Let's Try: Hellenica
0What if you took Ancient Greece, threw a bunch of steam punk on top of it, and then just for fun, made the combat a flavour of Final Fantasy Tactics and that's Hellenica!
Oh, and everyone is anime hot, because why not?
You are an Arktos, which is a soldier of sorts for Athena, Goddess of the hunt! You are given a vision about oncoming dangers that only you (and some friends) can stop! Unfortunately your vision is interrupted by a loud-mouth anime trope who joins your team. From there it's off on your grand adventure.
Mechanically this game is split into 2 distinct parts: story, and combat. The story parts is all talking and plot. You interact with all the people in the area, and you are then given paths you can take (each segment has up to 3 paths). You pick which one you want to take, which then leads you to a combat segment. Presumably each path gives you a different combat scenario, so there's a lot of replay value as you try and unlock all the various paths.
The combat is reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics, with a bit of Into the Breach mixed in. You get to plan your your teams actions and in what order they happen in. This allows you to do some fun combo moves by knocking enemies around the map. Then all the enemies move and do their stuff. Each map has 3 experience conditions (one of which is not revealed until you beat the map the first time) and experience grants you an ability point every 1000 experience. This ability point gives ONE of your characters a new move. This is not something I figured out until it was way too late.
A lot of the combat maps feel a lot more like puzzles, in that you have to figure out what The Big Bad is, or how to cheese your way into the third win condition. It's interesting, but can get frustrating if you're just trying to brute-force a solution.
Overall I enjoyed it! There's some ui changes/additions I'd like to see in the combat maps, as getting relevant information (like steam level) is a bit buried. There is also zero tutorial on how combat works, so if you're not a vet of tactics games, it can be a bit jarring.
Game info: https://thedragonloft.itch.io/hellenica
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