Games similar to kingdom tales series#

The first thing you face is an in-depth tutorial system that goes over virtually every mechanic you will need to know when playing the game, with future missions introducing new forms of transport and artillery that you’ll be able to use. Sure, it’s a game about a world at war, which may be a bit iffy metatextually given the real-world horrors and atrocities of war, but once you’re able to get through that and just focus on the game itself, it presents itself incredibly well to newcomers to strategy games. With its bright toy box-inspired visuals, Advance Wars 1+2 presents itself as a very lighthearted experience.

Games similar to kingdom tales series#

Unlike that series and its own Western debut title, you don’t have to worry as much about stats and more complex management systems. It was designed to be beginner-friendly and offer up a much more casual experience compared to its sister series Fire Emblem, as they were both developed by Intelligent Systems. When the first game released in the West in 2001, it was the first time a game in the Wars franchise had launched outside of Japan. Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp remakes the first two Advance Wars games and also recontextualizes for me the philosophies behind both of those games developments. Thankfully, I found it in the form of the Advance Wars remake. I know this is a “me” problem, and I’ve been looking for strategy games that would help mitigate my anxiety. Even if I made a big mistake, the game allowed me to rewind to a previous turn and try again, which in the moment was a sigh of relief, but in the long run made me find the game too easy. I was making these monumental decisions, but the game interacted with me as if it had kid gloves on.

When I played through Three Houses for the first time, I played it on normal mode without permadeath, but every time a unit died the game felt incomplete, like the punishment was too light and more of a slap on the wrist. Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Fire Emblem Engage have offered up fairly easy introductions to the genre, but whenever I play them I feel like I’m not really playing them as intended. I have been trying to break out of my comfort zone, and some attempts have been mildly successful. If my best unit is dead, or several of them die at once, what’s the point in pushing on if I’m just delaying the inevitable? If I spent over an hour on a mission only to be completely wiped, it’s a huge ask of me to go back in, try again, and potentially waste even more time on a mission that I may just fail again. It may be the death of one of my best units or getting a “game over” that sends me back hours, but each punishment feels so significant that I wonder what’s even the point of continuing. There’s this creeping sensation when I play a strategy game that I’m always one step away from failure and that I’ll be punished severely for it. Then when the move is made, sometimes even if it is the right move, something may have happened that’s entirely out of my control, like the enemy scoring a critical hit, making the game punish me for having bad luck.

The conveyance is almost immediate, but in a strategy game, I have no idea whether the move I’m doing is going to be right or wrong until a long period of time after I made my decision. If I take damage, then I must be doing something wrong. If I am damaging the enemy, then I am playing the game correctly, and if I am getting a huge combo or score, then I am playing the game well. When I’m playing an action game, the feedback is immediate. There are plenty of reasons as to why I try to avoid them at all costs, but mostly I think it’s that I always feel like I’m doing something wrong in strategy games.

But when a game is entirely centered around strategy mechanics, then I start to stress out and find myself getting incredibly anxious while playing them. I recognize that those minigames aren’t the main attraction, and if I want to, I can simply ignore them or just grit my teeth and barrel through it. If they show up as minigames in a much larger game that isn’t a strategy game, I tend to be fine with them. It’s not like it’s a primal fear in the same way that people are afraid of heights or spiders. Tactical RPGs, RTS, tower defense, auto battlers, 4X games - I’ve always been afraid to ever play them. As a matter of fact, I’m afraid to play them. But I don’t really like to play strategy games. For me personally, I find myself playing more platformers and RPGs than any other genre. As gamers, we all have genres of games that we gravitate towards or shy away from.