Tears to Tiara 2 features a godly character dynamic between it's two leads, a compelling narrative and enough substantial themes to chew on to a point I can understand why so many have in high esteem this niche SRPG, but the terrible pacing and anime harem/power fantasy tropes killed all my interest in it. Childhood friend lolis, super saiyan deus ex machina powers, and scenes about motorboating titties are shamelessly mixed in with a somewhat heavily presented story about imperialism and slavery and it just makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Please know your tone.

The gameplay was serviceable and I heard it gets really good but there were too many red flags for me after several mediocre short battles (item spam, infinite inmediate retries, lack of combat window...etc) for me to care.

I don't want to spend 70-100 hours on this experience. Quit at chapter 2.

Really good strategy RPG with visual novel elements. The soundtrack is amazing, and the CGs for the art look nice as well. The gameplay is pretty standard for tactical RPGs, but it's still fun. The story is filled with references to Christianity, Greek mythology, literature, and European history. The map displayed in the game is identical in shape to a real life map as well. The party members in the game are all memorable as well. The only real issue in terms of characters for me were the villains. For a game that takes around 50-60 hours, I wanted more than just one good villain. Still, it's a really good game and one of the best PS3 JRPGs in my opinion.

I love that this game has a mandatory big white war elephant that you must bring with you on every mission. I love that she is so big she gets stuck, so slow she gets left behind, and pulls a carriage that makes her a huge liability. But she is also an elephant. I never tired of watching an enemy soldier march up, spear in-hand, do 1 (one) damage and get stomped to death.

Respectfully and affectionately, this game is so dumb. I had a great time.

One of my favorite maps was a complete non-sequitur where your bard is slowly falling in quicksand towards a giant scorpion. He sinks a little closer to the scorpion every turn, a visible time limit for his rescue. Whoever you send after him will start sinking, too, which I only noticed when my big dumb war elephant got stuck and blocked half my right flank. I scrambled to throw healers and ranged units into the sands after my ill-fated bard (and elephant (and caravan)) while my goblin-player brain tried to justify splitting my forces to race towards yonder treasure chests. Despite my blunders and greed, I was able to plunder every chest, getting the scorpion down to 2 HP. I won on the final action of the final turn, as the bard had by then been pulled close enough to eek out exactly 2 damage and win the map. It was all so gloriously dumb, and cemented that I was seeing this game through to the end.

Tears to Tiara II is the kind of niche game with disparate niche elements that, instead of synergizing to expand its fanbase, exponentially limit the number of people who would love it; an anti-Persona 5. TtTII:HotO is a 70-100 hour turn-based strategy JRPG with chibi anime character models, but is also a fully Japanese only voiced visual novel about war logistics and the philosophy of godhood. It’s a Fire Emblem game where every inter-chapter set of character-portrait cutscenes lasts 2-5 hours. But instead of a purely generic fantasy setting, we follow Fantasy Spain during a war of cessation from the Fantasy Holy Roman Empire. It is unequal parts dry alternative history, (peppered with detailed half-hour asides to wax poetic on topics like urban waterwork planning and accurate death statistic reporting), and anime. Anime so anime the main character looks like, acts like, and is voiced by SAO’s Kirito.

All of those cutscenes of disparate flavors are completely skippable if you only want a robust 40-hour SRPG. Each of the 16 playable units are unique in function, even if they share weapon types. (One mage casts buffs, another debuffs, the third status effects, for example.) The game goes out of its way to throw out new map concepts and enemy types every chapter, often at hilarious expense to the story’s credibility. Prepare to see man-eating rainforests in Fantasy France, or pterodactyls atop the snowy peaks of the Fantasy Swiss Alps.

In this genre, I’ve always fought against the impulse to overlevel a character or two and trivialize the experience. Maps often take so long that the cost of failure in experimentation outweighs the satisfaction of realizing a new strategy. I did not have that impulse in my first playthrough of this game, as TtTII lets you reset the match to any previous turn, all the way to the beginning of the match. The game processes time such that any sequence of actions, when repeated, will yield the same results. This means repeating actions will allow you to replicate getting a critical hit, or different combinations of moves will help you avoid a whiffed attack. Cumulatively, this made every level feel like a puzzle box with a solution, a perspective that encouraged me to play with the tools I had instead of assuming I needed to level grind to overcome a wall.

As such, even playing on Easy, I was playfully challenged to learn every units’ peculiarities, and regularly rotated through the entire cast. I went for S rank on most maps, which meant no character deaths, no item usage, a turn limit, and no player characters of higher level than the strongest enemy unit on the map. To keep your S rank, you are allowed to break 1 rule if you achieve a bonus objective unique to the level. I loved playing this way, as it actively discouraged level grinding, and was difficult in a way that forced me to consider movements across the entire map and spanning multiple turns. It's a testament to good game balance when a game as complicated as this one lets you learn the cost and payout for every character's full arsenal of moves because they are all situationally useful.

(Then I beat the game on Hard and it fucking sucked. Pure number bloat, making enemy stat numbers higher and player stat numbers lower, limited money and experience gain, changing AI to spam area of effect spells. It made non-magic units cannon fodder for mages and eliminated variety in strategy because any enemy unit could 1-or-2-shot any player unit. Level grinding was a necessity for survival, and after I max-leveled a mage (and my elephant) I still had problems. People who like to play games this way literally hate fun.)

On the other side of my experience with this game, I think it has an emergent strength in the amount of time you spend with its characters. Often it is easy for JRPG characters to feel like a pile of numbers after their plot relevance wanes, but here the sheer length of the non-combat elements properly balanced the length of time you see these characters in battle. I think this grounding in both regards helped sell and retain the inherent appeal of the very very anime character concepts where other works can feel cliché, trite, or flat.

I had so many pages of notes for this game, as I spent most of April playing it. I want to complain about the anime writing, the withheld backstories told in random flashbacks, the predictable death fake-outs. I want to praise the game’s efforts in thinking about theology more than “i’m 14 and this is deep”, its commitment to crafting its world’s metaphysical history. But the sheer amount of text in this game makes anything I say either feel flippant or require so much juggling to sound comprehensible and remain spoiler-free that frankly, this game doesn’t quite deserve it.

Because while TtTII: HotO made me feel and think things, ultimately, it was only deep enough to be a good time. If the entire visual novel component is viewed as texture over substance, it grounds the experience so that the anime elements can be fun. Thousand-year-old pink-haired dragonborn loli? Eye-roll inducing on principle. Thousand-year-old pink-haired dragonborn loli who speaks formally, debates like a politician, and is treated with sincere reverence by every character in-universe? Hilarious.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and I feel Tears to Tiara II: Heir of the Overlord is a solid B+ game. Its flavors don’t really harmonize, but they don’t detract from each other, either. I was lucky enough to have a taste or a tolerance for all of them, and was won over on sheer variety. The voice acting is excellent for keeping you engaged in the moment-to-moment politicking or whacky nonsense, seriously you will hear vocal cords getting damaged in some of the serious scenes' screams, and the gameplay is rock-solid.

My one caveat is the opening is long and terrible, lasting like three or five hours, and refuses to tell the story in proper chronological order until it's done a couple “gotcha!” record-scratch rewind moments. I personally would have probably bounced off this game if I hadn’t started it during the opening stages of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, where seeing a smaller western country rebel against cultural genocide initiatives from its larger eastern neighbor was more compelling than it might have been a month prior. I would not fault anyone for lacking the patience to wait for this (or any game) to “get good,” especially when this isn’t an all time classic. It's just a shame to see so much effort trapped on the PS3 and delisted from the PSN Store, making a physical copy your only option.

After one month and 140 hours (a lot of that is idle time though), I finally completed Tears of Tiara 2. To be frank, this was one of my least favorite RPG experiences I ever had. There were several times when I had to force myself to finish the game.

Before I dive into the negatives, I will say not all is bad. The SRPG gameplay is pretty solid. It’s nothing groundbreaking but it works. You get units of different classes such as sword users and mages, buy equipment and upgrade it and give them different skills to boost stats. Barring a few maps when I thought it was unfair, it was a nice balance between being fun and being challenging. The characters are also charming and loveable. Although the majority of them lack heavy character development you would see in the gerne, they’re enjoyable for the most part and I don’t really dislike a single main character throughout the game, you can sense a tight bond with them despite the cast does grow pretty large at 15 characters. The music with the vocals is also pretty solid and the artwork in the CGs is great.

However, the biggest complaint I have with Tears of Tiara 2 is the game is just too long for its own good. I love a long epic tale but only if it’s engaging the entire time. TT2 is an 80 hour game with 13 chapters and I strongly believe the game should have ended in just six chapters if the story had better condensation. The game has some really serious pacing issues and a lot of scenes just get dragged out for little reason, especially in the earlier chapters. The pacing is so slow I would think the majority of players would struggle to even complete chapter 1, let alone the entire game.

Another reason why I think the game should have just ended at chapter 6 is because chapter 7 onwards has to be some of the most ridiculous plot writing I have ever seen in a game and I do not say that in a good way. At least the earlier chapters felt focused enough with clear goals and believable enemies. But after chapter 6, The game’s plot just becomes an unfocused jumbled mess all over the place. It’s really frustrating how the game, later on, treats death like it’s merely a plaything rather than a permanent outcome and a natural process afterlife.

I won’t spoil details but the abuse of revivals and fakeouts ruins and cheapens some of the most emotional scenes in the game in hindsight. Between that and the excess amount of Deus Ex Machina, it feels like the characters pretty much get everything they want with essentially 0 consequences in the long run. Considering this is a warm setting that is about overthrowing a divine emperor, the main cast dealing with 0 consequences on their side just cheapens the true effect of war with this obsession of the game always writing them as coming out at the top no matter what. And that just doesn’t feel believable to me.

Other issues I have is the ability to not save during the VN cutscenes, which is awful and I don’t like a game that doesn’t respect my time. I had to stay up all night multiple times just to reach a save point. And a lot of the overall writing is very repetitive. Not a major flaw but I do notice Tears of Tiara 2 like to recycle the same jokes and gags with the same characters. It’s amusing and funny at first, but it gets quite stale near the end of the game since it long lost its novelty.

Overall while Tears of Tiara 2 has a strong cast of characters with solid gameplay, it’s a hard recommendation to make to even the most diehard RPG fans due to its overall issues in pacing, length, and plot. Especially since I played better RPGs that essentially like Tears of Tiara 2 such as Fire Emblem Echoes. If you have an extreme amount of patience with the story and you’re looking for another SRPG to play then TT2 may be a fine game to play but otherwise, it's just really hard to recommend this game to nearly anyone personally.