Mobile Android cRPG and/or Tacticool Recommendations

[LibertyRansom]

Busy life. 2 kids under 2. Only an hour here and there for gaming, and generally only on an Android phone.

I enjoyed emulating Tactics Ogre Lets us Cling Together (One Vision Mod) on my phone.

Examples of non-mobile games I like:

Spoiler

1. Fallout 1+2
2. Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines
3. Arcanum
4. Pathfinder Kingmaker
5. Eador Genesis w/ New Horizons Mod (it's an RPG, fight me)
6. Final Fantasy Tactics/Ogre Tactics Let Us Cling Together (w/ Mods)
7. Deus Ex
8. Pillars of Eternity 1
9. NWN 1 (Swordflight chapter 2 is the top module)
10. Temple of Elemental Evil
11. TOME4
12. Star Control 2
13. slay the spire
14. Trials of fire,
15. battle brothers,
16. gloomhaven,
17,. Kotor II
18. Shadowrun Dragon fall,
19. Faster than light
20. troubleshooters,
21. chrono trigger.

Can I receive recommendations for mobile games? Should be less than 2 gigs.

 

[monilloman]

both shadowrun returns and hong kong are available for android if I'm not mistaken

 

[tindrli]

the quantity of recomendations is astonishing

 

[LibertyRansom]

the quantity of recomendations is astonishing

Yea, slim pickings. I read a thread a few years old, and it basically recommended emulated JRPGs. Looking into Persona 3 portable at the moment...

Also, already played the shadow run games.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Templar Battleforce and Heroes of Steel by the Trese Brothers

These have both mobile and desktop versions. I only played the desktop version. They could end up being annoying on mobile.

Templar Battleforce is like Space Hulk, but with extensive RPG style character and equipment customization. It's also pretty challenging depending on the difficulty level, the only problem I can foresee is that it might be more annoying to play on mobile.

Heroes of Steel is an earlier game from them, it's a standard fantasy RPG with uglier graphics, but it does have challenging combat (even if it can be a bit repetitive) and relatively well crafted character building mechanics, even if they aren't the most exciting. Iron man difficulties provide a challenge for later playthroughs. It could end up being a lot of hours of kinda generic, kinda repetitive but somewhat challenging RPG combat. I eventually stopped playing but it was OK.

Templar Battleforce is definitely recommended, Heroes of Steel is more like if you really need something to do for a long time. But it does have a mobile demo. Both games do.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

ATOM RPG
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atomrpg

I don't think there are any good exclusives worth mentioning, just ports of good games.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Busy life. 2 kids under 2. Only an hour here and there for gaming, and generally only on an Android phone.

I enjoyed emulating Tactics Ogre Lets us Cling Together (One Vision Mod) on my phone.

Examples of non-mobile games I like:

Spoiler

1. Fallout 1+2
2. Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines
3. Arcanum
4. Pathfinder Kingmaker
5. Eador Genesis w/ New Horizons Mod (it's an RPG, fight me)
6. Final Fantasy Tactics/Ogre Tactics Let Us Cling Together (w/ Mods)
7. Deus Ex
8. Pillars of Eternity 1
9. NWN 1 (Swordflight chapter 2 is the top module)
10. Temple of Elemental Evil
11. TOME4
12. Star Control 2
13. slay the spire
14. Trials of fire,
15. battle brothers,
16. gloomhaven,
17,. Kotor II
18. Shadowrun Dragon fall,
19. Faster than light
20. troubleshooters,
21. chrono trigger.

Can I receive recommendations for mobile games? Should be less than 2 gigs.

My kids never used my laptop or desktop too heavily when they were under 2, aside from when they were writing up an occasional report or white paper. What seems to problem here, are they rationing your screen time with an app or what's up?

 

[AdolfSatan]

IceBlink Engine with its associated modules is all you need.

 

[vazha]

Tales of Illyria is very good, all three parts.

 

[wishbonetail]

Have the same problem, only mobile games for now. Tablet Shadowruns are pretty tiny for mobile. Almost everything else are a different variations of slot machines and time wasters.
Frankly, you dont need anything aside from MD.emu and SNES 9xEX. Theres a ton of old console games that look and play great on mobile. Here are some for Sega Genesis:
Shadowrun
Rings of Power
BuckRogers Coundown to Doomsday
Genghis Khan Clan of the Gray Wolf
Kings Bounty
D&D Warriors of eternal sun
Might and Magic 2
Phantasy Star4
Uncharted Waters New Horizons
Immortal
There are mostly jrpgs on snes like Chrono Trigger, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, Final Fantasy6

 

[koyota]

Final Fantasy Tactics
Bards Tale (Includes the original bards tales 1, 2 ,3 )
Kotor 1 / 2
The Quest (Amazing 16 years after this came out still not a better elder scrolls clone on mobile)
All the IE games
Xcom 2

Already mentioned but Atom Rpg is highly recommended, the only single player game I know of that you can move the same save file from Android -> Switch -> Consoles -> PC.

 

[Pocgels]

I've looked for years. In short, there's a LOT of garbage and very little quality. There are a handful of good games on android - none of them are RPGS. (I'll be thrilled if someone can prove me wrong).

There are some rougelikes that have decent ports. (Nethack, Dungeon crawl stone soup.)
There are a lot of trash knockoffs of slay the spire on android. I haven't found one that actually understands why that game was good.
I could recommend the battle for wesnoth port if it wasn't such a lazy port.

Considering your preferences, it really is best to emulate PSP, SNES, or GBA. All of them have good emulators available for free on android.

 

[Hobknobling]

the quantity of recomendations is astonishing

Yea, slim pickings. I read a thread a few years old, and it basically recommended emulated JRPGs. Looking into Persona 3 portable at the moment...

Also, already played the shadow run games.

The platforms are so bad that it is really not surprising. The mobile form factor is of course a bit limiting, but the main culprits are Apple and Google who are happy with doing the bare minimum to maintain their tightly locked duopoly.

Running a business that relies on Google is basically suicidal and Apple is not that much better. Single policy change can bankrupt you instantly if you even somehow magically manage to get something going on. Both companies can basically ban you entirely from all of their services on a whim and they don't do customer support even for paying customers. The app stores are your typical algorithm-driven marketplaces (like social media) where the defining factor for visibility and success is not content quality but gaming the algorithm. I love this talk:

 

[d1nolore]

Occidental Heroes is a fun little game made by a guy that was posting on Codex at the time. It’s the first game I think of that shows it can be done if devs want to stray away from the trash ADD money making schemes.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wlxd.retrorpg.android&hl=en_NZ&gl=US

 

[koyota]

The platforms are so bad that it is really not surprising.

Customer expectations are also ridiculous, if it is more than a $1, that`s TOO EXPENSIVE.
Releasing a single-player RPG on android can only be a passion project, or a really cheap cash grab.

Only exception to the rule is Japan, which is why you end up with Square-Enix releasing unheard of $40 android games day and date with switch releases

 

[V17]

There are a few pretty good native or touchscreen-first games:

Pathos: Nethack Codex - not a Nethack fork but a new roguelike heavily inspired by Nethack with less complexity and a touchscreen-based UI. It's complex enough to be close to classic roguelikes but user-friendly enough to be played on a phone. Really good and free, imo the best roguelike for smartphones.

Wyvern - An "MMORPG" which in reality is played by tens of people at once at the most, most inspired by roguelikes and MUDs. It's based on classic PvE, no rushing to the endgame or PvP stuff, so there's very little MMO cancer. Been in development on/off for like 25 years now, it's decently deep and has a ton of content, but it's realtime and recent development aimed at not losing that much money for running it brought some decline. Still fun if you can handle realtime.

The Quest - Decently known around these parts, a first person turn based single character blobber. It's kind of dumbed down compared to the classics, so I don't see a reason to play it on PC, but with phone games I often don't want to go super deep because I'm not in an environment that allows for full concentration. The Quest is still about 17x more complex than the usual retarded smartphone games, so I think it strikes a decent balance and is worth playing as a casual dungeon crawler.

I remember that Frozen Synapse used to be available for Android, that's a bit different but I enjoyed it on PC, and I've heard Door Kickers is also pretty good. But neither is a classic turn based tactics game.

 

[lametta]

2 gig? beggars cant be choosers.. so yeah:
Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus

maybe: dark quest 1 and 2

 

[Doktor Best]

Emulate Fire Emblem games

 

[AetherVagrant]

Atom Rpg as already recommended is probably the best crpg experience on Android. It doesnt need a beast of a phone but a tater tot wont cut it either.
Templar Battleforce is pretty fun and challenging, and Open Xcom if you cant run XCom2. Star Traders is kinda fun, all the Trese Brothers games are good quality attempts.

The modules for NWN are pretty good, specially Darkness over Daggerford and Tyrants of Moonsea, plus with some fiddling you can play most user modules from the Vault.

PPSSPP emulator runs srpgs quite well even on mediocre phones, the Trails games are decent jrpg fare there. along with Disgaea and all the other psp ports.

9th Dawn 3 will run on anything and is a sorta Diablo meets Ultima 7 sorts thing. It's not great but it's something.

Titan Quest has a great port if you like that sort of game, and includes all the pc expansions but is a large install.

The IE games I wouldnt even try without a tablet, though its possible, I beat Baldurs Gate 1 on a crap phone only sometimes using a mouse, but I was desperate at the time. Planescape is more playable with the easier combat and zoomed in view.
You can get really fancy and put gemrbg or other windows emulator thing on your phone and play fallout 1/2/tactics. but its clumsy.
and Kotor 1 and 2 ports are playable and the full pc experience.


wasnt clear if the 2gb limit was for ram or installation size, if the latter its going to be tough.

 

[koyota]

The IE games I wouldnt even try without a tablet, though its possible, I beat Baldurs Gate 1 on a crap phone only sometimes using a mouse, but I was desperate at the time. Planescape is more playable with the easier combat and zoomed in view.

I played it on an 8-inch screen and they were fantastic.
Was planning on buying a PSP vita just for Trails,
but how do you feel about the virtual controls for it? I generally don`t emulate because of hatred for virtual controls.

 

[wishbonetail]

The IE games I wouldnt even try without a tablet, though its possible, I beat Baldurs Gate 1 on a crap phone only sometimes using a mouse, but I was desperate at the time. Planescape is more playable with the easier combat and zoomed in view.

I played it on an 8-inch screen and they were fantastic.
Was planning on buying a PSP vita just for Trails,
but how do you feel about the virtual controls for it? I generally don`t emulate because of hatred for virtual controls.

I'll say for myself, i find it impossible to play PC games on my 7" phone, everything is pretty darn tiny. Old consoles, on the other hand, are fit right in, so i dunno.

 

[warcrimes666]

I was often in the same boat with travel and tried to set up my travel phones with things to keep occupied with varying success.

One of the best phone games to date still in my mind is the Sorcery! series. It's basically a quasi rpg choose your own adventure type hybrid that can easily be played in bursts. Probably top pick and highest quality pure phone game.

Following that I second the Ice Blink basic app with hearkenwold module which is free and Pathos as a good roguelike, also Cardinal Quest 2. Exiled Kingdoms is decent as more of an isometric style rpg. Others that have worked but not necessarily rpg/tactics would be Star Traders by Trese brothers and one of the Puzzle Quests, the earlier ones are less annoying with the phone stuff but i'm currently playing Marvel Puzzle Quest occasionally.

Other ones you might check out as far as apps are some of the Kairosoft titles which can be engaging with rpg-like progression. Boxing Gym Story, Grand Prix Story 2, Legends of Heropolis, Skyforce Unite!, Kingdom Adventures 2, and Pocket Stables while sharing some similar systems on the backend are all pretty good to play on your brief downtime.

Emulation is king on the phone. I use Snesdroid, myboy!, and PPSSPP.

Outside of the all the good ones in that area I'm sure you're aware of, because of Tactics Ogre, the best less well known suggestions that way would be Jeanne D'arc and Dungeons and Dragons Tactics on the PSP. Jeanne D'arc is basically a clone of Tactics Ogre/FFtactics with a medieval storyline and Dungeons and Dragons Tactics is one of the best implementations out there that few have played.

For PSP roms, vimms lair or ziperto

 

[Luka-boy]

Dungeons of Chaos is pretty much a love letter to Ultima and has a PC version too.

 

[newtmonkey]

Dungeons of Chaos is surprisingly decent. In addition to Ultima, the author mentioned on Steam forums that Demon's Winter was a big inspiration for the game. The game looks absolutely horrible, but there's tons to explore and it's pretty satisfying to play.

 

[Barbalos]

You can get Morrowind running on Android with an app called OpenMicrowave and some technical tinkering.

I myself use a DOS emulator called Magic Dosbox to play DOS games on my Android phone. You have to set up virtual controls which is a bit of a pain but once it's all set up it works quite well. I had Might and Magic 4-5 successfully running, as well as Betrayal at Krondor, and Ultima VII (controls for this were awful though, with right-click being move).

King of Dragon Pass is a good strategic-type RPG available for mobile.

Moonshades is a dungeon crawler I've only played a bit of, but it seemed decent. Very much like Might and Magic.