Vanaris Tactics is a short narrative tactical RPG experience that tells a story about refugees fleeing their occupied motherland. You lead a group of refugees looking for freedom outside the walls of Vanaris, unite your people and use tactical prowess to escape your oppressors.
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I have mixed feelings for Vanaris Tactics. On one hand, I respect any developer able to do the Final Fantasy Tactics formula justice, since the tactical part of the game is easily its most successful part. On the other hand there are some small blemishes that make me unsure to recommend the game. I'll list a few:
- the game is dominated by green, grey and brown tones. The spritework is nice, but the colors don't give it any love.
- the UI takes a lot of space and the action is very zoomed in, at the same time you cannot move the camera without using the movement keys on your keyboard, defeating the purpose of having a cursor sensitivity. Just stick to controller or keyboard.
- the music does its job, some tracks are quite nice. Special effects are noisy so I recommend tuning them down in the options.
- the story, one of the pillars of its marketing, has an interesting premise and its characters are colorful, yet in its 4-8 hours of runtime, it struggles to give reason for much of what's happening, making sense just at the beginning and then at the end. Half of the time battles are initiated because you happened to walk on someone stealing cookies in a jar and now they want you dead.
Anyways I feel like the game has a lot of soul and would've been perfectly viable if not for small issues like these; it apparently crashes a lot, but in my case it only happened twice, so remember to save your game! The gameplay alone is solid enough for me to recommend the game to any (and maybe only to) SRPG fans.
- the game is dominated by green, grey and brown tones. The spritework is nice, but the colors don't give it any love.
- the UI takes a lot of space and the action is very zoomed in, at the same time you cannot move the camera without using the movement keys on your keyboard, defeating the purpose of having a cursor sensitivity. Just stick to controller or keyboard.
- the music does its job, some tracks are quite nice. Special effects are noisy so I recommend tuning them down in the options.
- the story, one of the pillars of its marketing, has an interesting premise and its characters are colorful, yet in its 4-8 hours of runtime, it struggles to give reason for much of what's happening, making sense just at the beginning and then at the end. Half of the time battles are initiated because you happened to walk on someone stealing cookies in a jar and now they want you dead.
Anyways I feel like the game has a lot of soul and would've been perfectly viable if not for small issues like these; it apparently crashes a lot, but in my case it only happened twice, so remember to save your game! The gameplay alone is solid enough for me to recommend the game to any (and maybe only to) SRPG fans.