To Arms!

I love Tactics RPGs. One of my favorite games of all time is Final Fantasy Tactics, which I suspect this game drew some inspiration from. There is a difference though. To Arms is not a tactics RPG. One such reason is it is a traditional RPG, with a large party and an elaborate class system, but traditional nonetheless. The elements that make for a true tactical RPG, moving units, terrain, range, position, and other factors that make tactics RPGs different form other games are not present here.

Another reason is “Tactics” play little role in this game compared to luck. Allow me to explain.

To Arms finds you in the role of Janos Blackthorne, the honorable if somewhat ill-tempered captain of the guards to Duke Mandon Lychester of Rydony. Together with his brother Horace, the court mage, Janos is sent to dispatch an incursion of goblins who threaten the Duchy’s borders. However, they are unaware that while they are away, a sinister political plot is about to unfold. Chapter one of To Arms recounts the tale of how the Blackthrone Brothers fell from grace and became the leaders of Blackthorne Company, a group of mercenaries, in hopes of one day using their military might to restore their honor.

Balance 2/5
This game has an interesting approach to combat, but it is held back by some severe balancing problems.

You start the game with the Blackthorne brothers and three generic recruits (for some reason your badass captain and court wizard are the same level as three random squires, but whatever.) You are given a chance to outfit yourself before your mission, buying items and equipment to properly arm yourself. You can be somewhat creative with your equipment options, but for the first few battles there isn’t much to do but attack. Eventually your team is joined by a paladin and his squire, and the option to change classes opens up. Each class has its own equipment options and a tree of skills available to them, which can be purchased with job points earned in battle much like experience. Deciding to branch out and cover a range of classes, I picked a pikeman, a knight, an archer, and a war priest. My team was now varied with a variety of offense and defense while maintaining a safe level of available healing. We were ready to kick some goblin ass.



As mentioned, you command your entire army in battle at once. For most of the game, this is seven men, and you’re often up against similar numbers of enemies. This means combat can get very intense very quickly, but it can be fun to watch your entire team attack in a sequence, or for Janos to give orders (party buffs) and watch your entire team power-up. But this also leads to a lot of problems. Namely, it is very hard to keep track of exactly what is going on in combat. Enemies hit hard. Many hit more than once. As mentioned, there are often many enemies. If the enemy party gangs up on one or two characters they can be demolished quickly. You’ll often find yourself just taking scores and scores of hits with very little you can do about it. A few classes have status moves such as stun that can hamper enemies, but for the most part there are few ways to really control damage. Another problem is skills have a fairly high cost and it was hard to learn more than one skill per character over the course of demo, especially for the generics. My knight character learned a move that supposedly increased his threat, but it was hard to tell if this was actually doing anything. Enemies also have a lot of HP so even having your entire team gang up on a target doesn’t mean it is going to die. Notably though, there is almost no way to control individual turn order. One of the most critical elements of a tactics game, being able to react to threats or actions in real time by deciding what to do, is lost in the massive jumble of turns. This could be mitigated somewhat by assigning priority to some moves. Healing, for example, should probably have a very high priority. When you’re going to take upwards of fifteen attacks in the next round, you need to be able to heal immediately.

Overall, however, enemies suffer simply from poor balancing. One sequence had the Blackthorne Brothers fighting on their own against squads of enemies. Without allies for support, Horace, my battle mage, was quickly cut down by enemies that were clearly balanced to fight against my seven man army. A single critical hit could bring him down and there was nothing to be done about any of this, and there’s no way to grind in this game to get stronger. All you can do is buy piles of healing items and hope the RNG favors you. The abject unfairness and reliance on luck of this sequence wreaked havoc on this section's score.

But this isn’t the worst part. The worst part is the outrageously high dodge rate of enemies. Late in the demo, enemies dodged far more than any game I have ever seen. Not just some enemies either, but most of them. It was not uncommon for my seven man band to attack and for five of them to miss. You might remember I had a similar complaint in Blood Machine, but this is even worse! I was not missing because my men were blind, and I don’t feel like I was using the wrong types of attacks on them because they readily dodged magic spells as well as physical skills and regular attacks. And I felt like I had a pretty well-balanced party set-up so I don’t feel like my choice in character classes would account for a 70% miss rate. Basically, all I could do was issue orders and pray. There was nothing else I could do! I was completely at the mercy of the dice gods. This isn’t challenge. This isn’t difficulty. This isn’t balanced. This isn’t fair.

The evasion rates of enemies need to be seriously curtailed. It just isn’t fun to start losing a battle because your men can’t land a hit for the life of them. Meanwhile, my enemies rarely had such issues on their own and landed scores of hits on my hapless soldiers. There was only one way to settle this. Janos had access to a party buff that dramatically raised everyone’s agility. By unleashing this power, I was presented with the bizarre scenario in which neither side was able to land a hit. This went on for a while before sheer willpower, brute force, and loads of healing items finally tilted things in my favor. But this did not leave a feeling of elation at my victory. It simply felt sour. The player should feel in control of his or her destiny, not have to rely on sheer luck. I never felt in control. Many rounds went by where all I could do was watch as all my attacks missed while my men got spanked because of some fluke of the dice. Missing an attack is like losing a turn. If I miss there should be a reason, like I was blind or the enemy was flying or was under the influence of an evasion buff. I shouldn't be missing en masse for no reason.

The game tries to play this off as “high difficulty,” and suggests you save often in case you get stuck. (I never got stuck, for the record.) But in reality, this is classic fake difficulty. Your party can get savagely cut up for several rounds for things you have no control over. The game’s “Tips’ section even has the nerve to suggest that it is the player’s job to keep multiple saves and be willing to completely tailor my party to the upcoming battles in order to win certain fights, but as a player, this response doesn’t satisfy me. Don’t expect the player do extra work because you can’t balance your game, and don’t tell the player they’re playing it wrong if the army they built is statistically incapable of winning a battle. How about letting me make the party I want? As a general rule for any game with class systems or customizable parties, you should always be able to win with the party you have, and shouldn’t ever need to have psychically deduced exactly what equipment or skills you would need to win the up-coming battles. Setting up characters to specifically exploit enemy weaknesses should be helpful, but never necessary. Especially since you generally have only a vague idea of what enemies are capable of so, you really can’t prepare before a mission, and once you’re in the heat of battle, there’s no turning back. What I think I would suggest is, where applicable, have some character give some idea what enemies on your next mission are likely to fight like. Are goblins high strength brutes? Would bringing extra heavy armor classes help? Or are they all fast as hell and I need fast people who can actually hit them? Are they vulnerable to magic? Invulnerable? These are things to think about that might actually incorporate some level of strategy and planning into the game. I wouldn’t suggest ever making it necessary to completely rearrange your party, but if you know what’s coming you can make small adjustments. Unless I have made a hopelessly oblivious team formation of all unarmed healers, the answer to a broken, unbalanced battle isn’t to tell the player “you did it wrong.”

Unless you’re a Rogue-like.

All in all I feel like this system has merit, it is just held back by bad balance/design decisions. I do have concerns about the number of characters, however. I felt like keeping track of 7 characters during battle was challenging enough, but throwing 15 into a turn-based encounter system just sounds like trouble. I would suggest limiting the number to a more manageable 8 or so.

Level Design 2.5/5:
This game does not use traditional town/dungeon mechanics. In town you simply visit shops to buy equipment, and then its off on your mission. Once you begin a mission, there is no way out save victory, so make sure to prepare.

Dungeons (using the term loosely) forego exploration for the most part, instead focusing entirely on the encounters. Each battle is unique and occurs in a specific sequence, and generally you’ll need to clear out all the enemies to accomplish your goals. Occasionally, you’ll be given the choice of what order to defeat certain groups of enemy in, or occasionally seek out some optional side area with some extra items, but for the most part it’s fairly linear.

One thing that bothered me was a lack of items to be found, even in areas where there logically would be or are specifically stated to be (a storeroom in an enemy fort offered nothing in the way to be looted, for instance.) The entire first mission went by without a single treasure chest to be seen, which gives little incentive to go exploring. Moreover, the player has no idea going into this situation how much is an appropriate number of items to bring. I bought ten healing salves, what seemed like a reasonable number to me, but I went through these quite quickly and the only way to get more was to hope enemies dropped them. I would suggest making some healing items available to be found in areas so that the player is less easily screwed if they have a hard time with a battle. This is really early in the game after all, this is the time to wean the player into the game and give them a chance to experiment and learn from mistakes, not punish them right out of the gate for failing to make perfect choices. You have the entire rest of the game to make brutal.

Another problem I had was once you’re on a mission, it’s live or die time. There’s no way to retreat from a mission if you find yourself in a bad situation. Not only is this annoying for the player but it’s not tactically sound from the characters’ perspective either. No sane commander is going to charge into a situation he’s totally unprepared for. I would suggest either giving an option to retreat, which either obliges the player to restart the entire mission and reset all the encounters, or perhaps in some cases force the player to eat the failure and forfeit any payment they might have acquired. This isn’t going to be applicable to every single mission but it is something to think about, and is almost certainly preferable to locking the player into an unwinnable situation.

Finally, the uniquely scripted nature of every single encounter give this game a fairly rare opportunity. I was somewhat disappointed to find that my soldiers simply walked into every single combat situation with no thought to tactics. In the future, I would give a forward thinking player some options in situations like this. Set traps, lay ambushes, anything to let the player gain an upper hand in combat. It’s more rewarding to just completely crush an enemy force because you were more clever than them then trade blows with them for twenty turns. If you want this to be a tactics game, let the player apply tactics.

Characters 3/5
Most of the characterization in this demo revolves around the Blackthorne Brothers. The most immediate and obvious characteristic of your protagonist, Janos, is that he is not the typical implausibly talented twenty year old white-haired pretty boy. He is a grizzled veteran who appears to be at least in his forties, a real soldier with years of real experience behind him. He serves as both a sympathetic and effective protagonist, a knight in service of his liege lord, bond by oaths of honor and friendship. His brother, Horace, provides badly needed comic relief; an element often missing from Max’s other games. I liked both of these characters a lot. They had a lot of chemistry and acted like, well, brothers. One thing I thought was odd, though, was that your badass captain of the guard starts at the same level as his recruits. I see no reason why he and the other “main” characters couldn’t start off with a higher experience level and a small pool of job points to spend to reflect their experience over their band of squires. This probably wouldn’t even disrupt the balance horribly, since having one or two higher level characters isn’t going to be a deal breaker in these types of combat situations; if anything it evens the score when you face enemy leaders who are themselves demigods compared to their men.

Most of the other characters received only scant attention. Though the demo contains a handful of minor villains, most aren’t given the chance to do anything but stand around and act fiendish. Lady Bethany, the only important female character to appear, is portrayed in a manner that borders on misogynistic. I can forgive some of this as being one of the realities of the setting, but I couldn’t help but think this would come off better if the writing were more subtle about it.

The dialogue is really quite decent and makes at least a good faith effort to adapt to the setting, a sort of pseudo-old English style that manages to stay understandable but at least give the world some depth. The writing is occasionally marred by Max’s patented “plethora of obscenities” that often not only sound forced and completely out of character for the people saying them, but are out of character for the game’s universe. Did you really need to break your campaign setting’s own rules to let yourself use the f-word? Consider excising these and finding more colorful in-period euphemisms. I assure you they’re out there and some of them are quite fun. They’ll sound better and more natural. This use of profanity does not make things darker and it does not make the characters seem more mature. It makes them seem like grade school students trying desperately to be outrageous.

Story 3/5
The game appears to be set in a fairly expansive fantasy world of political intrigue. It clearly borrows a great deal from Final Fantasy Tactics in regard to its systems and perhaps its world as well, but the mood and tone of the series seems to be inspired more by George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. If you liked either of these, there might be something here for you.

The main plot of the game appears to be centered on the Blackthorne Brothers and the missions they undertake, but behind the scenes is a web of deception and betrayal amongst the nobility and their power schemes, though this demo offers but a taste. It is hard to say at this point exactly how developed the world is, though the provincial system of the world map did leave me with questions. Are these provinces allied with each other? Do they in-fight? What other races are there and do they all hate each other? These are things to think about.

Music and Sound: Coming soon!
The music used in this demo is all appropriate and well-used (aside from an odd lyrical selection played during the credits) and I felt like the sound effects were relevant, but from my understanding, this project will soon have a number of custom musical tracks incorporated into the game. I always think custom music is a plus and will check out this sound track when it is released and update this review to reflect it.

Overall 2.5/5
I find myself feeling very much the same way about this project as I did about Wanderer. I feel it is a decent concept plagued by bad design decisions. This is an early demo and its state reflects this; it is still rough and unpolished. there were parts of this game I enjoyed, but they were undermined by the parts I thought were severely broken. However, if you clean up the combat problems (seriously just lowering their evasion alone would probably make this a 3) and consider implementing some of the other ideas I mentioned, and you could have a winner here.