Summary
Tactics games have had a resurgence in more recent years. Sometimes, you just want a game that forces you to use all your brain to do even the simplest of tasks, and that’s where tactics games excel. And for as many incredible, dedicated tactics games as we have now, plenty of non-tactics series want to get in on the fun, too.
Plenty of different games have over the years created copious spin-offs, and quite a few of them have tried their hand at tactics games. ANd even when all of them aren’t perfect, they are always a breath of fresh air in a game otherwise dominated by more traditional real-time games.
While Nintendo can be a bit repressed in terms ofexperimenting with many different genreswith some of its games, Mario is not that. That little guy has found a job in every genre there is, from RPGs and tennis, to racing and platforming. One he seen a surprisingly lack of though were tactics games.
That is where Ubisoft’s Mario + Rabbids comes in. A collaboration between Mario and Rayman, though mainly the Rabbids, Mario had a dedicated tactics game that pulled heavily from the likes of modern XCOM games. And the most shocking part of all is that the game was actually good. Who know the Mushroom Kingdom had some many keen strategists?
It’s hard to call anything from Marvel strictly a spin-off when there is no singular continuity to spin-off from. In a sense though, every Marvel game is a spin-off from the more prominent films and comics, so Marvel’s Midnight Suns feels like one that can approriately called a spin-off, and by far the most interesting in a long time.
Coming from Firaxis who made the modern XCOM games, Midnight Suns blended some of the best aspects of those games with the more defined characters from Marvel’s comics. The result were a series of fleshed-out characters who all felt like truly unique characters. Even more unique are the way each character’s moves are determined by a custom deck of cards built for each of them.
Gears of War helped to popularise cover-shooters, a genre that became the leading style of design forthird-person shootersfor quite a while. It is up for debate if Gears of War was the best at this style of gameplay, but even six entries or more-or-less the same thing would wear down on anyone. And so enters Gears Tactics.
Turns out cover-shooters are a natural fit for tactics games. With the camera pulled to a top-down perspective, Gears Tactics fits perfectly. The gameplay becomes turn-based with more restrictions on your movement, but many of the same actions feels natural, such as moving to cover to advance, and slowly cutting through hordes of Locust swarms.
From the very beginning, and with few exceptions, Metal Gear has been a real-time series, which became even more prominent with the 3D Metal Gear Solid entries. Stealth was the selling point, it was deep and intricate, and an inescapable part of the game. Bu that’s not to say the game’s still didn’t experiment every now and then.
Enter Metal Gear Acid for the PSP. While sTealth was still a priority, you were now moving across a grid-based map, and had to build out a deck of cards that determined your actions. Each card had an associated cost, and trying to keep that cost low allowed your turn to come up faster. Essential if you wanted to stay ahead of the enemy.
Metal Gear Acid also had a very unique cel-shaded look unlike the realism of the rest of the series.
Fallout as it started with Interplay, and Fallout as it currently stands with Bethesda are two entirely different beasts. The original games were fully turn-based once combat was entered, while Bethesda’s are fully real-time, with aspects of that turn-based heritage in the VATS system. Fundamentally, both are still RPGs.
Fallout Tactics is not that. It did away with many of the RPG choices and character iteration, aiming instead to make a much deeper combat system. And assuredly it was. It had a mix of real-time similar to Final Fantasy’s ATB system, the original game’s turn-based system, and a team-based system where each squad took all their actions in turns. While not beloved at the time, it became the foundation for so many tactics games to come later.
We live in a world where Persona 5 is inescapable. There are just so many of them, from the original game, dancing spin-offs, innumerable collaborations, and so much more. Persona 5 is inescapable. And just when it seemed like the games had slowed down, Persona 5 Tactica reared its head.
Persona 5 Tactica is a tactics spin-off of the original Persona 5, though also has a dramatically different art direction with more cutesy characters. That said, many of the elements, such as All-Out Attacks and Personas made the leap for a genuinely enticing, if quite easy, tactics game.
Back in the day, Pokemon flourished with spin-offs with genuine depth. While we are mostly restricted to free-to-play mobile entries now between new mainline entries, there are quite a few magnificent Pokemon spin-off lying dormant that are just begging for revitalisation. And Pokemon Conquest is one of them.
Pokemon Conquest is acollaboration between the wider Pokemon seriesand Nobunaga’s Ambition, the strategy games. It takes place in a unique Pokemon region that is also home to the many leaders of the Sengoku period. Except now they have Pokemon to use. The game takes place on a turn-based grid, and is genuinely one of the most unique Pokemon spin-offs out there.
Final Fantasy as a series is so unique because it has very little connective tissue. For the most part, every entry can be completely different from each other. That said, the series does still get spin-offs, entries that make more dramatic changes than those representative of the main games. And Final Fantasy Tactics is simply one of the best spin-offs ever made, tactics or otherwise.
Final Fantasy Tactics uses the Job systems of previous entries in the system, and extends that to 3D, tile-based arenas. Your Job determines your unit’s speed, an adaptation of the ATB system. The game is also packed with countless choices, which both determine the units you can recruit, and the path the story follows.
Final Fantasy Tactics also introduced the setting of Ivalice, which would later be used in Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy 12.
