Media Thread: Wild Tactics Demo

So I was waiting for this game since I saw that trailer over a year ago.

I was excited to see this morning that the Demo had finally come out, so I went to give it a shot. My first experience with it was... rough, to say the least.

Firstly, maybe this is just a "Modern Era of Gaming" thing, but it seems poorly optimized. Strategy RPGs shouldn't take that much Memory/RAM to run because it's all turn-based, but this thing is runs at a snail's pace unless I turn it to the lowest setting (1280x720). Sure my setup is a shitty eight-year-old laptop that's literally JUST my daily driver, but it has 20GB of RAM, so that should mean something.

Onto the polish of the game itself, that's also pretty scuffed. The 2D Artwork is immaculate, with a sharp and striking style that clearly illustrates each character's personality. This is countered by the character's 3D models which are bland and lifeless. This seems to be in the pursuit of realism, because each model looks like what a human with an animal head looks like with fur to match. This is made slightly worse by the Voice Acting. Now, most of the time the characters sound pretty solid. Nobody sounds particularly annoying, and some characters have accents to help them stand out. However, sometimes the intonation of certain phrases seem a little... off. Like, the line is delivered to be a joke, but it just sounds a little flat. Or something is meant to be a reply, but it sounds like an initial statement. It's not so egregious that it's distracting, but it very much feels like they could have used a few more takes.

Gameplay is pretty solid. I've played a few SRPGs/TRPGs (Fire Emblem, Massive Chalice, Shining Force, etc.), but I've only ever beaten a few (the 3DS Fire Emblem games). Even still, this seems pretty alright. You have two Action Points (AP) to move, attack, and use abilities. Each character has their own gimmick to make them stand out, and they have both ranged attacks that can hit at range but do little damage, as well as melee attacks that do a lot more damage but require a distance of 1 tile. There are also "Friendship Bonuses", where two characters with positive relationships can get a bonus. The only ones I've seen is "Heal when you Crit", and "Increase Accuracy when these two are close together", but not every character has relationships with others so not every character gets a bonus; so they seem like they might become more helpful when the mechanic is fleshed out. While it's not blowing me out of the water, I can't deny that it's pretty fun.

Now, this might be a little thing, but it's something that caught my attention and distracted me while I was playing: The Timeline. In combat, there is a Timeline at the top of the screen that shows turn order. It shows off your characters from fastest to slowest, as well as your enemies in the same order. Each character has two AP, and this is shown as pink dots under their portrait. At first this seems cool, until you realize that hitting TAB lets you pass your turn along without using up AP. This allows for much more freedom of strategy, but it screws with the Timeline a little bit. If you look, it'll remove the fastest character from the turn-order, and imply that you've used up their turn. This is pretty disorienting, and I'm not a fan. Personally, considering that they enemies aren't fast enough to disrupt your turn, I think this could be easily replaced with a "Your Turn / Enemy Turn" phase counter that just denotes how much AP your party members still have. This way it still clearly denotes how much AP you have left to use without confusing the player. Just a small thing, but it was disorienting me the whole time.

And lastly: Saving is confusing. You can't save manually, and it is unclear when the game is autosaving, so when I had to do other things around my house I ended up just pausing the game and leaving it going while I left to do other things. This turned about 2-3 hours of gameplay into 8.3 hours logged into Steam. A dedicated "Save" button would really help.

Overall, not too enthused about this game. While the gameplay is serviceable and the artwork is fantastic, the overall experience leaves something to be desired. I can't call it a "Bad" experience by any means, but it very much wears its flaws on its sleeves.

6/10