Kickstarter of the Week – Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians

Remember awesome grid-based tactical games like Final Fantasy Tactics? Well they are making a comeback. The past few years have seen huge releases like The Banner Saga and XCOM: Enemy Within make the tactical RPG genre explode. But what about Final Fantasy Tactics, that loved game that tactical RPG fans look back fondly upon? What is its creator, Yasumi Matsuno, doing these days? The answer, is attempting to Kickstart a new tactical RPG project called Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians.

Unsung Story will be a lot like Final Fantasy Tactics in that it will tell the story of an ancient war and the heroes that shaped the battlefield, whether recorded by history or not. It takes place in the fantasy world of Rasfalia and followed the events of the Seventy Seven Years War. Each episode of the game will follow a different important character in the war, and your main protagonist will change as the war goes on. Sometimes characters will stick around, other times they will leave, and other times they will die. Heck, you may even find yourself playing as your own child at some point.

The game will be grid based, but not as you would expect. Instead of a square grid, characters will be laid out on a grid of triangles. Instead of standing on the triangles themselves, characters will move along the gridlines and stand at the intersections between them giving them six directions of movement. Attack ranges will be noted by coloring the triangle themselves. Any intersection that the triangles touch will be included in the range of the attack. So, for example, basic attacks reach to the six triangles that immediately surround your character, painting a hexagon around him.

The game will also be heavily class-based, just like Final Fantasy Tactics. However, the class system will have an additional level of complexity in the form of professions. There are only five basic classes in the game: Attacker, Defender, Mage, Healer and Tamer. Attackers specialize in dealing physical damage, Defenders specialize in being tanks and drawing agro, Mages use special abilities and magic to deal damage, buff the party, and debuff enemies, healers heal the party and utilize defensive buffs and Tamers command monsters and have other strange and wonky secondary abilities. Each character, however, has one of ten professions. This combination of profession and class eventually grants a character his final “job” so to speak.

For example, Noble’s classes all have to do with having access to expensive equipment and tools. The Attacker Noble is the Ballast Knight, who wields Great Swords and Lances and can fight mounted. Estate classes, however, all have to with math and business. Their attacker class is the Aerolest, who uses his math and science skills to create crossbows and siege weapons. Yet another class is the Polearm Knight, the attacker class of the Pioneer. They  have access to Pikes, Scythes, and other weapons with long range.

Unsung Story is asking for a whopping $600,000 to get off the ground and they are only about $75,000 away from their goal. Unfortunately, they only have three days left to complete their Kickstarter. So if you want to see the tactical RPG come back in full force, head on over to the official Kickstarter page and pitch them a few bucks.