The dice rolling, card playing tactical-RPG from Cardboard Utopia is finally upon us.
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Children of Zodiarcs is a turn-based tactical RPG, using a hand of slowly unlocking and expanding cards as player character abilities, and a handful of virtual dice which modify the card’s effects. On the outset the game feels big, but both the unusual story and the battles themselves wind up feeling a bit more intimate than you might expect, for good and ill.
Battles in Zodiarcs take place in sections of territory with obstacles and enemies placed on a movement grid. Each side in a conflict takes turns moving and attacking, with win/loss conditions being the only real outcome, other than perhaps a few conversations between characters at key moments being cut off if a character is defeated too early. The terrain is somewhat climbable, sometimes with different avenues for engaging foes. It is unclear sometimes which characters have line of sight, and how far one of your attacks can reach on the vertical plane, making some advanced planning a lot more difficult than it should be. All character abilities are expressed in cards, dealt in hands of up to seven from a custom deck of abilities unique to each character. When used, players roll dice to activate abilities, alter damage, heal, draw cards, get an extra attack, and block melee retaliation damage, with the dice that are rolled equipped beforehand out of a pool of dice reserved for each character.
This game does not have loot per se; one earns dice at the end of missions which can be swapped with your current loadout, and as one levels up, new cards unlock and old abilities expand. As abilities expand, rolling star symbols will enable extra effects, and you’ll be granted bonus dice for many abilities which make the abilities have more impact, leading to some interesting ways to combine attacks, cause debilitating negative dice to cling to opponents and then make them take damage from them, for example. This is a far cry from the beginning levels’ few, plain abilities. Deck construction, dice equipping, and dice construction are the only ways you can customise a character.
Between battles you can disassemble dice you don’t want to increase the value of a few of a given die’s facings, letting you hone higher-performing dice. Your basic dice pool gives you an idea of the possibilities of a given roll, but little control over the outcome beyond being able to reroll 2 dice in a pool once, and having to accept the results of the new roll. An interesting wrinkle of these dice pools subverts what one often encounters in RPGs, the damage range of a given attack. Players are used to damage values being linear ranges, with each value equally possible. Because of the combinatorics of a given roll however, the probabilities wind up being closer to a bell curve, with the middle values being much more likely than low or high. While dice crafting doesn’t tend to amount to a whole lot and is frankly a bit dull, one can use up enough extra dice to craft a die that may enable extra card play, more melee defence, a better chance to draw an extra card after an attack, and a few other effects.
Essentially, Zodiarcs is a string of battle scenarios, with downtime in between to get to know the characters better. There is also an arena, as well as an optional, brief series of side missions, both of which expand upon a few plot events and character decisions. The story is linear, but the game allows you to experience these events out of order, giving players the time to strengthen their characters for the more gruelling arena battles. Anyone with even a passing interest in the story will be rewarded for doing these extra events; it’s not made clear, but they are actually essential to the story. What aren’t essential are optional battles in locations the player has already visited, allowing you to grind more dice and experience points. There is no story to them, but especially early on they can help you get an edge over enemies in the story missions.
In addition to one autosave slot and four manual saves, the game has one save slot that allows you to save mid-battle, and strangely that slot still exists even after the scenario is beaten, allowing you a chance to try it again if you wanted to, until it is overwritten. It’s important to manually save if you ever intend to go back, though, to preserve your overall progress. The scenarios on Normal difficulty are not crushingly difficult but often challenging, requiring the player to think about how far they advance, not just who they should hit first. Hard difficulty is, however, pretty overwhelming, and you’ll likely be reloading a lot if you try it.
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The opening promise of the game’s unique setting is somewhat let down by a string of battles that are largely slight variations on the theme of characters violating the territory of rival gangs, cannibals, or nobles. The major story events happen about mid-way through, and some interesting developments, illuminated by the side missions, help make the story stand out more, but feel a bit thinner than they should due to the lack of variety earlier. The journey of the main character makes sense when taken as a whole, though, and is refreshingly subversive about the destruction that accumulates in tactical combat games.
The combat itself has moments of greatness when you align abilities well to hit a group of targets, draw the card you need to turn the tide, or use a combination of abilities to get a good string of attacks going, although one may find one’s persistent memory of the gameplay is of trying to reroll dice to get a desired result for the card you played only to roll the same facing again, undercutting your attack’s possibilities and opening you up to attack next turn. Sometimes such rerolls work out and it’s rewarding, but the pausing at each card play, dice roll, and dice reroll slows the feel of combat, which, yes, is a thing even in turn based games. Thankfully you never have more than a few characters, and strikes are often devastating, with only the rare opponent being able to handle more than two or three hits. Since this can also apply to player characters, a defensive game makes more sense than diving in, but even so, you may find you’ll have to reload due to a convergence of unforeseen circumstances.
The music of Zodiarcs is a highlight, symphonic and grand. The expressive character art nigh on perfect, the pastiche paintings that set up certain scenarios are well done, and the battle locations have a slightly low res feel that not only works but probably contributes to how smoothly you can rotate a battle map. Killing off a character results in a ragdoll effect that is oddly satisfying when they fall off a ledge; ability animations sometimes take a bit longer than one might like, which can feel a bit sloggy after a while, but at least a recent feature allows you to fast forward through the enemy’s turn, and there’s an option to automatically roll dice, instead of manually rolling them every time. The characters are memorable, even if some get less time than you might expect, and serve the story’s themes, while the story’s intimate focus over a brief time period lends a different feel to the narrative than what one may be used to.
Had there been more variety to scenarios, perhaps a few changes in how you interact with the world over time, a further delving into the world itself, more exploration options, or maybe a bit more characterisation either in-battle or between, Children of Zodiarcs might have pulled farther ahead of its own failings, but as such the game’s own attempts at grandeur are undercut by its stumbles in pacing, samey early encounters, sometimes finicky battle mechanics, and solemn linearity. The story, taken as a whole, is ultimately worthwhile, taking risks or springing abrupt twists that don’t always pay off but are nonetheless appreciated, and toward the end the battle mechanisms come into their own, a random gobby mess of damage, curses, and extra actions that can be fun to unleash. Given how much further it feels like the game wants to go, though, it aches a bit to imagine the bigger game it could have been.
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Keyword: Children of Zodiarcs