Grand Guilds

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG / Card RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Grand Guilds is a Tactics-Style Turn-Based Strategy-RPG with Card RPG elements that has players searching for answers to a secret plot carried out by a mysterious group apparently seeking to unbalance the peace in a medieval fantasy realm. This game was released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2020.

Grand Guilds has a decent presentation, but not a spectacular one. The textures and character designs are good, but not especially imaginative. The animations for some attacks are fantastic, but other animations like generic walking animations are stiff. At one point I noticed some nasty slowdown in a cutscene, despite that there was absolutely nothing taxing going on to justify the issue. The music is decent but forgettable fantasy fare, and the snippets of voice (sadly no fully-voiced dialogue) are okay but seemed overly expressive for the situations they were used in. All in all, nothing terrible, but nothing great either, and certainly nothing to justify the over 5.6GB this game takes up in your Nintendo Switch’s memory.

As for the gameplay, this game makes use of a fairly unique mix of Tactics-Style Turn-Based Strategy-RPG and Card RPG elements, and while it’s all decent and works, I honestly felt like neither of these elements were realized to its full potential. Players don’t win cards, buy them, or collect them, they unlock them by buying them with points gained through battle or simply through the course of the campaign. And these card elements don’t allow for the sort of character and party customization people may be used to from other Tactics-Based Strategy-RPGs like Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Disgaea.

I should also point out that the interface here has some issues as well. Some important functions, like looking closely at a card in the menus, require pressing in a thumbstick, and players can’t look at a card at all in battle until they bring up the menu to actually use it… which can lead to players having to move, use an attack, then highlight a card just to see the card and have to undo the actions up to that point after the fact. It’s not game-breaking, but it’s highly inconvenient, and I feel like frustrations like this are littered through the game design. Again, nothing truly terrible, but plenty of small annoyances.

In the end, I still like Grand Guilds, and I give it credit for doing a few unique things within its genre(s), but I feel like it’s also littered with enough flaws that it’s harder to appreciate, especially on a platform that has such an absolute wealth of Strategy-RPG titles, like the Nintendo Switch. If you’re a huge fan of the genre and want something new and relatively inexpensive, you may want to check this out, but otherwise you’re probably better off sticking with one of the many other better games in the genre that the Nintendo Switch has to offer.

tl;dr – Grand Guilds is a game that combines Tactics-style Strategy-RPG and Card RPG genres. It’s a fairly original approach to the genre, but it’s hard to appreciate the game’s good qualities because it’s filled with a lot of frustrations such as a cumbersome interface and bloated file size. If you’re a genre fan looking to fill out your collection with a cheap addition, you may want to consider it, but most are better off sticking with other games in the genre on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C+

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