can work in other genres, it’s frustrating to see it not work in tactics. I haven’t played gears tactics or Othercide yet, but I’m sure they’re serviceable Xcoms, and Disgaea and sons continue to do better than ever. Fire emblem has had a resurgence, and advanced wars has had war groove take up its mantle. But still, no final fantasy tactics.
While others may have seen Fae tactics as stumbling off the shoulders of giants, I see a game that’s quite tall on its own merits, but nonetheless has a slight hunch. If it came out in 2005, we’d love it for all the intricacy and beauty it managed to cram into a well polished parcel, but nowadays it seems to have been lost in the tide of fans looking for a successor. I have an extra key because of that, so if you got here first, comment “wow Fae tactics seems like a cool game” and I’ll shoot you the key for it. This was supposed to be a video review but editing sucks, but I think you can do the same thing on Medium. And also thanks for getting this far, hopefully I’ll be seeing you around.
