Title	Absolute Tactics: Daughters of Mercy
Developer	AKUPARA GAMES
Publisher	AKUPARA GAMES
Release Date	November 11th, 2022
Genre	Strategy
Platform	PlayStation 4 | 5, Nintendo Switch, Steam
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

I’m always up to check out a good strategy title, so when I got the chance to check out Absolute Tactics: Daughters Of Mercy for the PlayStation 4, I jumped on it. At first glance I liked the art style and the gameplay looked pretty solid, so I expected this to be a pretty decent indie title. Let’s see if this held up to my expectations.

The story here follows a young man named Huxley, who aspires to be a great hero. The chance for this arrives when dark forces have taken over his land. Our hero and his band of friends set out to free their home. In order to do this you will have to defeat Father Eldritch and his Daughters of Mercy. They will stop at nothing to find the Fallen Daughter, the ultimate source of Adenine, which will give them the power to rule this world forever.

I have to say, this may be one of the most basic and badly written stories I’ve seen in a video game in a long time. The writing doesn’t fit the tone of the game in the least. The characters speak at times like reject valley girls, and this is consistent through the entire game. I think the writers were going for some sort of humor with this, but it fell flat and just hurt the overall experience of the story. That aside, this story is very one dimensional with predictable character growth, which for a very linear SRPG is already not great.

Now that we have that out of the way let’s talk about what Absolute Tactics: Daughters Of Mercy does right: the gameplay. The game features a very traditional Japanese style SRPG system. I was pleased to see this, since this style is one of my favorites. They kept things pretty simple with your party of usually six heroes battling enemies with their own strengths and weaknesses. Players move around on grid-based maps dispatching enemies with a variety of attacks and skills, as you would expect. I like that you could equip each of your heroes with two different jobs via the skill books. This lets you customize each character to your liking with very little restrictions. I liked trying out different combinations to see which ones worked the best.

In between battles there is a camp menu. From here you can choose to purchase wares from the various shops, take on optional missions or progress the story. Optional missions have some hidden goodies on the maps, and you can replay them as much as you want until you find the secret within each one of them. This makes things not feel repetitive if you have to run one a few times to be leveled up enough for the next story battle.

In the graphics and sound departments, this one is pretty good as well. The artwork is detailed, the environments look great, and the character models look great as well. Attacks from both your heroes and enemies have some good animations, making the game feel like a smooth experience overall. The soundtrack fits the theme of the game very well, having that classic fantasy vibe to it. The only real issue I had with the sound was that some of the effects sounded a bit out of place, but this was nothing too distracting.

Overall, Absolute Tactics: Daughters Of Mercy is a good SRPG that is dragged down by its subpar story. The gameplay here is good and fans of the this genre will find a lot to love here. The story being the way it is really hurts this, since most of these games you are driven to complete the story maps to see how it progresses. The bad writing here makes you not really care halfway through, so it begins to feel tedious. I spent right around 17 hours with this one on normal difficulty, but this will vary depending on the level of difficulty you choose to play on. It’s hard for me to fully recommend this one at the $24.99 price tag, unless you are just a hardcore Strategy RPG fan. That being said, if you snag this one up on sale down the line you will probably find things you enjoy about it.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher.