Talking About Tactics Games

A little bit of a departure, though very much deserving of a post on this blog. I'll come back to more Windows 8 review in a while; I figure I'd do more of a "1 month later" review and cover a few more topics I think are important as far as navigating around and playing with an operating system. Today, I wanted to get a little bit of an idea out there on the topic of tactics games. I'm sure you've all played them, or at the very least have heard of them. For reference, some of my favorite tactics games out there (though the list of which I've gone through is far longer than this): Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, Ogre Battle, Vandal Hearts, Suikoden, and Shining Force.

Just a few broad ideas to be thrown out here, and I'm curious to hear your ideas too. So shout out in the comments if you feel like talking about this. I was just recently asked to name one thing I love about tactics games they all have in common, one thing I really dislike about them, and one thing I wish they could implement or improve on when it came to tactics games. So here that goes. After the jump.

Pretty damned ashamed I didn't include a picture of Shining Force II before this edit.
My bad, favorite tactics game of my childhood. My bad completely.

LOVE
Infinite turn-based time. Yes, I know this practically defines the genre as a whole. However, I've seen some games try to go against this (in like, multiplayer tactics games, etc). Basically, what I mean by this is that the game allows you to look over the entire battlefield, all the terrain advantages/disadvantages, unit stats, and think for however long you'd like. There's no pressure. This is a tactics game. There's no time limit, there's no need to hurry your pace. You can play at exactly how fast or slow you feel like playing. Go make a sandwich, it's ok. Take the dog out. It's cool. The game will be there when you get back. I'm a tactitioner at heart, so this is the main draw of these games for me. I like to think about what's to come, where I want to set up, and the silly things I might want to try because why the heck not? Having infinite time to go through the possibilities is fantastic.

Don't like that answer? Think it's far too general? Ok. Then I'll throw something else out there. Difficulty level. I've never played one tactics game where I blew through it and thought "Whoa, that was one easy as heck game." I don't know what it is about tactics games, but the difficulty level is always just right. The game might start out fairly simple and easy, but the game always gets more difficult and progresses to a state where playing through levels is challenging. I think this differentiates tactics games from a lot of other games too, where finding a broken answer actually takes time and effort and work. And even if that broken answer exists, unlike other games where I write the game off with "bad game design," I will generally be more lenient on a tactics game because usually the fun of playing isn't the same as constantly winning whilst doing one thing. I don't even always play tactics games for the story. I play to play. Most of the time I don't even care why I'm on that battlefield. Sort of like games of Magic. Lore be damned, it's me vs the other side and I want to win.

DISLIKES
Limiting views with camera angles. There are some tactics games out there that do pretty awfully with camera angles. When it is your prerogative to get a look at every nook and cranny on the map, having a limit on camera angles feels... bad. Now, this can be even as simple as the terrain height differences in Disgaea (ok, HOW deep is that ONE tile right there?!?) to pillars blocking your point of view no matter how many times you rotate the map in Vandal Hearts (pillar... pillar... pillar... Ok, you know what? I'm just gonna avoid that entire section on the map. They can suck it). Also, keep in mind what platform the tactics game is on. The same game that looked and worked great and fine on my tv through my playstation with a playstation controller... DOES NOT FUNCTION THE SAME on my smart phone that has a display that's approximately 1/50th the size as my tv, has no tangible buttons to speak of, and now I *really* can't see what I want to see.

SOMETHING TO IMPLEMENT

CLOSE! ...But not quite, Geomancer

Some games do this, and I think other games would benefit from this. Terrain. Manipulation. Imagine a tactics game where terrain is important, right? Well, what if... you could manipulate terrain (as a class or something -- Final Fantasy Tactics had the Geomancer - pretty close to what I'm talking about) either to your advantage or to the enemy's deterrent during battle? What if there was an engineer class that could build turrets over time, dig holes, destroy terrain, and build bridges? Would be cool, right? Just a thought.




Shout out and chime in with comments, below. Thanks everyone.