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.
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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.
Oooh, I got you OP. If you liked the dense micro-maps of Into the Breach, check out Bad North. Defend small islands from waves of invaders with limited troops. Not an overly long game, but very satisfying for what it is.
Tuned Heart - PC-9801
Koudelka - PS1
Jean D’Arc - PSP
XCOM 2 - Steam
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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Job system is fun too, just unfortunate the later Heroes stomp over created characters
And the music is incredible
That’s fine. Created characters are strong enough to beat the game with. I only played through it 2 times, but my second run I used as few named chars as possible. I created my team based on Seiken Densetsu 3 characters.
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.
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,
