Children of Zodiarcs

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG / Card RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!

Children of Zodiarcs is a Turn-Based Strategy-RPG and Card-based RPG released on PC and PlayStation 4 in 2017, and then ported to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game follows the story of a group of youths in the slums of a city in a fantasy setting, stealing from the wealthy to try to get by, until their world gets upturned after they steal a powerful “Zodiarc”, with said zodiarcs being ancient machines capable of seemingly magical feats.

One warning I’ll give to potential players is that Children of Zodiarcs has a pretty dark plot, starting by not shying away from how miserable it can be to live on the bottom rung of a strongly classist society, and arguably getting even more dour from there. And while I do think that the writing and characters are pretty good here… well, try not to get too attached to anyone.

However, while the game’s story may be pretty depressing, the presentation is overall pretty good, combining decent 3D visuals for locales and characters along with some very nice hand-drawn 2D artwork. This is all backed by a pretty nice somewhat cinematic instrumental soundtrack. There’s nothing extraordinary here, and much of the game’s story is conveyed purely through text-only cutscenes accompanied by aforementioned character portraits, but for a relatively inexpensive game it’s not bad at all.

However, the highlight here is almost certainly this game’s blend of Strategy-RPG mechanics with both deck-based RPG gameplay and dice mechanics. Players move around in battle much like a typical Tactics-based Strategy-RPG, but your moves are limited to the randomly-dealt cards your character has in hand. Upon selecting a move and a target, you’ll then roll dice to determine the move’s effectiveness as well as potential bonuses, with players able to do a one-time re-roll of up to two dice to modify their result.

One of the nice things about this is that players will be able to modify their characters’ decks as well as their dice. If your cards don’t have enough healing, you can select dice with more healing sides to compensate, or you can go the other direction and focus on dealing damage… or you can focus on bonus effects, drawing additional cards, there’s a lot of flexibility here.

Players will gain additional dice to equip through battles, and leveling up results in not only stat increases but improvements to cards and unlocking additional dice slots. Players will be able to customize specific dice as well, though this takes far more grinding for resources than simply swapping one die out for another. What’s more, this game cleverly uses dice as a way to express its game mechanics – attacks that would reduce accuracy do so by replacing dice with worse versions, and a character getting temporarily powered-up generally does so by gaining more dice for the duration of the effect.

I think this all works together really well, and does a good job giving players a sense that they have multiple ways to customize each of their characters. However, there’s also a downside to this, as it can make battles take quite a long while as each attack requires moving your character into place, selecting a card and a target, rolling, deciding which dice to reroll, rolling again, and then resolving all of this to get a result, all while being mindful that you’ll sometimes need to spend a move just to draw additional cards when you’re running low on attacks or simply don’t have the move you need.

While it’s enjoyable, it’s a lot to go through, especially if you’re tackling an enemy you should be able to easily dispatch. I think this game could have greatly benefitted from a basic attack move that doesn’t require cards, or the ability to skip rolling and just accept the least-beneficial result if it would still be enough to finish off an enemy. Either of these would have made the game flow much more swiftly and addressed the pacing issues.

Still, even with the dour plot and the pacing issues, the mix of gameplay elements here is quite enjoyable, and players who particularly like creative game mechanics with interesting customization options in their Strategy-RPGs should find Children of Zodiarcs worth trying out.

tl;dr – Children of Zodiarcs is a Turn-Based Strategy-RPG and Card-based RPG that follows a group of youths in a fantasy slum who find themselves at the center of a conflict surrounding one of the game’s titular magical artifacts. This game has something of a downer plot, and it suffers from pacing issues, but the multiple game mechanics involved in combat and character management are really engaging, and make this game well worth a look despite those issues.

Grade: B+

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