- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,576
Tags: Dandylion; Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children
We could easily have missed the Korean crimefighting tactical RPG Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children when it was released back in 2020, hiding over there in the JRPG forum with its anime graphics and dodgy online features. But we didn't, and the game made its mark, earning the prestigious third place in our GOTY poll for that year. Troubleshooter's landmark feature is its incredibly elaborate character system, which is based on collecting abilities from defeated enemies as item drops. Even forum veteran Grunker, an inveterate hater of anime aesthetics in all their aspects, found the game to be a masterpiece of system design. He contributed this review after spending a cool 308 hours playing it.
Read the full article: RPG Codex Review: Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children is like the best goddamned game ever made
We could easily have missed the Korean crimefighting tactical RPG Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children when it was released back in 2020, hiding over there in the JRPG forum with its anime graphics and dodgy online features. But we didn't, and the game made its mark, earning the prestigious third place in our GOTY poll for that year. Troubleshooter's landmark feature is its incredibly elaborate character system, which is based on collecting abilities from defeated enemies as item drops. Even forum veteran Grunker, an inveterate hater of anime aesthetics in all their aspects, found the game to be a masterpiece of system design. He contributed this review after spending a cool 308 hours playing it.
The beating heart of Troubleshooter’s interconnected web of system design is Masteries. At their base level, Masteries function much like feats in Dungeons & Dragons - that is, as your character gains levels, you pick more Masteries and add them to your character sheet. Unlike feats, though, masteries have a point cost, can be switched in and out almost freely at any point outside of missions, and each belongs to one of five types (Basic, Attack, Ability, Support or Defense). A character’s training points determine how many masteries they can equip – so, say, a character with 10 training points could equip Breakthrough (3 points), Final Blow (3 points) and Mutant (4 points). Furthermore, each character has a Property Limit for each type of mastery. If our character with 10 training points from before had an Attack Property Limit of 5, he wouldn’t be able to equip both Breakthrough (3 points) and Final Blow (3 points) despite having 10 training points, because they are both Attack masteries, sum up to 6 points and his Attack Property Limit is only 5.
Each mastery adds unique effects to your character – for example, the aforementioned Breakthrough halves the Block rating of anyone trying to defend against your attacks, while Mutant turns every single debuff affecting you into a random buff at the end of your turn – but the real twist here is that if you combine certain sets of four masteries, you activate a Mastery Set. These special sets add their own effects to your character which can be anything from just granting you a flat HP bonus, to modifying one or two of the masteries that activated it, adding entirely new abilities or passive effects to your character. These mastery sets are not shown anywhere until you discover them for yourself, and I highly encourage you to play Troubleshooter blind here – at least for the main game – as there’s a very puzzle solving-like joy in identifying and finding powerful mastery sets on your own.
To draw another parallel to D&D, Mastery Sets are kind of like if you picked four feats in D&D and picking those specific, four feats added an additional, fifth feat to your character.
In addition, most of the masteries in Troubleshooter come from a shared pool of 'Common' masteries that can be equipped by any character with no prerequisites. There are class-, race- and type-masteries, but beyond those, masteries are a complete free-for-all.
Building any character in Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children is therefore a sprawling buffet of endless possibilities and combinations. You’re always chasing that perfect dream of activating the mastery sets you want while still having room for individually powerful masteries all the while having to obey property limits and spending your total, allotted training points. There’s no more inherently Troubleshooter feeling than missing just one mastery to activate a final set, meanwhile knowing that pulling out anything you’re already fielding is likely to start a domino-effect of deactivating synergies you’ve already put onto your mastery board. What any sensible person does in that situation, of course, is start completely over because if you just tweak that thing you considered before, then surely..?
It also means that you can build virtually any character in virtually any you want. Want to make the game’s default, squishy healer into your main tank? There’s almost certainly a way to do it – and in fact, the game will probably support it with a ton of masteries that enable weird and wonderful synergies exactly like that.
Yet even with all this freedom, a character’s base stats, core active abilities and masteries specific to their type will make sure that even though everyone shares this massive pool of hundreds (and hundreds, and again hundreds) of different masteries, they will still be unique. In fact, every character must choose from a whole host of class-specific masteries and advanced class masteries (which are selected from one of the two advanced classes your character can pick), as well as type-specific masteries - like Spirit masteries for Spirit-users or Fire masteries for Fire-users. On top of this, characters must choose one out of three individual, passive abilities and have base class- and advanced class passive abilities which are not part of the mastery board themselves, but which further individualize characters.
Each mastery adds unique effects to your character – for example, the aforementioned Breakthrough halves the Block rating of anyone trying to defend against your attacks, while Mutant turns every single debuff affecting you into a random buff at the end of your turn – but the real twist here is that if you combine certain sets of four masteries, you activate a Mastery Set. These special sets add their own effects to your character which can be anything from just granting you a flat HP bonus, to modifying one or two of the masteries that activated it, adding entirely new abilities or passive effects to your character. These mastery sets are not shown anywhere until you discover them for yourself, and I highly encourage you to play Troubleshooter blind here – at least for the main game – as there’s a very puzzle solving-like joy in identifying and finding powerful mastery sets on your own.
To draw another parallel to D&D, Mastery Sets are kind of like if you picked four feats in D&D and picking those specific, four feats added an additional, fifth feat to your character.
In addition, most of the masteries in Troubleshooter come from a shared pool of 'Common' masteries that can be equipped by any character with no prerequisites. There are class-, race- and type-masteries, but beyond those, masteries are a complete free-for-all.
Building any character in Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children is therefore a sprawling buffet of endless possibilities and combinations. You’re always chasing that perfect dream of activating the mastery sets you want while still having room for individually powerful masteries all the while having to obey property limits and spending your total, allotted training points. There’s no more inherently Troubleshooter feeling than missing just one mastery to activate a final set, meanwhile knowing that pulling out anything you’re already fielding is likely to start a domino-effect of deactivating synergies you’ve already put onto your mastery board. What any sensible person does in that situation, of course, is start completely over because if you just tweak that thing you considered before, then surely..?
It also means that you can build virtually any character in virtually any you want. Want to make the game’s default, squishy healer into your main tank? There’s almost certainly a way to do it – and in fact, the game will probably support it with a ton of masteries that enable weird and wonderful synergies exactly like that.
Yet even with all this freedom, a character’s base stats, core active abilities and masteries specific to their type will make sure that even though everyone shares this massive pool of hundreds (and hundreds, and again hundreds) of different masteries, they will still be unique. In fact, every character must choose from a whole host of class-specific masteries and advanced class masteries (which are selected from one of the two advanced classes your character can pick), as well as type-specific masteries - like Spirit masteries for Spirit-users or Fire masteries for Fire-users. On top of this, characters must choose one out of three individual, passive abilities and have base class- and advanced class passive abilities which are not part of the mastery board themselves, but which further individualize characters.
Read the full article: RPG Codex Review: Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children is like the best goddamned game ever made
