It's a pretty good month for SRPGs on Steam (yes, there's a GA)

If you look through my recent(ish) giveaways and forum posts, you'll see that I usually just pop up to remind people to buy more visual novels, but I'm a man of many interests. Due to accidentally buying a spare key on Humble, I'm gonna go in a different direction today: strategy/tactical RPGs.

Even if you're not intimately familiar with the genre, you've probably got a good idea of what it is. You put teams of units on a grid and move 'em towards each other and make 'em do battles in turns. And you know a bunch of the big franchises, even if just by name - Fire Emblem, Shining Force, Final Fantasy Tactics, Super Robot Wars, etc., etc. Basically, it's like chess, but with more dumb anime plots and rulesets made up by kids on the playground endlessly trying to one-up each other. They're challenges you can generally take at your own pace, even if they're not always good brain exercises.

A couple weeks ago, Vestaria Saga finally released on Steam. Given the generic-looking art assets, and the shady nature of the publisher, you'd be forgiven for passing by it at first glance. You might even be less likely to purchase it upon learning that it was released in Japan as a free download some years ago. But what this game has going for it is the developer: Shouzou Kaga, creator of the Fire Emblem franchise, and the lead writer/designer for the series up through Thracia 776 at the end of the millennium. Designing Fire Emblem is just about all Kaga knows how to do professionally, to the point where Nintendo sued him for copyright infringement (and lost) when his new studio released Tear Ring Saga. Vestaria Saga isn't much different in that regard, although that's certainly due in part to the limitations of the SRPG Studio engine. Regardless, it's a title fans of classic Fire Emblem games should take a look at.

For fans of giant anime robots, you might be pleased to find out that Super Robot Wars X just released on Steam a couple of days ago. You'll be less pleased to find that, while it's entirely in English, it's only available in certain Asian markets, much like SRW V a few months before it.

Finally, in another couple of weeks, Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception (and its sequel, Mask of Truth, which I won't link due to potential for spoilers) will finally get their first PC release. They've been available for a couple years now on PS4 and Vita, but for a franchise that started on PC nearly twenty years ago, it's nice that they're coming back to it. While they're not unrelated to the original Utawarerumono, I wouldn't say it's absolutely necessary to have played the original, which is good, since there won't be an official release of it in English until the remake drops sometime later this year. That, too, is going to be on Steam, although not until some time after the console release, apparently. I would warn that these are closer to visual novels with occasional SRPG battles rather than true SRPGs, but if you want to read a good, engaging story, you could do a hell of a lot worse.

I'll give honorable mention to Langrisser I+II, which is releasing in a couple months, although there's plenty of reason to be wary. The Langrisser series has been running nearly as long as Fire Emblem, and before Sega had its own contender in Shining Force, the first Langrisser was localized for the Genesis as Warsong. Unfortunately, the rest of the series never made it to the west, save for the miserable and largely unrelated Re:Incarnation for the 3DS and the mobile gacha game that released last year. The SNES remake of Langrisser II, Der Langrisser (which has a good 'unofficial' translation available, it you want to look around), expanded on the original by adding in branching routes, a feature that seems to have been backported to Langrisser I for this remake. Unfortunately, the art in the remakes is fairly generic-looking, and it's being handled by NISA, so it's a double whammy: bad localizations (see: Ys VIII) and awful PC porting (see: Ys VIII again, and really just about anything they've touched). It'd be a shame if the Steam release ended up being as bad as their last few big releases, but there's always other versions available.

NISA made its name on SRPGs, though, and they wouldn't be in business if it weren't for the Disgaea franchise. Their first Disgaea port was a mess, to the point where I eventually refunded it despite being a great game on any other platform. I bought a Steam key to give it another shot due to the current sale on the Humble store, only to find I'd already drunkenly done the same thing a couple months ago. So, now I've got a spare key, and you've got a giveaway to enter. Disgaea might not be the most polished game, but it's a damn fun classic (and also, possibly the only game on Steam that lets you equip a horse wiener).

Giveaway closes at noon EST on January 18th. In the meantime, if you've got an SRPG you want to discuss or recommend, the comments are all yours.

(tl;dr here's the GA for anyone who's just gonna skip to the bottom and not read the wall of text that I spent an hour working on, thank you very much)