Future Tactics: The Uprising

Future Tactics: The Uprising Overview

Future Tactics: The Uprising is a turn based strategy tactics role playing game that was released for the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox. This quirky tactics game has a heavy focus on the destruction of the environment in each mission. When the player does so he or she can obtain items that will upgrade their characters. The player can also upgrade their characters from experience they obtains from winning missions and defeating enemies. Overall if you are a big fan of tactics games then this is worth a play, otherwise its not a perfect game and you should probably stay away.

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Full Review

Future Tactics: The Uprising Review

By, Jason Ferguson

Backdrop

.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.

The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).

Gameplay

Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.

The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.

Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.

Combat

Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.

Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.

Fresh Features

Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.

To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)

Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.

Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.

Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.

Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.

Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.

In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.

Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.

Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.

Time for Completion

Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.

Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.

Shortcomings

While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.

From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.

The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.

The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.

Final Word

We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!

Final Grade: B

Future Tactics: The Uprising is one of the most unique games I’ve played in a while. It throws out a lot of the norms we see in Strategy/RPGs and provides gamers with an experience that’s more focused on the action. With hordes of Strategy/RPGs out there, Future Tactics provides gamers with a refreshing taste of something new.

In the not so distant Future Earth has been taken over by creatures. The surviving humans are spread throughout the world in small settlements and live in constant fear. A young man named Low finally is fed up with the creatures, and he and his sister fight back! As they continue on slaughtering every creature in their path, they’ll meet up with many allies and a fight to rescue humanity from the creatures will begin. Each battle is a chapter in the game’s story, and ends with a short cinematic that relays the story. Unfortunately, the story isn’t overly interesting or detailed. The game just gives you some villains and an excuse to kill them. Fortunately, killing them is actually pretty fun. Of course, most Strategy/RPGs tend to put combat before story, so this isn’t anything new. The game’s story is certainly effective, but not at all deep or flashy. If you like to keep things basic and want to avoid the normal deep, confusing storylines that we see in many RPGs, then Future Tactics may please you.

There are a decent amount of playable characters in the game, each with upgradeable skills. Unfortunately, the characters seem sort of random and aren’t really connected to the story very well. There’s one of those “hey, you’re a good guy… I’ll join you!” sort of things going on with everybody you meet. I can’t say I ever really got connected to any of the characters in the game at all. Rarely can you even control more than 3 in battle, so the fact that your team consists of many playable characters doesn’t matter.

Gameplay is where the game shines. Future Tactics gets rid of all the grids and confusing numbers that most Strategy/RPGs use and focuses more on the action. During your turn you can move your characters around the map. A circle will surround your character and that will be the range where you can move. When you come across an enemy you’ll want to blow them away. Each character is equipped with some sort of gun, so when you pull out the weapon you’ll be required to properly line up your shot and fire. The better lined up your shot is the more powerful your attack will be. As you level up you’ll gain new abilities, like the zoom ability, which allows you to zoom into your enemy to get a better view of your target. After you take your shot you can still continue to move around. This gives you the chance to hide from your enemies and get out of their range. It actually requires some skill and it’s actually quite fun. It can be a little frustrating at first as you struggle to line up the shot, but once you get the hang out it things get a lot better.

Like any good Strategy/RPG, the environment in Future Tactics affects the gameplay. Although, the environment in Future Tactics plays a much larger role than most. As you run around the map you can hide behind fences, buildings, rocks, trees and hills to avoid the creature’s line of sight. On top of that, the environments are highly destroyable. You can blast a whole in a house and crawl inside to hide from enemies, or you can blast a crater in the ground and use it for cover. You can even blast your enemies off the edge of a cliff or into a river and kill them instantly. Jump on top of a building to get a clear view of the battlefield, knock objects down to obstruct your enemies view… there are all sorts of interesting ways the environment can affect your battles!

When you’re ready to end your turn you have three options: Rest, heal and shield. Shield reduces damage, heal leaves you vulnerable but heals health, and rest simply ends your turn. Once your turn is up the enemies then begin to move.

Your characters level up by shooting enemies. The better the shot, like a headshot, the more experience you’ll receive. You can earn additional experience by fighting higher level foes and by dealing the final blow. The best way to earn experience then is to get the killing blow on a high level creature with a headshot. You can also find upgrades spread throughout levels that can be distributed as you wish among your characters to teach them skills.

The variety of enemies is pretty low, which can be annoying at times. The victory conditions are pretty much always the same. kill all enemies or get to point X. Further variety could have made this game a lot better considering it had a fairly solid battle system. With the right strategy, battles tend to be somewhat short and easy too.

Graphically the game isn’t anything special. The design isn’t particularly inspired and the characters don’t look realistic or move convincingly. I also had several points where my characters clipped right through walls and got stuck there, leaving me with no other choice than to reset. The camera is also extremely problematic and makes it hard to line up your shots. The sound isn’t much better. The voice acting is just…bad. Not to the point that you’ll want to stab your ear drums out, but enough that you’ll wonder why they choose such crappy voice actors with such crappy accents. The music isn’t too bad, but it is quite repetitive.

The game has a decent amount of replayability. For one, the game offers a custom mode where you and your friends can face off to see who’s the best. The game features an enjoyable enough battle system that you’ll probably want to go back for the custom mode. There are several different modes available for custom battles as well, including human vs. human, human vs. computer or a mixture. There are also plenty of things to unlock for the custom battle mode through battles in the story mode. With a fun battle system and plenty of options in custom mode, Future Tactics will likely have you coming back for more.

With a little more work, Future Tactics could probably have been a great game. It offers a unique, fun battle system along with plenty of replayability. Unfortunately, poor graphics and sound combined with dull characters and story hinder it. Still, Future Tactics is a budget title, so you don’t really have much to lose if you decide to give it a shot. If you’re looking for an interesting twist on Strategy/RPGs or a straightforward RPG that doesn’t confuse you with grids, stats and super deep storylines, then Future Tactics: The Uprising will please you.

Final Grade: 68%

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