I love tactical RPGs. I remember once taking Final Fantasy: The War of the Lions on PSP on holiday with my poor wife one year. She got very annoyed because every time I stopped moving for any reason I would whip out my PSP (which was in sleep mode, not off) and start playing. It was quite annoying. I regret doing that now.

Anyway, I haven’t played them in any kind of systematic way but I have played FF: TWOL, Disgaea 5, Valkyria Chronicles, Metal Gear Acid, Freedom Force, Shadowrun, amongst others. Does XCom count? I guess it probably does. I love XCom. I have 70 hours logged in XCom and 129 on XCom 2 on Steam, I would think another 50+ on XCom2 on the Switch.

As with everything, the genre is absolutely replete with stuff I have never heard of or played (R Type tactics? Jeanne D’Arc?) so this post is my attempt to get it all straight in my head. I will play a few and write it all up here. It will be fun to replay FFT: TWOL, I don’t really remember it but I obviously enjoyed it since I couldn’t stop playing it on holiday.

What is a tactical RPG?⌗

I grew up calling them strategy RPGs, SRPGs for short, but it would appear that all the cool kids are now calling them tactical RPGs

History⌗

8 bit⌗

WIP

16 bit⌗

Langrisser was an early release on the Megadrive. It has seen been remade on Steam. There were sequels on SNES, PS2, Windows, and Saturn.

To play⌗

See an issue on this blog