What are your favorite Tactical RPGs?
What are your favorite Tactical RPGs?
Looking to ask for people's favorite tactical RPGs because I have played a bunch but never really gotten into any. XCOM, Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Advance Wars, Fallout, etc.
Looking to see what other people love so I can convince myself to try something new or try something again.
Out of what I've played, Into the Breach was my favorite. Very dense, and the positioning is really important. The only one I actually finished.
If you enjoyed Into the Breach, take a look at Tactical Breach Wizards. Not much of an RPG, but the combat is similar to ITB. Not as difficult though.
For some reason I read Tactical Breach Wizards and thought of Sexy Battle Wizards, and I just thought, that's a cool recommendation but why here?
My favorite series is disgaea, but I wouldn't recommend it to most people, it's over the top game breaking silliness.
Chroma-squad is often overlooked, but captures a lot of what name 90s trpg's great and improves on the formula quite a bit.
The absolute best trpg imo is "bionic dues", I feel like it you enjoyed into the breach you should definitely give bionic dues a shot, it's such a different style of game,
What's the one in the picture? Also, how do I read alt text on Summit?
Picture is of "Front Mission" (1995). I've never played or heard of it, tbh it is just taken from the Wikipedia page for tactical RPG.
Front Mission was pretty fun, and it looks like there's a remaster available that shines it up a bit. I don't remember much about the plot, but you build and outfit a squad of mechs, and you can specialize them for guns, or melee, or rockets or what have you.
Ooh, thank you. It looks cool.
Shining Force is a classic. Basically Seva's answer to Fire Emblem.
Wargroove is pretty good too. Kind of like Advance Wars, but in a more medieval fantasy setting. From an indie dev with pixel art. My only real complaint is one I have with all modern "retro pixel art" style games: the "pixels" can move by much smaller increments than themselves. I wish games that used that style would align everything, including animation, to the fake pixels. It looks kind of busy and messy imo. It doesn't bother me enough to ruin Wargroove though.
Banner Saga was pretty good. It's a combination of tactical RPG with mostly text-based choose-your-own-adventure style elements between battles. Still haven't played the 3rd one, but I enjoyed the first 2.
Loved Shining Force since I watched my brother and his friend play all night after renting it from Blockbuster in the early 90s! I’ve played 1 and 2 a few times over the years and always had fun.
I love Tactical Breach Wizards, which is somewhere between Into the Breach and Invisible Inc (also amazing).
Thanks for this rec, it looks delightful!
Jagged Alliance 2 (especially with the 1.13 mod) is the most ludicrously detailed tactical RPG you'll ever find. It can be a nightmare to actually play until you spend many, many hours learning all its systems, but nothing else comes close immersion-wise. You can customize every mercenary's loadout down to individual weapon attachments, capturing different parts of the map gives bonuses that actually make sense (like being able to ship in weapons once you've taken the airport), you can train militias to hold onto captured sectors for you, and you can even use the in-game internet to send flowers to the main villain.
Yeah, I really liked JA2. The UI is pretty elderly today, though.
I haven't been very impressed with some of the subsequent attempts to revive the series, though I still haven't gotten around to playing Jagged Alliance 3 yet, and that has much better scores than some of the intervening releases, like Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. If you haven't tried JA3 yet either, you might consider taking a look.
EDIT: Oh, wait, yes I did play it, because I remember the intro mission that they have screenshots of.
I don't recall finishing the game, though. I should go back and see what my status in that game is. Thanks for making me think of it.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, above all else.
That being said, Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 1 and 2 are awesome. They combine SRPGs with the usual SMT combat - I don't think I've found something similar yet.
You move around like you would in any other SRPG, then you can attack enemies in range to enter normal turn based combat - however, at most, you can only play out 2 full turns before combat ends. Afterwards the next unit moves. Each unit represents a squad of up to three characters you will be batteling with, usually a human and two demons. Depending on your squad, you may have different movement, range and abilities.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, above all else.
Yes. The day is full of moments. (Relevant Penny Arcade)
X-Com - UFO Defense and TFTD are definitely my favorite. Fallout 1&2 are a close second and I've been meaning to play through them again. Ogre Battle is a distant third, with Front Mission right behind it.
There's a reason why oldschool X-Com players kept coming back to the games despite technical issues like the Groundhog Day bug. (Thank all applicable deities for OpenXcom solving those issues, though.)
Absolutely loved both of them! I think UFO Defense was the first pc game I played on our first 486. It was one of the first games I ever successfully hacked.
Not sure how many people know, but there's another game from Gollop, Rebelstar Tactical Command for Gameboy Advance. It's part of the Rebelstar series dating back to the ZX Spectrum. It plays pretty much the same as the original XCom games.
Wasteland 3 is really good, baldurs gate 3 kinda, darkest dungeon, Valkyrie chronicles 1 & 4
I enjoyed Wasteland 3 a great deal too.
Advance Wars, of course.
I haven't seen any mention of "Steamworld: Heist", yet. It's a very different sort of game engine, but scratches the same itch.
Another good one that’s more recent is Triangle Strategy. Positioning is important. Great story. Very similar to FFT but FFT is better overall. Still a great game and more modern.
I'm a weirdo, so Massive Chalice.
It has a strange high-concept premise where you are an immortal ruler defending against a monstrous army that only attacks every decade or so. Any surviving individual squad member will only be able to go on a handful of missions before aging out, so you are also managing familial bloodlines to birth new soldiers, while controlling for genetic and social traits that get passed down. I love the uniqueness and big ideas. It's far from perfect, but you asked for favorite not the best.
Wildermyth was very enjoyable, it's not as deep and well written as some of the others mentioned but still held my attention long enough to finish it.
Pretty unique art style and it felt relatively challenging throughout.
I second that opinion. It seemed shallow and easy at the beginning, but turned out to be a really entertaining and challenging game. I also love how the characters age, develop, and eventually retire.
I also love how the characters age, develop, and eventually retire.
They can also turn up again in later campaigns. This lends well to both the story and team-building aspects of the game, and is one of the things that sets Wildermyth apart from superficially similar games.
Tactical RPG's are my favorite genre of games, and Tactics Ogre (not Ogre Battle) in any of it's many iterations is my favorite. No game is perfect but it does so many things so, so well. Matsuno's magnum opus. The latest version, Tactics Ogre Reborn added high quality voice acting which I really love.
I've had my eye on Tactics Ogre Reborn for a while now, but haven't bought yet since it seemingly won't go below 50% off, and the reviews say some of the later missions are pretty stacked against you, forcing you to play a certain way. Thoughts on this?
There's a hilariously drawn out postgame/endgame challenge dungeon type thing that's like 100+ straight battles.
But the main game is solidly worth the full price, quite honestly. Any sale you find is just helping your budget.
There are a few specific missions that are indeed stacked against you, but they are important story missions that are like boss fights. You don't have to play them a specific way to beat them at all, people just get too caught up in playing these games in cookie cutter ways sometimes and now you get site created by AI slop that just regurgitate it.
The game gives you all the tools you need and more to complete every map, and it's up to you how to use them. Character builds are very flexible and adjustable before each map to fit the situation, so if you're getting stuck somewhere it might be time to rethink your strategy.
A concrete example from my first playthrough: I was facing a large group of beasts and kept losing and losing. Up until then I had just been bringing my favorite characters in terms of personality, but when I instead brought a heavy phalanx frontline to keep my guys in the back safe, that encounter became a breeze since the enemy was too slow to even touch my backline.
The game isn't particularly difficult, but there's lots of this in the game. Facing undead? Bring someone who can do exorcism. The enemy has a lot of archers? Equip weapons/skills that let you deflect arrows. I am simplifying, and there's always more than one solution to each problem, but you're going to need to plan for each map before you go in.
Not my all-time fav, but I like it a lot and it's kinda slept-on: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars for the 3DS. It's got a lot in common with X-COM -- heck, Julian Gollop was even the producer on it.
FFTactics like others was my favorite.
I quite enjoyed into the breach.
I bought a couple of tactics like games on steam and they all dont seem to be fun to me. I guess I like to grind a bit on fair but punishing tactics titles.
My favorite is the original Final Fantasy Tactics, hands down. I also liked XCOM 1, Advance Wars, Ogre Battle 64, Unicorn Overlord, Fire Emblem 3 Houses, and probably a few others I can't think of right now.
I'm playing Last Spell right now, isometric base defense game. Lots of viable ways to play, but later missions become a slog if you don't plan out hero builds. A run takes 5-10 hours, but rounds take 20 minutes. Emphasis on crowd control and positioning.
Darkest Dungeon is nice if you want a break from isometric stuff, dungeon crawler, emphasis on team combat and resource management.
Creeper World III if you want to try RTS style, lots of community maps.
Tactical Breach Wizards, Come in through a window, throw everyone else out the window. Silly, but fun.
I like the disgaea series not only because of the deep systems involved, but also just because gameplay is so snappy. So many SRPGs are slow as molasses in terms of interface. I also really enjoyed Unicorn Overlord recently.
Laser Squad, playing couch hot-seat is what sent me down this path.
I really liked Jagged Alliance 2, Afterlight and especially X-COM: Apocalypse. Apocalypse had such radical departures from the first two Ufo titles, which did not make it very well liked among enthusiasts, in particular the real-time battle mode. But the game had such fun mechanics and steep difficulty curve, I really enjoyed the challenge of it, as opposed to getting another Enemy Unknown clone that was TFTD.
Just can't beat The Shining Force games. Can't.
Fallout Tactics remains my favorite Fallout.
Syndicate from 1993. Don't know if that fulfills the "RPG" part of Tactical RPG but it's definitely worth a play.
Yes! I loved playing this game on our old 486.
I feel like it had RPG elements with the soldier upgrades and equipment. There was progression in what your characters could do. This game was amazing, I'd love a remake of this with some small graphical and quality of life improvements.
Tuned Heart - PC-9801
Koudelka - PS1
Jean D'Arc - PSP
XCOM 2 - Steam
My favorites are probably the Disgaea series and related games (Makai Kingdom, Phantom Brave) and Tactics Ogre. I also like Tactics Ogres more popular little brother, Final Fantasy Tactics.
Currently playing Tactical Breach Wizards. It's not really "hardcore" the way XCOM is, which suits my lifestyle right now.
I was a big final fantasy tactics guy back in the day. I it was my first into to tactical. RPGs, and I was already in love with final fantasy III and VII by then, so it made sense. My buddy also had Vandal Hearts and that was awesome too! Can't say I played much more beyond that.
I rather enjoyed Gears Tactics a few years ago.
I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It's not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you've seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you've played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.
Wargroove is very good.
The only game that I've ever played like this is SNES' game Ball Bullet Gun, it was like 12 yeas ago. It doesn't have a story. You make your team, and play against another player. Playing it alone is kinda boring.
Not my fav by any means, but I've really been enjoying the Kriegsfront Tactics demo this week.
Vandal Hearts on PS1. I think its probably not as good as I remember, but I was a small child and it said the word "Bastard" and that was the most adult media I'd been (unknowingly) allowed to consume. I played that game hard.
There was an old one on the first sega console controlling different knights on a board. It was the first game of its kind i played but could never remember what it was.