List of Recommended turn based tactics games. If you have a suggestion feel free to let me know as there are many games I haven't played.
Last Updated Sept 11, 2011.
North American/English titles:
DS: Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Rondo of Swords, Panzer Tactics DS, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, Knights in the Nightmare, Drone Tactics, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor, Age of Empires: Mythologies, Devil Survivor 2,
DS games that look decent but I haven't played: Dawn of Heroes
PSP: Wild Arms XF, R-Type Command, Knights in the Nightmare, Valkyria Chronicles II
PSP games that look decent but I haven't played: Mytran Wars, Legends of War: Patton's Campaign
GBA: Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Super Robot Wars Original Generation 1 and 2, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, The Lord of the Rings, The Third Age
PS: Front Mission 3, Nectaris: Military Madness
PS2: Eternal Poison, Daisenryaku VII Exceed, Front Mission 4, Suikoden Tactics
PC: X-COM: UFO Defense, Panzer General and other games by SSI such as Steel Panthers, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Elven Legacy, Fantasy Wars, Field of Glory series, Wesnoth, Panzer Corps. Just about any modern tactics game from Slitherine.
WII: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
PS3: Valkyria Chronicles
360: Operation Darkness
WII, PS3, and 360: Military Madness: Nectaris Remake
iPhone/iPad: Military Madness: Neo Nectaris, Battle for Wesnoth HD, UniWar, Reign of Swords
SAT: Iron Storm
Import titles: Ready to learn some Japanese? Here are some great import tactics titles.
Most Super Robot Wars import titles are decent to great. I'm not going to list them all, though. Same with the SD Gundam G Generation series.
The Daisenryaku series from SystemSoft is the only traditional wargame series still being produced for modern consoles and portables. There are a ton of Daisenryaku titles and most of them are pretty good.
If I'm missing a good import title, let me know. I certainly haven't played them all.
DS: Fire Emblem: Shin Monshou no Nazo Hikari to Kage no Eiyuu*
GC/Wii: Fire Emblem: Souen no Kiseki
PSP: Valkyria Chronicles 3, R-Type Tactics II: Operation Bitter Chocolate, Dai-2-Ji Super Robot Wars Z, Gloria Union, Gungnir, SD Gundam G Generation World
GBA: Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi*
PS: Front Mission 2, Berwick Saga, Tear Ring Saga: Yutona Eiyuu Senki
PS2: Super Robot Wars Z / Super Robot Wars Z: Special Disk, Super Robot Wars Original Generation Gaiden, Super Robot Wars Original Generations, Front Mission 5 ~Scars of the War~, Super Robot Taisen Impact
PC: Daisenryaku Perfect
SNES: Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu*, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776*
Imports that look decent but I haven't played: Gungnir, Gloria Union, Blaze Union
* = Unofficial English translation patches available
Monday, November 15, 2010
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22 comments:
Awesome Site.
Awesome post. Even a few I didn't know about! Lord of the Rings for GBA? I picked up a PSP Lord of the Rings tactics game, but I haven't tried it out yet.
Thanks Bobalot and Ganson. Yeah there's a LOTR game for GBA which is pretty good. It has a pretty unforgiving difficulty mode and it's a well made tactics game. The PSP game isn't quite as good, imo.
I also didn't know about Daisenryaku VII Exceed. Amazon has it new for .89, so I picked that up.
Oh yes, it's the only Daisenryaku game to ever come to NA, so it's worth giving a try to see if you like the series.
You'd actually recommend Operation Darkness, or are you just listing it as a tactical game?
Operation Darkness is a pretty fun tactics game if you can get past the awful camera.
wild arms XF for the psp was awesome! too bad the difficulty died down about half way through the game, but it was a heck load of fun.
Agreed. I did find the constant changing of classes a bit of a chore/bore, but Wild Arms XF was surprisingly good. Still have to finish it.
So, Matt, Dawn of Heroes and Hero's Saga Laevatein didn't quite make the grade? I haven't tried the former yet, and I didn't get very far along the latter.
I actually haven't gotten into Dawn of Heroes. Hero's Saga Laevatein is a generic tactics game mostly for kids. It's not a bad game, though.
surprised to only see one psx title.
oops meant only 1 psx title
Hello Matthew, I really like this site!
Some little mistake I found:
DS games that look decent but I haven't actually played: Dawn of Heroes, Mytran Wars
Mytran Wars is for PSP not DS
It is a mostly generic robot based game, a little resembling front mission, but in any way not as polished. The Comic Style Story Events and the research/upgrade systems are nice though
PS3: Valkyrian Chronicles (of course!)
Disgaea wasn't mentioned on PS2 and PS3, DS and PSP...to hardcore? ;-P
Hi Private Prinny, thanks for pointing out that mistake.
I don't recommend Disgaea as it is more about grinding and numbers than chess-like strategy and tactics.
Hm, you have Suikoden Tactics but no Final Fantasy Tactics? Personally I thought Suikoden Tactics was flat out awful.
Final Fantasy Tactics is too imbalanced and easy, imo. The tactics games I listed are for those who like figuring out slightly more complicated strategies.
I liked Suikoden Tactics as it had a decent scoring system and wasn't a walk in the park.
Operation Darkness? Eternal Poison? After thinking you have lost your mind I think I figured you out. You're someone who likes a challenge. The problem is all the good games aren't very hard anymore like back in the old nes/snes days where there was only a couple quick levels so the games had to be controller breaking hard to prevent you from beating it quickly. So to combat the good "easy" games with good design, sound, etc... you pick these horribly bad games because they are "hard". But not hard in a good way, hard as in "this game is so poorly designed that it cant be anything but impossible". Let me just list a few things about Operation Darkness. The camera angles it gives are almost unplayable. You're either in the wall or floor or anywhere but where you should be looking at. How about when a character that you just spent how long leveling dies and is replaced by a level 1? How about only 1 guy in the game can revive people but he will probably die any be gone forever anyways. And one last thing, the graphics. Not that they mean much but come on! Is this a throwback to snes? Everyone has their own opinions and I do enjoy reading your site.
OP Darkness camera sucks, yeah. Considering I played through it without ever equipping auto-restore or level grinding or permanently losing a unit I wouldn't consider it that hard. See my guide for the game here. Eternal Poison was a decent PS2 title, not amazing but sometimes it's slim pickins for English only speakers.
After reading trough this again and since you are only suggesting challenging games I take back my earlier remark about the Disgaea Series, which are quirky, crazy and fun games but not challenging (at least as long you do not state "mindless time consuming grind equals challenging".
However one thing I noticed:
You did exclude the Gamecube from your List.
And since you stated FE Radient Dawn for the Wii maybe also FE Path of Radiance for the GC qualifies as well (since you can still play it on a Wii as I have done so myself)and was quite challenging sometimes(at least for myself).
Another thing, in your Import List you listed:
FE 12 for the DS
FM 2 for the PS1
...which have ongoing fan-translation attempts...
as well as
FE 6 for the GBA
FM 5 for the PS2
which have finished (imho) quite exceptional fan-translations.
Might be worth an extra note?
Or do you not condonde this attempts due to possible piracy? Or do you want to keep things simple to prevent the list from getting to cluttered and convoluted?
You're right, I should list FE9 as an import game. Mania mode was pretty fun.
I don't think fan translations necessarily means piracy. You can get most older import tactics games on ebay for very cheap. For example I see several Front Mission 5 listings for under $20. I'll try to make a note of what games have translations, though. Thanks.
Your site seems to give off quite the elitist aura. It's no wonder easy games like Tactics Ogre (which I find to be just awesome) and FFT didn't get a good rep from you. I respect that, though.
Still, you should probably list out other ones that are fun as well. Sure, challenges are always fun, but remember that fun is clearly subjective. I'm sure you know that very well.
Listing the other games will appeal to a larger audience, probably increasing you blog hits, and in turn, help out other gaming bros find the game that they like, easy or hard.
Thanks for your comment. I don't think my site is any more "elitist" than other sites that focus on skill based games. Certainly the usual RPG crowd would see it that way, since the concept of skill or competition is alien to them. However, I don't normally criticize a game harshly just because it's easy. There are other important factors to consider, which you can see by reading my review methodology article. Needless to say, FFT and TO fail in almost every area of turn based tactical game quality to me.
I don't think highly popular series like FFT, TO, Disgaea, etc. need any further promotion by me. They are popular enough without my help. What should be happening is FFT, TO, and Disgaea fans expanding their interest in turn based tactical level games by playing other games, but instead prefer to remain insular, ignorant, and inexperienced. While it's true that by not plastering my web site with FFT, TO, and Disgaea tags, keywords, images, etc. that my blog is less visible in terms of searches, I don't feel the need or interest to change.
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