Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs – Royal Edition

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Regalia is a Tactics-Style Turn-Based Strategy-RPG released on PC in 2017, and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2018 in a Royal Edition that includes all of the expansion content for the game. This game puts players in the role of an heir to the throne of a kingdom in ruins who must rebuild the empire that is his birthright.

This game uses a combination of 2D backgrounds and cel-shaded 3D characters, along with some hand-drawn artwork for character portraits. The result looks pretty good, although I will say that I wish the game had used fully 3D backgrounds so that the battlefield could be rotated, and it’s frustrating that sometimes characters can become obscured by objects. Also, I’m not a fan of the music in this game – often, it reminds me of elevator music. On the plus side, I really like the character designs, and this game’s writing is very good, with a great sense of humor and some really wonderful and memorable characters. On balance I’d say that overall I really enjoyed the presentation in this game, even if I had a few issues with it.

When it comes to the gameplay, when playing this game I was reminded somewhat of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Much like in that game, players will play through various strategic battles out in the field while also keeping an eye on an in-game calendar and managing their growing army’s development back at home, including developing interpersonal relationships, as well as building up their kingdom’s facilities.

Each of these actions at home contributes to success in the field – building up your shop, for example, will let you trade off unwanted items for valuable resources, and developing relationships with various characters will unlock new abilities or bonuses. However, every day spent focusing on these is a day not spent out on the field working toward goals that need to be reached by a deadline. As such, players must strike a good balance, and must decide which of these activities to spend their limited time on.

The battles themselves aren’t just your standard fare for the genre, either. This is pretty challenging stuff for a Strategy-RPG – I’ve been a fan of this genre for decades and I actually failed out of the first tutorial mission. The trick is understanding a few of the ways in which this game is unique, and utilizing the game systems here properly. Failing to do so will quickly lead to your doom.

Firstly, it’s important to note that this game doesn’t really do healing in battles. Lost life is not recovered until after a battle is over. Until then, the best players can do is beef up their units with extra armor using various character skills. It’s a good habit to get into to start out a battle by getting your units armored up as best as you can before enemies are in range. Likewise, it’s equally important to recognize that any character capable of adding armor is about as close to a healer as you’re likely to get, and that they must be utilized pre-emptively rather than as a reactionary measure as in most games.

Another important element to bear in mind is that this game has no basic attacks – characters only have abilities. What’s more, character abilities draw on two resources – cooldowns and command points. Cooldowns, as you might expect, require players to wait before re-using abilities again, and command points are a resource shared between all characters, and players only get one per turn. These command points can be saved up to use on a character’s stronger abilities, or they can be spent one at a time to enable a single character to gain an additional turn.

Add to this an unforgiving random chance that any given attack may miss, as well as some reasonably crafty enemy AI, and you have combat that can get difficult very quickly if you don’t manage the timing of your character’s abilities properly. What’s more, abilities that ensure a 100% success rate when attacking, or cause status effects, play a much bigger role here than many games of this sort.

Thankfully, for players who don’t want a challenge, you can go into the options menu and change these settings to suit your own playstyle, individually changing the punishment your characters dish out or receive, turning off the enemy’s ability to evade your attacks, and so on. The game recommends you play with the default settings, and I personally think one of the most enjoyable parts of this game is learning its various systems and overcoming this challenge, but I appreciate that less-skilled players have the choice to tone down elements of this challenge that particularly frustrate them.

Still, there are other flaws here that could have done with a bit of tweaking. The game systems here seem a bit over-complicated, and take a while to properly understand. Even then, the menus aren’t always intuitive, and players can find themselves struggling to find basic information at times.

In addition, little seems to have been done to optimize this game for handheld play. The text looks tiny in portable mode and can be difficult to read, and this game offers no touchscreen controls, even though it would do wonders for the game’s menu navigation issues.

Still, despite all its flaws and its high difficulty, I found Regalia to be a delightful Strategy-RPG that I would absolutely recommend to fans of the genre, particularly those looking for something with the same sort of progression as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and especially for those players who crave a challenge.

tl;dr – Regalia is a Strategy-RPG that has players in the role of the heir to a crumbling castle looking to rebuild his empire. This is a challenging entry in the genre that does some unique things with combat, and with progression that resembles Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s not without its flaws, but for fans of the genre this is definitely a game I’d encourage you to try.

Grade: B+

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