Fae Tactics

For the longest time, I have been searching for a game that scratched a very specific itch; that itch being Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced. Advanced specifically, mind you. There are many games that provide the feel of the original FFT, but this is the first game that sent me back to those very fond memories of playing the first game on my Game Boy Advance.
It's a charming, colourful game with a lovely and wide variety of characters as you go along your journey. The story moves along nicely, with some nice story plot points that had me theorising and even caught me off guard a couple times. You learn about the world, and the main character as you explore it, her troubles and her inability to not want to help people.
The combat is a square tile, turn based RPG. Your characters speed decides the turn order, and their various stats allow them to do various different things on the battle field. Every non-summon character has their very distinctive role, and none of the were ever really benched. The game does a good job and making sure you use all of them, and help you realise where their strengths can be. Most characters on the battlefield, have an element. Fire beat grass, grass beats wind, etc. I like how at any time during battle set up, you can see the type charts, as it could get a little overwhelming sometime.
The game is very good at making sure you pay attention to the arena and the enemies in it. Some stages might have pits with enemies that can push you. Some might be very vertical with enemies at the top, teaching you about height advantages. Some stages even have canon placements, where you can either go around or try and power through it. The bosses in particular make sure you always think about your set up before starting the battle, and how you approach them.
I played the game on normal, and found it a nice challenge at times. My younger brother played it on hard, and he said it could be quite a slog and the bosses turn into damage sponges. I ran into that issue a couple times, particular with side content bosses. I'd say that's my only real gripe with the game, Magic Barriers can take quite long to reduce. One particular fight near the end of the game, I had the enemy pinned by four units, all comboing crit damage with each other and it still took like, 5 turns as they could barely damage me.
Over all, a very strong recommend if you like this sort of combat system. My gaming tip for you all, the Teamwork scroll is very useful. And Apex lets you avoid critical damage a number of times, which can be vital in some fights. Have fun!

My favourite of the isometric tactics games by far. The art and aesthetic is great, the story and characters are excellent and well designed, the world is interesting and compelling, and the combat is the right balance of fun and challenging.
The creature collection aspect really adds an extra layer of fun and tactical possibilities and keeps you coming back for more.
Big fan, big thumbs up.

Fae Tactics is a 4/5
On my scale, a 4/5 game is great. It goes beyond simply “good” and elevates the experience with a solid story, a particularly noteworthy process of development, and/or innovations in mechanics which are satisfying to figure out and implement.
Fae Tactics is a great turn-based tactical game. It might not be as intense as Into the Breach, nor as minimalist as Bad North, but its bright, colorful environments, strong story with likable and interesting characters, wonderful music, and well-designed encounters give Fae Tactics a unique brand of charm otherwise lacking from its alternatives.
Let’s start with the gameplay. The core gameplay loop is quite simple in theory, but the game’s mechanical systems allow for a lot of variety in how you approach the encounter. Each day, you can take an action at a specific location, which then either triggers a cutscene that advances the story or an isometric, turn-based combat sequence that will also advance the story. You can also free battle to farm resources to upgrade your Talisman and collect more summons if necessary.
Each encounter will spawn a board and various enemies of various types. Yes, this game has an elemental typing system which is complex. Each type has specific weaknesses and strengths and a unique assist ability you can use on your units to enchant them. Some of these are not made equal. Because turn order allows you to potentially strike before taking damage, and movement is necessary to get into range to do the damage (and units are generally painfully and pitifully slow), haste is a god-tier buff.
Likewise, each unit in the game has a special “wait” ability, which, for leader units (main characters or enemy commanders), can vary based on weapon equipped. For example, the main character, Peony, can “wait” (neither assist nor attack, usually a default action that will occur when positioning) to buff her next attack with Chain, which will hit all enemies in range, when equipped with her default item. When she equips her ice spear (her best weapon btw), her wait skill is reflex, which makes her reactions more likely. In this case, her reaction hits the 4 tiles touching hers (no diagonals) with an ice move that has a high potential to freeze the enemy and gives her a permanent +7 defense. Each party character has 3 weapons that can be unlocked, giving them different typing, wait abilities, assist abilities, and reactions. There are also a number of gems that can be unlocked, that give your characters additional buffs or effects. For example, my personal favorite was to equip Ice Spear Peony with the Stigandir scroll (+3 movement, +1 initiative; guaranteed first move + 6 tiles) with the gem that gives you blink movement. This essentially turned my Ice Spear Peony into a teleporting flanker I could use to easily reach the middle of a group of enemies with her Ultra move primed and detonate the equivalent of a nuke in the middle of the enemies.
Each character has a place on your team, made especially pertinent based on what encounter you’re dealing with. You really are rewarded by thinking through the strengths and weaknesses of your characters and combining their plethora of skills and abilities into a team that is ideally suited to that encounter. Change your party, their equipment, and even their gems around as needed. Hell, you can respec your skill points at will, so if you’re getting rolled you can even make characters tankier for that one fight at the cost of some damage.
The talisman is yet another layer of mechanics which empower you to think about the best composition, although slightly more limited due to balancing. The talisman has 2 things it gives you: spells and summons. Spells are relatively simple: you can activate one per round at any time one of your units has their turn as a bonus action; although the spells originate from Peony, it does not need to be her turn to cast them. For normal encounters, I recommend the kiss spell, as it is a fairly powerful heal every 2 turns, the hand spell, as it lets you collect items on the map without having to end your turn on them, and silence, which does damage in a 5 tile radius around Peony and has a chance to silence, which prevents enemy leaders from using their own spells and removing their MB shield regardless of how much they have. The other spells are way more situational, but can occasionally find use (entomb, for example, is strong against teleporting phylacteries).
Summons are enemy units that you’ve defeated and gained the ability to summon by picking up their respective business card that they drop after defeat. You can’t gain the ability to summon all the non-leader enemies you confront, but you can gain the ability to summon most. Like with spells however, not all are created equal. The Bone Servant the most op summon in the game (and coincidentally one of the most annoying enemies to deal with). This is because his passive makes him take 80% less damage from any attack that is not a back attack and his wait ability lets him protect all allies that are 3 or 4 tiles around him. In the vast majority of encounters, I ran 2 wind summons + Bone Servant for haste buffs and protection. Fights where this combo was not viable required somewhat more thought and planning.
Most of the story unfolds in “cutscenes” where the characters talk to each other. I find these broadly well-written (barring some minor grammatical errors like a period instead of a question mark) and the characters have distinct and interesting personalities. Some of the dialogue can be a little cringy, but remember: Peony is a 15 year old girl. Cringy dialogue is per the norm for that age in real life, so I think it adds to the character. Also species/worldbuilding designs and artwork are peak. Very creative and the sprites are awesome.
The world itself has a lot of intrigue and mystique. You do learn a lot about the game through expository dialogue, but it was always properly contextualized; characters weren’t talking about the mechanics of magic for no reason, but they would explain elements of the cultures and the world’s history when other characters asked. Because the characters come from such diverse parts of the in-game world, this sort of cross-pollination of cultural knowledge and exchange makes sense, and is probably how society should conceptualize and approach diversity in real life.
I’m not going to even spoil it, but the end twist was really fucking good. In retrospect, it was foreshadowed very well, but I was not expecting it at all. Likewise, while you don’t start with a good grasp of why you’re doing what you’re doing, you come to learn in time.
This game is not 5/5 mainly because combat is tedious . Enemies take forever to do their turns, and there are a lot of them. Please do yourself a favor and turn combat speed to x2. Why there isn’t a speed even faster than that, I don’t know — one should be added (at least for enemies taking their turns). This is the largest factor holding me back from NG+, and is something I’m sure has filtered a fair number of people. Slow combat is great at the beginning for appreciating the art, visuals, animations, sounds, but by the 20th hour I just want to execute my strategy quickly (x4 speed quickly).
Finally, I’d be remiss to not comment on the music. Beautiful, quirky, full of character and charm, and very effective at communicating the characters’ emotions. The ominous “shit is about to go down” theme is perfect for setting the mood. Likewise, I found the emojis in this game to be charming and perfect for effectively communicating the tone a character would be speaking in. Where Coromon’s emojis felt sappy and cartoonish, these actually tell you what emotions the characters are experiencing and contextualize how the dialogue should sound.
Highly recommended. One of the better tactical games out there for its sheer depth.

One of the best tactical RPG, 9/10. Need a sequel.
Complete first play through in 40 hours,
100 hours to complete all character, fae, spell, equipment and achievements which unlocks all of the epilogues.
In the second play through is when it really shine, the difficulty spike is a bit more challenging. So you must setup party first before every battle, as the elemental weakness, the terrain, and character traits is really affecting the flow of the battle.

7/10 its a good combat system, but dialogues and waiting for enemies to take their turns can be tedious. Art is nice, story is slightly above average, but its really about the combat.

As a big Tactics Ogre/FFT guy, I often give a chance to grid-based skirmish games like this. This is very successful in its goals in part because, unlike a lot of these, it is not attempting to evoke the same vibe and atmosphere as one of those games. Taking on a monster collection, elemental system-based tactics, it manages to actually get you into thinking about team composition and builds more than a lot of these manage to. Serviceable story. Never really wowing me, but giving you enough threads to builld out the world and where your characters fit into it. Great for me to put on a podcast and then mainline a bunch of fun battles.

8.5/10 ~Strongly recommend

You play as Peony, a mysterious young girl that wields magic and attempts to help and/or befriend anyone she can due to unresolved past trauma. As a person somewhat unfamiliar with the wide world, you slowly uncover why everything/everyone has gone afoul.

Really fun tactics game. Very cute and endearing, but there are definitely lots of dark themes throughout. This is a HARSH world (trigger warnings for cartoonish murder, torture, abandonment).

So far over 40 hours and still not at an obvious ending, but I'm assuming another ~10 hours depending on if I attempt all side quests/unlockables.

Age recommendation 14+

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pros and cons, some minor spoilers

Positives:
-All but 1 or 2 of the main characters I really enjoyed. Thematically, they are all really fun to play.

-Similar to Final Fantasy Tactics with some rock/paper/scissors/shotgun/lightning elemental properties, kinda pokemon like in that way, but only ~9 party members and ~35 summons/pets.

-Story moments are really interesting/intriguing. Heart wrenching and heart warming moments abound.

-Animations and Art style overall is great


Negatives (least to greatest):
-Music gets a little stale

-Some of the combat interactions are unintuitive and unexplained until they happen

-With a few bad combos, things go south suddenly

-Many of the battles are really long and drawn out, but not in a strategic way

-The majority of the story is not particularly linear and very wide/spread out instead of long, some describe it as episodic. This leaves the story to unravel overtime as plots start and stop without much warning. Ultimately, the worst part about this is you have to play without stopping or you will probably forget characters, locations, etc

-I wish the main character had more than one facial expression, or at least was drawn with her mouth closed, rather than agape (this is the thing I dislike the most about the game, which is not a huge deal, mostly a missed opportunity)