Grotesque Tactics Collection

With videogames, as with any art form, parodies tend to fall into two camps: there are those that charmingly and affectionately evoke the spirit of the genre that inspired them, managing to be something more than a mindless pastiche, and those that simply mock a more popular form because they lack the ability to do something meaningful in themselves. Grotesque Tactics rather stubbornly places itself in the no man’s land between those two shores, like a troll guarding a bridge with ridiculous riddles (although in Grotesque Tactic’s world it would more likely be a flatulent troll dressed in a pink leotard than the standard garden variety).

Grotesque Tactics begins with our depressed goth protagonist Drake about to end his sorry existence by feeding himself to a carnivorous mushroom, when Holy Avatar, an outrageous caricature of a heroic golden boy, wanders along and convinces Drake to join him in defeating the Dark Church, who currently holds the Kingdom of Glory to ransom. Drake reluctantly follows Holy (who amusingly refers to himself as ‘his semi-divine humble self’) and helps him to assemble a nightmare team of anti-heroes (hence the game’s somewhat misleading subtitle: Evil Heroes). Holy’s overactive libido results in the majority of the party being made up of nubile maidens clad in scraps of cloth that are more for aesthetic purposes than actual defence, whilst an opportunistic goblin rogue named Rukel (but clearly modelled on Golem) and the fantasy equivalent of Mr. T complete the party.

Gameplay itself is a simple affair. You’re free to wander around the environments until you enter the range of an enemy, when the game becomes a turn based affair on a grid in the mode of Might and Magic Heroes or Final Fantasy Tactics. However, If you’re looking for a deeply tactical challenge you should look elsewhere, because each of Grotesque’s characters has a clearly defined role with only three special abilities that are unlocked through the course of the game. However for all its simplicity the combat system is satisfying enough to carry you along in spite of yourself. It’s a shame, however, that even in such a seemingly unadorned system there should be a few frustrating gremlins. The main culprit in both games is the camera, which is often more of a threat than your foes as it lackadaisically and unpredictably drifts over proceedings like a drunken Loki, causing you to mis-target enemies or heal the wrong ally.

One nice touch is the game’s obsession meter, which fills when characters take damage and is a kind of automatic limit break that hinders you more than it helps. The maidens, for example, will obsessively defend Holy putting themselves into harm’s way in the process. Meanwhile, Holy himself will feel compelled to start narrating one of his old war stories, putting to sleep anyone in his immediate vicinity. It’s a nice touch that cleverly undermines an RPG tradition, and it’s a shame that the designers felt compelled to remove it from the sequel.

Dungeons and Donuts, the follow up to Evil Heroes and included in this set, changes everything and yet nothing. Following the fall of the Dark Church the Kingdom of Glory has become infested with an evil John Carpenter-esque killing fog, and Drake has developed heroes amnesia (which we are told is common for heroes embarking on a new adventure). The game definitely looks better and runs more smoothly (even on slower systems there is much less lag when your party passes the six person mark), but the charmingly cartoony graphical style of the original has been replaced by a fairly bland attempt at a darker, more realistic aesthetic, which only serves to make the game appear much older than it is. A particular disappointment is that the quirky JRPG inspired character portraits of the original have been traded in for some crude attempts at more realistic daubings. Then there is the addition of voice acting, which varies widely from cringe inducing to funny, with every inconsistent shade in between.

Dungeons and Donuts also ramps up the parody, and within the first hour you’ll have met Professor Oke who tells you about Pokedudes and Hope from Final Fantasy XIII (there isn’t even an attempt to disguise his identity for copyright infringement reasons) who constantly whines about how he hates heroes because one of them killed his mommy. Although there is a lot of funny material in this game, a good deal more of it feels clumsy and forced compared to the largely charming references of the original.

The game plays pretty much the same and characters still have a limited amount of skills at their disposal, only this time around they are augmented by some fairly uninspiring skill trees. There is also the addition of a crafting system, which sees you finding recipes and cooking them up using bits and bobs dropped from monsters. The sole use of this ability seems to be to create food for NPCs during the web of fetch quests that constitute the down time between dungeons, which seems a bit of a wasted idea. It seems everyone is hungry and no one knows how to cook (Glory would be a paradise for Ainsley Harriott), but although these misadventures are wrapped up in humorous dialogue and simple point and click style inventory and dialogue puzzles (one particularly amusing one sees you on a panty raid of the Holy Avatar Fan Club), it’s not enough to disguise the tedium of the activities. By giving the illusion of nonlinearity this seems a lacklustre attempt to fix the on-rails quality of the original, which saw you moving from combat locations to a hub town to resupply with little choice in between.