A mobile iteration of Final Fantasy Tactics‘ gameplay with a bright, cheery visual theme (as well as protagonist) along with some fairly dark storytelling, Fae Tactics ends up a pretty decent tactical RPG.
The gimmick here is that you only have 3-4 actions available at any given time; attack, assist, or wait with the possibility of casting one spell per round (depending on cooldowns). Some things can modify those base actions (Ultra attacks/assists unlock at level 10, which will replace the default action with a more powerful version), but essentially what you have at level 1 is what you’ll have at level 20. Character customization comes in the form of summon, accessory, and weapon choices (leveling simply lets you choose one of three stat groups to increase). While there are a wide range of accessories and summons acquired through combat drops, each main character only has a maximum of three weapons (unlocked through quests) and accessories usually just amount to a specific stat increase.
So the game pretty much comes down to summons… which is a bit of an issue since you can only summon 1-2 decently powerful units per battle.
The limited summons combined with only being able to field 3 party members at once means you’ll often be heavily outnumbered. With the universal action system on top of that battles end up fairly challenging and almost puzzle like; you have to figure out the best ratio of allied-to-enemy element types in order to maximize outgoing damage and minimize incoming damage (elemental affinity has a sort of rock-paper-scissors dynamic).
Currently I’m conflicted: I don’t like the visuals/protagonist or overwhelming simplicity, but the storytelling is pretty good (albeit heavy on loading screens). I like the non-linearity of the quest selection, but find the implementation overly haphazard/disjointed. I want to keep playing to see where the storyline goes, but I also don’t want to have to re-arrange my party every single battle to take advantage of element synergy.
I guess the safest thing to say is that it’s an acquired taste.
