I was not expecting to get nearly 50 hours in one run of Fae Tactics. Another game with beautiful pixel art. I don't play many tactics games, but Fae has a bright and memorable art style and character/creature designs.

While there are characters you can recruit in the main and side stories, I had fun collecting fae creatures to be my supports. The main story is okay, not super memorable. I did enjoy the side content and world building. There are different locations to explore that have their own leaders and conflicts.

I had fun playing FT. I only did one run, but completed every side content I could find. After reading comments and guides, I see that I missed quite a bit! There's a ton of content in here. I wish there were more options, like saving during a battle. Even if it's a save then quit because the fights can take time. It's easy to miss a great deal of the side content. I wish that wasn't as hidden. It was fun and maybe in the future I can do a NG+.

Imagine if Pokémon was like FF Tactics...wait- Pokémon Conquest already exists.

That comparison still works tho, it is a combination that works very well. Collecting creatures that you can swap around for different combat scenarios is very engaging. They just really nailed the core gameplay on every level. All the different buffs, positioning, spells, elements, chaining attacks together, it just works really really well. I never felt lost, or confused about why a thing happened. Normally there's a pretty simple reason for each situation that can occur, and that makes gameplay glide along smoothly.

Hell, it took me four months of playing this game off and on before I beat it—something that I never do. If I stop playing a game for whatever reason, it usually goes unfinished. Not this one though. I kept coming back, because it's just so damn fun. And every time I did, the core mechanics were never lost on me. It was like I had never even stopped playing. I think that goes to show how well-crafted this game's mechanics are.

I really enjoy the smaller, shorter maps—compared to something like Fire Emblem, you can play through several chapters without feeling tired or burnt-out. I don't think it's necessarily better than how FE does it, it's just different, but I like that approach.

I will say I wasn't exactly engaged with the story. It wasn't bad, but because of the game's nature, every plotline feels like a sidequest. Which is...very strange? Although I'm not against the idea, I kinda like it. You're constantly jumping between different plot points at your discretion and skill level—it was like I was trying to piece together a puzzle that was slowly deconstructing itself as I built it. There were some standout moments I really enjoyed, like Payachin's storyline, or that moment with Peony and Claudia near the end. Although I will mention there was a surprising amount of burying gays, or queer people just flat-out being villains. Definitely a strike against the game for sure.

Anyway yeah, Fae tactics was pretty good. Give it a shot if you're in the mood for a tactics game with monster taming.

Gosto do gênero, os gráficos são bonitos e o jogo parecia divertido... mas na verdade é um jogo bem cansativo e arrastado.
Sua equipe tem cerca de 03 a 06 bonecos, enquanto a I.A controla de 15 pra mais (fora os respawns e summons), ou seja, você fica 20 segundos fazendo suas ações, enquanto precisa ver os inimigos fazendo a deles por 05 minutos (e nem a velocidade 2x resolve muito).
Não sentia a dificuldade pelo desafio, mas sim pela paciência de querer viver depois do turno dos inimigos, o jogo sempre querendo que você rushar o boss pra parar vencer...
Com a historia desinteressantes, e personagens com a carisma de um brócolis, não vale a pena... Joguem um Final Fantasy Tatics ou Wargroove, que ganham bem mais.

What an interesting game. The worst Xbox port I’ve ever seen, in fact! Yet, this game cast a spell on me. This version (and just the game in general) is very flawed and glitched out, so much so that new game + doesn’t even work! Two achievements won’t pop no matter what you do. And this game is hyperspecific about some things and weirdly vague about others! But, despite its many, many flaws, many crashes and a broken game mode, I love it. The story is simple, sure, but the characters have so much charm. The art is incredible, and don’t even get me started on the music. This game hooked me like not many games have. It was so ingrained in me that I was dreaming about back attacks and combos! This game may be very, very flawed, but I love it nonetheless.

This one was bit of a bummer, because there's a pretty nice SRPG core here, but the pacing just kind of kills it. I've gotten like 5 hours in, and a bunch of the battles end up feeling very samey (bar one escape map that was kind of neat).

This feels compounded on with how slow the battles are. Waiting for each enemy to cast their little buffs on the side and such gets old pretty quick. Especially in the case where the buffs are an apparently uncapped amount of an extra magic health bar to whittle away at.

This game's main strengths are mainly in its foundation. The combo system, where your melee units get to join in on attacking when someone else hits adjacent foes to them, is fun to pull off and helps give them an edge over the ranged units. There's plenty of skills and buffs to try and give to your allies as well, especially since you get access to most of the tricks of your enemies by summoning them. The element system was fun enough too.

I also think this game approaches worldbuilding well enough. It's got a bunch of fantasy species and locales, and it avoids the usual pitfalls of dumping fifty proper nouns for you to memorize. I think anchoring the different species with allies turned recruitable characters you fight alongside in some story sequences helps with that.

Overall, this was kind of fun, but the process of spending 50 minutes or so on one quest, with a large amount of that just being waiting for the enemies to get through their turn, got stale pretty quick. It's better in small doses, but it seems like there's a lot of content, so it feels like it's hard to get through it all that slowly. There's a game I like here, but it doesn't feel particularly worth it to play to that point.

Fae Tactics is a surprisingly large and fully featured tactics game. It has a lot of charm, great pixel art, and some interesting mechanics. I abandoned it because the difficulty is a bit too spiky and a couple of bad gameplay choices started to get to me, but I still had a good time with it.

The game is visually striking. There is an impressive amount of pixel art here and all of it is really great. The main characters are all very expressive and have cool designs.

The narrative seems very twee and simple at first, but it does grow into something that hits a bit harder. There are some pretty dark moments here and the story pushes into some more mature territory. I think the world building is interesting as well, even if some of the factions and people are a bit cliche.

Fae Tactics plays like a classic tactics game, with a square grid and turn-based combat. Most of the strategy revolves around countering elemental weaknesses in a more complicated version of rock paper scissors. I like how this makes you think about levels before you try them out and encourages you to use different characters. The characters are also all meaningfully different and have interesting side stories once you put them in a few battles.
I did get pretty sick of the battles though. There isn't quite enough variety over the length of the game to sustain things. Like most games, if this was half as long it would be much better.
There are a couple of mechanics that drained a lot of the fun out of this game for me -- Apex and Multicast. Most later bosses have these. Apex means they ignore elemental type (which undermines the gameplay pretty extremely) and Multicast means they cast 2-3 extra spells on their turn (which means they output an insane amount of damage and can kill a character in one turn, which often means game over). This makes the last fights feel pretty arbitrary and random, unfortunately.

I like Fae Tactics and I think it does some interesting things with the tactics formula while still hewing pretty close to the Final Fantasy Tactics-style. There aren't many games that fill this particular niche, and this one is definitely worth checking out.

Apesar da minha paixão pelo gênero e da minha admiração pelos visuais estonteantes, o jogo revelou-se uma verdadeira maratona de emoções... da tediosidade ao arrastamento. Imagine uma equipe de jogador, contendo magníficos 03 a 06 personagens, enfrentando uma superinteligência artificial que controla incríveis 15 ou mais (claro, isso inclui os respawns e summons). O resultado? Um emocionante turno de ações do jogador que se estende por inacreditáveis 20 segundos, seguido de um excitante período de 5 minutos para observar os inimigos executarem seus movimentos, mesmo quando utilizando a revolucionária opção de velocidade 2x, que é tão eficaz quanto um guarda-chuva em um furacão.

A verdadeira dificuldade aqui não está na complexidade do desafio, mas sim na necessidade vital de cultivar a paciência enquanto os inimigos fazem suas apresentações dignas de um espetáculo. O jogo, de maneira muito sutil, sugere que você deve apressar-se contra os chefes para alcançar a tão almejada vitória.

Com uma narrativa que poderia ser facilmente esquecida e personagens tão carismáticos quanto um pedaço de pão mofado, a experiência geral não só justifica, como exige o investimento de seu valioso tempo. Minha sugestão? Opte por jogos como Final Fantasy Tactics ou Wargroove, onde a gratificação e o envolvimento estão garantidos, além de acrescentarem um toque de sofisticação à sua coleção de experiências ludicamente desafiadoras.

Even though I initially played for about 20 hours, lost interest and dropped it to rot my brains playing Apex Legends and other such dopamine addiction fixes, I knew this was an extremely good game from what I did experience. I recently returned to it, sunk another 20+ hours in and realized that Fae Tactics is easily one of the best indie offerings to the genre because it is unapologetically itself.

Many of the prominent indie titles of the past decade (Symphony of War, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, Dark Deity, etc.) have kept their influences closely abreast as the tactics genre can best be described as "burgeoning" on PC. As a style of gameplay, SRPGs are quite niche. So understandably, the best route to more players will have these developers jockeying to give us the next FFT or Fire Emblem on PC, titles that have long been relegated to consoles. Many of these games are straight up unplayable without emulation, though the increased popularity of PC gaming and Square Enix's embrace of such has given the true believers a chance to revisit the classics (still no Final Fantasy Tactics remaster or port, though..) But the library of PC SRPGs has been steadily growing, thanks to lower barriers to entry.

Endlessfluff's Fae Tactics is in fact a port of an Xbox game, but it is very much in the new tradition of the PC indies I listed, a new-school SRPG developed by fans who grew up on the classics and hope to bring the genre to new audiences. But Fae is a somewhat stark departure from many of the others. While we have come to be used to the high fantasy environment and Japanese anime-inspired artstyles ushered in by the predecessors, Fae Tactics visual signature is far more distinct. It has the colorfulness and whimsicality of EndlessFluff's earlier work in titles like Valdis Story, bringing to life its various characters and biomes with an aesthetic similar to Ralph Bakshi's artistic direction in Wizards (1977). The emphasis on color and distinct sihouettes allows EndlessFluff's artist CaroMoya to transcend the rather generic art styles of its contemporaries and focus on designs that communicate personality, environment and race. And shoutouts to Sam English's wonderful score for further bringing this game to life.

The comparison to Wizards is apt beyond just the art style; as it brings together the same thematic and narrative elements as well- a world that has been reclaimed by the magical fae after a cataclysmic event; natural elements allowed to spread unhindered by human technological advancement but still coming into conflict with that which has been left behind, like scars that threaten to be reopened.

Fae Tactic's experimental heart permeates every aspect of its SRPG foundations; you're not playing a bishonen royal prince with a small company of knights in this game. Its main character is a precocious young witch in a world that fears her very existence and your initial companions are a bird with water magic and... a dog. (Shoutouts Faerghast, you did it first) Peony is a lovely character; instantly recognizable by her bright design and personality. Each new character you meet have their hearts and minds slowly opened by her unflinching altruism and childlike innocence, I could only join them in being won over. I was laughing every time she got embarrassed; felt my heart melting every time she cried. One of my favorite protagonists by a very, very long shot. Truly, women are powerful and Peony is the most powerful.

Fae Tactics also has an unconventional approach to how it develops its narrative. The game itself operates on a week-based calendar, with the passage of time affecting things like access to certain areas or quest timers. This works well for me, as it allows me to tackle the campaign at your own leisure. Generally speaking, until the lategame there will always be 2 or more major quests to challenge. So if you're struggling with one, you can just play another or do some "free matches" to farm scrolls. Thanks to each weekday being represented by an element, the system has strong ludonarrative significance with each day buffing its corresponding element.

This game flew under the radar if there ever was one, so finding information and discussion on this game was somewhat tasking. If there is a common sentiment I have seen about Fae Tactics, cribbed together from various posts through the years I have managed to find floating about the ether, it is that the game can sometimes present an unfair challenge. This is an interesting dynamic when you start to consider how pared down the actual combat mechanics are on the surface. You only have three actions: attack, assist buff or wait (self-buff). Further, Square Enix set a benchmark for build complexity with Final Fantasy Tactics by which most hardcore SRPG fans will anchor their expectations. Subsequent games within the genre focused heavily on customizability within your army. The ability to modify your units to your preferences with things like skill trees, inheritances, reclassing is now genre standard. Fae Tactics chooses to trade in some of that build complexity for a more streamlined experience- there is a smaller scope of progression for units outside of the basic stat modifiers as you level up. The main characters (dubbed "Leader Units") have all their passives by default and can only change these passives through very limited customization options. For example, Peony can swap between three different weapons, each bestowing her new element and some different passives.

Apart from Leader units, there is also a monster-collection subsystem in the game in which killing certain enemies bestows you summon cards, allowing you to bring up to three additional units to the fight. These monsters are a case of "what you see is what you get," their passives are set and only base stats can be augmented via scrolls. Thusly, the importance is placed on the team composition that will utilize these monsters to maximum efficacy. In addition, the monster collecting process is a welcome diversion from progressing the story- with rare monsters to hunt only available in certain locations on certain days. Satoshi Tajiri, eat your heart out.

Fae arguably succeeds in streamlining the process, as builds are much simpler and straightforward and the much of the "planning" phase instead centers around macro-level strategy. Rather than spending hours tweaking individual values on the characters, you instead match teams based on elemental affinities and passives that "combo" together well. Thus combat is focused how well you effectuate these combos, and the inability to optimize will significantly contribute to the difficulty.

The difficulty of the game boils down to two factors: 1) the enemy level scales with the highest level member of your party (and since she is mandatory for every encounter, that is almost always going to be Peony unless you intentionally do not use her) and 2) the enemy has access to the same powerful offensive and defensive buffs you do, often multiplied to insane values. Bosses in this game can easily stack upwards of 200+ defense, high amounts of damage reduction, and will one shot you if you are not properly built to take their hits.

The solution to this, however, is actually quite simple thanks to the nature of the game's overall mechanics. You pick the element that is advantaged, equip and upgrade things that will buff that element, and take advantage of the "weekday" you are choosing to fight. Even though the bosses may sit across the map permanently buffing themselves until you reach them, I have yet to meet a challenge that was insurmountable during my playthrough. There's always clear answers to specific enemy tactics, ie. you have an enemy stacking defense buffs? Bring defense imperils. The level scaling makes things difficult, but imo it also keeps things fair. The enemy keeps pace with you statwise, and can easily destroy you if your plan of action isn't solid- and I think this overall creates a satisfying level of challenge in which you cannot simply dominate the enemy on stat differential alone. And to be sure, there are very, very broken passives in this game (Protector, I am looking at you) that can make even the most impossible-seeming scenarios in this game doable. But I can hardly call this a demerit. The greatest games in the genre have been deconstructed ad infinitum to come up with strategies that trivialize the hardest content; for me, this is part of the allure of the strategy RPG.

Then, my major criticism can mostly be boiled down to technical deficiencies that came with it being ported from consoles to PC; but for the most part these can be overlooked. The game has too much going for it for any of my criticisms to diminish the overall experience.

Fae Tactics does things different, it plays with its food and is focused on innovation and expressing itself over sticking hard and fast to the classics. This experimentation is only to the games benefit, its missteps end up being more interesting than something like Dark Deity's most faithful and successful recreations of the formula. We need more games in the genre like this that seek to push boundaries, rather than reify them.

Yo lo he intentando. Me encantan este tipo de juegos, y Fae tactics tiene algunas ideas maravillosas, como el que cualquier unidad pueda atacar/hacer algo por si mismo/apoyas a un compañero. Nunca pierdes turnos si te organizas bien. El apartado gráfico también es muy bonito, los personajes que he conocido son interesantes, y la historia pintaba bien. Pero tiene un fallo que me toca la moral.

Los niveles de los monstruos a los que te enfrentas. Creo que están demasiado subidos y dependen muchas veces demasiado del azar, pudiendo morir rapidísimamente si resulta que justo ese ataque no lo ha resistido y se envenena, ciega o lo que sea. Eso no sería un problema y te diesen algunas misiones o zonas para farmear, y como bien juego de este estilo las tiene. Donde los monstruos tienen aun más nivel que en las misiones de la campaña. En serio, si la única opción que me das es repetir una misión hasta que de la casualidad que de se alineen los astros, no aguanto.

Luego tiene otras cosas, como que tras 14 h todavía no sabía como subir el nivel para invocar monstruos, o que solo había conseguido a 1 personaje. Pero el mayor fallo es el soft block que te hace porque le sale de las narices. Una grandísima pena, el resto es genial.

It resembles Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in the container, but not in the content. Anyone who has been drawn to this game thinking that it is just like the Square game has to be prepared for a disappointment.

⭐ Great sprite work, ideal for pixel Junkies.

⭐ Nice user interface and simplified controls. I think it's pretty intuitive and plenty of explanations for smooth combat.

⚠️ Little itemization and summoning progression. In FFTA and sequel you have at your disposal a mileage theorycrafting of races, jobs, skills and equipment. Objects are not simple stat buffs, they allow you to learn new skills and change jobs to get, for example, a paladin with thief or ninja skills and have a more balanced team. That offers a huge range of customization and is what I like the most about this game. In Fae Tactics you can have just three characters on the battlefield, each one with the same three actions (basic attack, assist and wait), scrolls that give stat buffs and you can only put one per character and summons that can't carry items and they're just to buff the three main chars. That's all.

⚠️ Combat takes too long. Not just story driven combats, simple trash mobs fights for grinding purpose take a fair amount of time because the boss is either summoning new minions or shielding itself non-stop, so most of combats end up being to knock down a wall.

⚠️ The plot is dull and you won't even remember it while you play. Combat is all that matters and is easy to burn out.

The extent of the mechanical depth of Fae Tactics is evident since the first time you mouse over a character, the complexity of the combat is embedded within the characters themselves in the form of elemental affinity, passive skills, reactions, assists, etc. Due to all the important information being readily available, the combat is highly based on hard counters. There's even a permanently available elemental chart which can be brought up by holding the space bar.
On a similar note, Fae Tactics also follows the honored SRPG tradition of allowing the player to recruit enemy monsters to their party. I think this is a nice addition to a game that otherwise lacks a traditional progression system. As an example, the player might not get new skills from a level up, but completing missions can potentially result in a new party member, spell or equipment upgrade instead. This is a trade-off more than anything because the usual job system is completely absent.
In terms of presentation, the game is colorful and flashy, I'm not a fan of most character designs, but I do realize that's subjective. However, what does deserve a lot of well earned praise is the sound design, the soundtrack is delightful to listen to and there are distinctive sound effects for buffs, debuffs, kills, different movement types, etc. I could almost play the game blindfolded, it's awesome.
On the other hand, I don't have the same degree of praise for the story. Without spoiling it, there's a decent mixture of lighthearted and surprisingly dark moments, and it's clear that a lot of thought went into creating different locations, cultures and characters. What stopped it from being great in my opinion is that the main plot is highly compartmentalized, each "chapter", so to speak, goes over a new character, their personal struggle and the culture they inhabit, only to be basically forgotten by the time the next character is introduced. All things considered, I don't think the writing is bad overall, perhaps a few more campfire interactions would have fixed my problems with the storytelling.
To conclude, I think Fae Tactics is a good addition to the library of any SRPG fan. It's easy to understand, colorful, and the biggest problems I could point out about it were purely subjective. It's a really sweet game overall.

Every now and then, I'll remember how much fun I once had playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance as a kid, pick up a tactics game, fail to enjoy it, and wonder if I'm mistaking nostalgia for one game with a fondness for the genre as a whole. Fae Tactics is one of the rare games that restores my faith that the genre still has something to offer me.

The masterstroke of this game is the care it takes to carefully roll out new abilities and decisions, providing a massive amount of depth without ever feeling overwhelming. A menu-free combat system might seem simplistic at first, but the Disgaea-like care that goes into positioning, sequencing, and elemental matchups adds depth once you're ready to grapple with it. The party build provides an almost endless variety of different strategies, and the level design--while occasionally frustrating, in one case enough that I'm choosing to put the game down for the time being--generally does a good job of encouraging you to experiment on occasion while usually allowing you to maintain a consistent build.