Edge once put the tactical RPG in a sentence. Japanese role-playing and strategy games, it wrote in 1998, were opposite sides of the same coin: “The former genre presents a story with a combat engine tacked onto it, while the latter offers a tabletop wargame simulator with a story applied to hold everything together.” A tactical RPG is the coin standing on its edge. Battles are fought on a map of squares, one unit at a time, like a wargame, but the units are named characters with their own stories, who gain experience from one battle to the next. In Fire Emblem, the series that gave the form its Japanese shape, a character who falls stays dead for the rest of the game.
Fast facts
- The battle: turn-based, on a grid or map of squares; terrain, range, facing and height affect the outcome.
- The party: named characters who carry experience, classes and equipment from battle to battle.
- Western roots: tactical combat in role-playing games such as SSI’s Wizard’s Crown (on sale by January 1986), and Julian Gollop’s squad games from Rebelstar (1986) to Laser Squad (1988).
- Japanese line: Fire Emblem (Famicom, 1990), Shining Force (Mega Drive, 1992), Tactics Ogre (Super Famicom, 1995), Final Fantasy Tactics (PlayStation, 1997), Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (PlayStation 2, 2003).
- Western line: X-COM: UFO Defense (1994), Jagged Alliance (reviewed 1995).
- Names: “strategy RPG” in the English-language press of the 1990s; “simulation RPG” in Japan.
Tactical combat before the name
Western role-playing games had tactical fights from the mid-1980s. SSI’s Wizard’s Crown was on sale in America by January 1986, and SSI’s advertising promised that players could let the computer resolve a fight quickly or “personally direct it with a multitude of tactical options”. Its designer, Paul Murray, told Compute!‘s Gazette that “the emphasis from the start in Wizard’s Crown was on tactical combat.” When SSI’s The Eternal Dagger reached Britain in 1988, Commodore Disk User found that “position, facing and angle of attack are important”, and called it “a wargamers’ role playing game”. The turn-based combat entry follows that line in more detail.
From the other side came the squad wargame. Julian Gollop’s Rebelstar (1986) and Laser Squad (1988) gave each soldier action points to spend on moving, turning and firing, and let a soldier who kept some back fire during the enemy’s turn. Those games had scenarios rather than a campaign, so their soldiers did not carry experience from one fight to the next. That came later, with X-COM.
Fire Emblem
In Japan, the form came out of Nintendo’s partner Intelligent Systems, which had set red and blue armies against each other on a map of squares in Famicom Wars (1988). Fire Emblem (1990) kept the grid and the turns and gave every unit a name, a story and one life. Nintendo’s Gunpei Yokoi produced it, and the scenario was by Shouzou Kaga of Intelligent Systems.
Nintendo Power, looking at the series in 1996, wrote that Nintendo had “took a chance on an unusual game” that “combined strategy and RPG features”. The game’s “unique approach,” it explained, was “to break up the traditional RPG party into individual characters”, who moved independently on a map “where strategic placement is the key to success”, each with a story that crossed the others’. The magazine compared it to a mix of Final Fantasy and Ogre Battle. Its account of the fourth game spelled out the rule that made players care: “If you lose a character, they remain lost for the duration of the game.” Weapons wore out, and some pairs of characters fought better together.
The series stayed in Japan until 2003, when the Game Boy Advance game known in the West simply as Fire Emblem came out in English.
Shining Force
Sega answered on the Mega Drive. Shining Force came out in Japan in 1992 and in America and Europe in 1993. It was made by Sonic Co., a four-person studio inside Sega led by the brothers Shugo and Hiroyuki Takahashi, with help from the newly formed Climax Entertainment. Retro Gamer later described it as “a tactical RPG, of which there had been very few released at the time”, played like Famicom Wars and Fire Emblem, “moving each unit around the battlefield like pieces on a chessboard”.
Sega’s American magazine, Sega Visions, sold it in 1993 as “highly tactical RPG action” with “direct control of more than 30 characters”. The party arrived ready-made, “unlike most other RPGs”, and the player could take any 12 of them into battle, changing the line-up in towns. It was also gentler than Fire Emblem. Fallen members could be raised from the dead, and if the leader fell the player kept “your experience points and any new levels gained”, so that, Sega Visions said, “hack ’n slash players also eventually win by virtue of ever-increasing strength and magical powers.” The Takahashis kept the same style for the Mega Drive sequel and the Game Gear and Mega-CD games that followed up to 1995.
Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics
The Super Famicom’s deepest example came from a small developer, Quest. Edge later called its Tactics Ogre (1995) “the definitive SNES wargame”, “little-known (in the West, at least)”. Its director, Yasumi Matsuno, then moved to Square, and Edge later described his first game there as closely following “his earlier work, the Ogre Battle series”. Final Fantasy Tactics came out on the PlayStation in Japan in the summer of 1997, when Edge reported it as “a strategy RPG featuring Final Fantasy characters”, with 20 jobs to choose from. It headed the Japanese sales chart that Computer and Video Games printed in September 1997, above Pocket Monsters, and reached North America in January 1998.
Edge reviewed it in April 1998 and gave it nine out of ten. The game was, it said, “almost a carbon copy of Ogre” apart from its polygon landscapes, made by a team that was “almost identical” from character designer to composer. A single skirmish could take “the best part of 20 or 30 minutes”. Everything counted, “from the elevation of your character on the landscape compared to that of its target to the compatibility of their respective zodiac signs”. Its Charge Time system gave each character a gauge that filled at its own speed, “minimising the board-game feel of taking turns”. Characters learned jobs and abilities; even using a potion was a skill a character had to learn. Computer and Video Games, reporting from the Tokyo Game Show in 1997, was amused by the labels: “If FF VII is an action RPG and FF Tactics is a simulation RPG then by rights Saga Frontier should be an adventure RPG.”
Ten years later it returned on the PSP as The War of the Lions, sold in Britain for £30, and Edge still counted it among “the very best examples of the genre”.
X-COM and Jagged Alliance
The Western line reached its best-known form in 1994. X-COM, designed by Julian and Nick Gollop at Mythos Games and published by MicroProse, began as a sequel to Laser Squad and kept its time units and reaction fire. Around the tactical battles it built a campaign. Soldiers who survived improved their skills and rose in rank, and the player could rename them. The dead stayed dead.
Sir-Tech’s Jagged Alliance, designed by Madlab Software, went further towards role-playing. Computer Gaming World, reviewing it in July 1995, said it tried to “marry an addictive small-unit combat engine with a heady dose of role-playing adventure”, and asked, not quite seriously, which of the magazine’s genres it belonged in. The player hired mercenaries from a roster of 60, each with a personality, and led them across an island divided into 60 sectors.
Disgaea
By the early 2000s the form looked settled. Reviewing Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea: Hour of Darkness for the PlayStation 2 at the end of 2003, Edge called strategy RPGs “the most hardcore of RPG subsections” and noted that few in the West would argue any had bested Final Fantasy Tactics. Disgaea kept the isometric grid and changed the scale. Players created as many characters as they liked, moved them between classes, and could enter any item in their inventory to level it up in the “item world”. Even the shops’ stock depended on persuading a council to pass a bill. Edge gave it nine out of ten and wrote that “the genre has a new king.” The game had been a large success in Japan, and its American publisher, Atlus, printed only a limited run.
Since then
The two lines kept going. Firaxis revived X-COM as XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2012, and Gollop returned to the form with Phoenix Point (2019). Fire Emblem nearly ended in the early 2010s: Nintendo’s producer Hitoshi Yamagami said the team meant Fire Emblem: Awakening (2012) to be the last, until its sales changed their minds. Awakening added a mode in which fallen characters return, so that beginners put off by the series’ reputation could play. The series has continued since, and Nippon Ichi reached Disgaea 4 in 2011.
Sources
- Edge issue 57, April 1998, pp. 93–94: Final Fantasy Tactics review (the “opposite sides of the same coin” opening; Quest and Tactics Ogre; the team; skirmish length; elevation and zodiac signs; Charge Time; nine out of ten).
- Nintendo Power issue 87, August 1996, pp. 56–59: “Fire Emblem Rises from the Paks” (1990; strategy and RPG; individual characters; lost characters “remain lost”; weapons with a limited life).
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, “The History of Shining Force”, pp. 171–172: Sonic Co., the Takahashi brothers and Climax; release in 1992, 1993 in Europe; “a tactical RPG, of which there had been very few”.
- Sega Visions, June/July 1993, pp. 42–45: Shining Force feature (more than 30 characters, parties of 12, “highly tactical RPG action”, raising the dead, keeping experience).
- Computer Gaming World issue 25, January 1986, p. 23: Wizard’s Crown listed as new. Compute!’s Gazette issue 35, May 1986: SSI advertisement (“a multitude of tactical options”). Compute!’s Gazette issue 41, November 1986, pp. 24–26: Paul Murray on Wizard’s Crown.
- Commodore Disk User vol. 1 no. 6, September 1988: The Eternal Dagger (“A wargamers’ role playing game”).
- Edge issue 47, July 1997, p. 28: Final Fantasy Tactics news (“a strategy RPG featuring Final Fantasy characters”; 20 jobs).
- Computer and Video Games issue 187, June 1997, Tokyo Game Show report (“a simulation RPG”); issue 190, September 1997, p. 102: Japanese multi-format sales top 10.
- GamePro issue 108, September 1997, p. 129: mail-order listing with the American release of Final Fantasy Tactics due 01/98.
- Edge issue 181, November 2007, p. 97: Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions review (PSP, £30; Matsuno and the Ogre Battle series).
- Computer Gaming World issue 132, July 1995, pp. 148–156: Jeff James, Jagged Alliance review (Sir-Tech, Madlab Software; 60 mercenaries; 60 sectors).
- Edge issue 130, December 2003, p. 101: Disgaea: Hour of Darkness review (Atlus, Nippon Ichi; nine out of ten). Edge issue 234, December 2011, p. 120: Disgaea 4 review.
- See Intelligent Systems for Famicom Wars, Fire Emblem’s credits, its Western release in 2003 and Awakening; Laser Squad and Turn-based combat for Rebelstar and action points; X-COM: UFO Defense for its tactical system, the 2012 reboot and Phoenix Point.