Fae Tactics - SRPG by creator of Valdis Story

[Abu Antar]

 

[Abu Antar]

Releasing this fall.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[CryptRat]

still planned for this year

Fae Tactics update. Finding Bugs!
Posted on October 23, 2019 by Caro!

Hello, our most dedicated fans!

First, thank you for being so patient.

It has been way too long since we last posted. As of this moment the game development mostly consists of playtesting and bug correcting. All content is in and just has to be tested for experience.

This go around is different. We have the help of Humble Bundle, our publisher. So we have a QA team going through the game in its entirety and reporting bugs to us. I can’t tell you how much having a publisher has been helpful in that regard. Especially for us … we are two game devs … and a baby. Even with their help we’ve been playing it a lot to find anything we can too. We still find things! I always am happy to find something wrong but of coarse it’s not such a joyous occasion for Kyron lol! Either way the bugs are trickling in less and less.

There is some exciting news on the horizon… for one… a release date which is still planned for this year!

I know it can be pretty disheartening to see a dead blog. I just didn’t want to write the same thing over and over…. But why not? I promise to update you at least once a week now. These most likely won’t be huge updates, just check ins.

We are excited about being near the end of development! We are also just pretty exhausted and living the frugal life! It’s funny when we started this game we thought of it as a small little game. “A pixel art tactics game, it will be faster to make than Valdis Story!” But we sort of fell in love with it and it just got pretty big.

Anyway that’s all for now- Talk to you soon!

Cheers!

Carolina<3

PS: If you haven’t already Wishlist Fae Tactics on Steam and let your friends know!

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[J1M]

Switch seems perfect for this.

 

[Siveon]

Oh yeah I definitely want this for Switch. Would be just like playing Disgaea or FFT on my PSP.

 

[Abu Antar]

If you're subbed to Humble Choice, a demo of this is included.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

Steam demo is out.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Finished the demo.
Game is pretty much what they've shown so far, rather simple and shallow on character build side and some levels were a bit on puzzle side.
Felt rather fun actually.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Achelexus]

Chances it'll be good?

 

[Farewell into the night]

50/50

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/fae-tactics-review/

FAE TACTICS REVIEW
Fae Tactics revives and simplifies the 60-hour tactics JRPG.

Fae Tactics lays out building blocks that most turn-based strategy players are already familiar with: elemental rock-paper-scissors, creature collecting, and combo attacks. From there, it subtracts a lot of menus, creating a stripped down and faster experience than classics like Final Fantasy Tactics. But what took longer to set in was what I came to see as the core aspect of the game—the idea that I wasn’t assembling a team like XCOM, but a toolbox. Nabbing new summons in Fae Tactics wasn’t up there with naming my alien-fighting marines after friends, but my weird menagerie had their own charms.

As Peony, you start out fixing your broken down motorcycle and then get drawn into witches, kingdoms, and an ancient war between humans and fae. Amid this conflict, Peony's searching for her mother. But I actually found that the strange smaller stories—like a boxing chicken trying to beat a corrupt mafioso—were the most entertaining to me. Fae’s DNA is entwined with other JRPG and anime-inspired games, but it scribbles a silly face on its post-apocalypse faerie world and doesn’t drown in long dialogues.

As a strategy game, Fae Tactics lets you get comfortable in a routine for a few battles, then upsets that routine. Elemental enemies approach in a squad out for blood, environments supercharge one particular type of enemy, and traps and features of the battlefield range from amusing to deadly. Some of these challenges are painful the first time you encounter them, resulting in difficult battles if I didn’t adapt my party composition or tactics. In one case I watched bemused as the battlefield turned into a pinball table, flipper traps throwing my poor unit around and dumping him, poisoned, in front of the boss and halfway across the map from me.

Other times, I found ways to turn enemies’ traps against them. One time a gremlin was operating a cannon covering the bridge over a pond, with another enemy blocking the far side. After my two attempts were spent getting blasted by cannon fire, knocked into the water, and thoroughly embarrassed by the gremlin squad, I started my strategy over. This time I swapped my summoned units out for a pair of flying ones, who merrily flew across the water to clear out the living roadblock so I could safely run across. The gremlin manning the cannon continued to fire at the same empty bridge for the rest of the battle. You do you, little guy.

The most frustrating thing I encountered in Fae Tactics is a familiar gaming trope: protection missions. These friendly NPCs often had a different idea of the battle plan than I did, and would run away out of my healing range just to perform some weak elemental attack. About half of my lost battles were due to these friendlies getting absolutely nuked by a lucky ultra crit or simply running directly into danger. These setbacks weren’t so frustrating that they stopped me from wanting to swing at the next summon-piñata, though, and my drive to continue to add new options to my stable was high.

Sometimes I missed the lack of more in-depth customization or abilities for my characters, a genre staple in games like Disgaea. Summon units (creatures, basically) and leader units have simple standardized abilities on attack, assist, and wait, and there are no classes to advance in. Summons use preset abilities, and leaders can only advance on three passive paths—essentially offense, defense, and other. With the only customization being my choice of unlocked weapons and one other equipment slot, I often wished I could take my favorite leader and tweak them with more options, but Fae Tactics is deliberately streamlined, nixing nested menus in favor of the feeling that you’re bringing a small toolbox into each encounter. Fae Tactics wants you to find good strategies, but it doesn’t want you complacent in them.

This less-is-more approach fits well with the flow of combat. With most abilities being passive effects (regenerating HP per round, walking on water, etc), I quickly learned the grammar of the grid. This left me free to make active decisions—should my unit attack to trigger a combo, assist to set up my next move, or wait? I’ve recommended many tactical RPGs to friends over the years, and have heard before that the layers of menus were too much for them. If you’ve had this issue, Fae Tactics has been designed to sidestep it entirely. Battles themselves still take between 20 and 40 minutes, but you won’t spend so much of it selecting and confirming things.

My most rewarding moments were battles where I brought just the right composition of units—you pick three powerful leaders, three simpler summons, and three spells to bring into combat immediately before each fight. After surveying the battlefield and selecting, I could position my melee units to set off combos that would land multiple back attacks and crits in a rapid-fire blitz of damage. I like how this feels, like I’m in command of my ultimate strategy, but it wasn’t effortless—I’d often have to respond to unexpected reinforcements. In one case, I was down to just my battered trio of leader units after surviving the initial wave, and the enemy was regenerating so quickly that the battle was slipping away. Careful maneuvering and luck earned me a great set of crits and an Ultra against them, but failed to seal the final 13 damage. The boss, a fairy creature, wound up another poison blast against me, and not only did my dog pal Chico use his defender ability to block the damage, but counter-attacked to finish the job. See you later, tinkerbell.

As for the characters themselves, Peony the totally-not-a-witch and her growing band of misfits are pretty endearing. Her starting companion Chico, a lovable dog with a dopey look on his face, quickly became my favorite for how good he was at protecting the rest of my squad. Peony’s search to discover what happened to her mother isn’t all that gripping, but it’s a good excuse to explore Fae's anime-sketchbook world. I gravitated toward the story quests, finding that they were more interesting and had better designed battles full of new circumstances and hazards. Plus, even the side quests I embarked on also had small arcs that would often reward me with a new leader, or some new equipment. The difficulty curved fairly evenly following the main story and doing most of the side quests, and I rarely found myself needing to even look at the random battles for grinding XP. Not being able to save during strings of battles was a serious problem at several points, forcing me to repeat several battles if I didn’t want to leave the game running for long periods.

While the story occupied a lot less of the game than the combat, I found it impossible not to love some of the weird menagerie of animals I was collecting. There’s a nostalgia about the quirky creatures and vibrant colors that makes even the weirdest of the creatures appealing. Part of me wants to slide their character portraits into a card binder like I did with my favorite Pokémon when I was little. Except Chico. He’s going in the display case with my holographic Charizard.

THE VERDICT
77

FAE TACTICS
Fae Tactics takes an enjoyable swing at streamlining a complex genre, but doesn’t reinvent it in the process.

 

[Infinitron]

Released:




https://af.gog.com/game/fae_tactics?as=1649904300

 

[Kruno]

This looks really good. I am watching the videos but undecided because I do not know how deep the gameplay is. Are we talking about Disgaea-esque or FF:T feel for the game? It looks a lot more like Disgaea than FF:T to me, but that is only from a 30s video.

EDIT:

 

[flyingjohn]

Guys,get the release build of the game of the web since the first updates are gonna kill the difficulty fast.

 

[Thac0]

Guys,get the release build of the game of the web since the first updates are gonna kill the difficulty fast.

Hmmh there is little more frustrating than starting a hard game, and having it patched to be easier a week in when you have mastered it already, turning the remaining game into a deflated baloon.
However this might crash and burn if noone gets it early, since initial reaction seems to be bad, and 0 reviews after 1 hour isnt good for the steam algorithm.
I am gonna look into this more tomorrow, it has been on my steam wishlist for an eternity and a half.

Also I just got whiplash from reading a normal Kruno post.

 

[flyingjohn]

This looks really good. I am watching the videos but undecided because I do not know how deep the gameplay is. Are we talking about Disgaea-esque or FF:T feel for the game? It looks a lot more like Disgaea than FF:T to me, but that is only from a 30s video.

EDIT:

A minion that buffs up a boss is present on the stage and when you attack it ,it teleport away.He rage quit after that.
HAHAHAHAHAHAH.

 

[CryptRat]

I'll buy it on GoG, I am not sure the devs get more money when buying those games directly on The Humble Store but I just noticed that buying the games published by The Humble Store directly on The Humble Store only gives you a Steam Key and no DRM-free download, it's especially weird since these games are sold on GoG so there's no will not to sell the games DRM-free.

 

[Thac0]

This looks really good. I am watching the videos but undecided because I do not know how deep the gameplay is. Are we talking about Disgaea-esque or FF:T feel for the game? It looks a lot more like Disgaea than FF:T to me, but that is only from a 30s video.

EDIT:

A minion that buffs up a boss is present on the stage and when you attack it ,it teleport away.He rage quit after that.
HAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Thats such a basic bitch boss mechanic aswell, completely bog standard for the genre. Has that popamole never played an SRPG before? The mechanic is absolutely fine and one of the reason that movement and effective attack range are good stats. Also from watching the few jumps in the video I am sure the totem does not choose the jump coordinates randomly but favours closer jumps to mapwide jumps.
Also he complains about permanent max hp buffing? Of all the stats to be buffed max HP is the least threatening lol. Does he want the boss to be nothing but a statcheck he can't lose, Final Fantasy 4-6 american version style? God these people give JRPG fans a bad rep.




Anyway seems like this game is picking up rather nicely. 50 Reviews in a day is fine, 75% positive is meh but at least its still blue. Any codexers had their hands on it already?