Reverie Knights Tactics Review ー Great Story, With Lacking User Experience

I’ve always been a fan of tactical RPGs, from blindly going through the Fire Emblem series to some tactical spinoffs from some IPs like Final Fantasy. (Yes, I’m one of those people.) So when I saw Reverie Knights Tactics, I could not help but feel a sense of familiarity from it.

Reverie Knights Tactics begins the story by showing the city of Lennórien, a once-prosperous city of the elves that fell to ruin after being attacked by the Goblinoid race as an act of revenge. The Order sends adventurers to try and remedy the situation, but years go by, and no response is heard. And that’s where you come in. As the daughter of one of the adventurers that went MIA after the expedition, it’s your job to travel to the now-renamed city of Rarnaak and find out what happened.

During combat, you’ll be thrust into a field with a lot of enemies. You can either move within the range of blue tiles or yellow tiles. But if you move to a yellow tile, that will consume all your AP, which won’t allow you to attack. There are also many obstacles you can interact with to cause damage to EVERYONE in range of the debris. This means that debris can also hurt you, meaning you need to carefully consider what obstacles will do once interacted with.

In every battle, some objectives grant you EXP and Cogni. The former is pretty self-explanatory, as it allows you to level up. However, the latter is a type of currency you utilize to decipher magic scrolls, which will increase all of the characters’ stats. Unfortunately, if you fail an objective, you have to clear all of the battles to retry, should you desire to. The moment you advance to the next fight, you won’t be able to redo it. This was a design choice I didn’t enjoy, especially if you’re going for the achievements.

There are not just battles, though. Throughout the main story, you’ll be given multiple choices that affect how characters perceive Aurora, the protagonist. For example, choosing too many “Chaos” choices will make them think Aurora’s courageous yet brainless, and too many “Order” choices will make them think she’s intelligent but feeble regarding combat. Depending on your choices, the font color will also update in subsequent cutscenes.

Speaking of the main menu, the UI doesn’t seem optimized for consoles. At all. The tutorial sometimes fails to instruct on what you need to do, and I had a rough time understanding the controls. It almost felt like…this was 100% designed with PC in mind, and while that’s all right per se, it’s still really jarring that little to no optimizations were made for console. Playing through the cumbersome controls was not fun and is actually what made me lose the will to play the game for long periods of time.

Overall, Reverie Knights Tactics is a good game with a good story, but unfortunately, lacks a compelling user experience. While the story was engaging, the controls made gameplay a more frustrating experience that limits enjoyment, and that’s a shame.