Telepath Tactics is the latest entry in the Telepath RPG series, and is markedly different than its predecessors. It ditches the vector graphics and awkward birds-eye camera angle for more a more traditional 3/4th view and pixellated style, and streamlines the experience into a linear series of battles like Fire Emblem rather than a free-exploration RPG. I believe that the latter change makes it a better game, but at the same time drastically hinders its storytelling ability.

The gameplay is way more coherent and professional now. The GUI is less clunky, controls are more intuitive, and many mechanics have been added or expanded. Arenas can now be larger than the size of the screen, elevation and terrain effects come into play (though they’re a bit wonky in 3/4th view), destructible objects are now much more important (there’s even a class that can build them), and so on. Enemies also play by the same rules as you now; they can finally move more than 3 spaces at once, which makes positioning and movement a lot more important.

There are definitely balance issues though. Assassins break the game in half with the right specs (I oneshotted the final boss with mine, no joke), I never got much use out of the engineer, and photokineticists seem inferior to the other psy fighters. The different classes of psy fighter felt a bit redundant in general; it might have been better if they were consolidated into one class, or else differentiated further into having unique battle roles.

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But probably the most significant change is the introduction of an inventory system. Before, the most you had were the orbs, which were for the player character alone. Now there are weapons, armor, special accessories that grant new abilities, consumable items, the whole package. Weapons also have the interesting feature of having limited uses and eventually breaking, I presume to address the complaint that physical fighters were overpowered in the previous games. I’m not sure how I feel about the feature; it’s an interesting idea in theory and does add a sense of resource management to some otherwise simple characters, but I often found it pretty stressful. Especially in the early- to mid-game, it’s hard to gauge how many uses you’ll need to get through a battle, and it’s impossible to know when you’ll find a merchant and be able to restock. In the end I managed to make it through without any of my fighters becoming sitting ducks, so I guess the developer knew what he was doing, but it was still tricky. A “how many battles until the next shop” counter would have helped me feel a lot less lost.

The inventory system is also pretty clunky and unintuitive, in contrast to how sleek the rest of the game is. Figuring out equipment limitations is a hassle (you can’t check from the reserve, only if you add something to a character’s inventory), and it’s not always clear how many equipment slots there are or how things fit into them, especially for the non-humans. Some kind of visual system, like a lot of western RPGs use, would have helped.

(And this has apparently been fixed in a recent patch, but in the version I played, the inventory system was inexcusably buggy: important, irreplaceable items would just vanish all the time, especially after I had just bought them. It’s honestly a wonder I managed to keep everyone armed. There was also an equipment bug where if you removed an item from your inventory the “equipped” symbols would bug out and de-equip random things, which was a hassle.)

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about these additions. They certainly make for a lot more tactical depth and customization, but were also dizzyingly complex at times. Fortunately, I did get the hang of it eventually (unlike some tactical RPGs I could name), and I did feel very clever about some of the strategies I came up with, such as eliminating powerful enemies simply by dragging them off a cliff and into a river. Or by accidentally pulling an enemy on top of me because I made the mistake of pulling from the south, which produces some pretty weird results thanks to the 3/4th view.

I will say that I am disappointed by the move towards standardized and compartmentalized classes, especially since so many of them have a physical focus. I loved the fact that the first game reversed the standard RPG paradigm of fighters being default and casters being freak exceptions, but here it’s right back to normal. Heck, the protagonist isn’t even a psychic this time! You only get one psy user in your initial (rather large) party, and they remain scarce. You also never get a shadow user at all. In Servants of God, your entire entourage is made up of at least minor psychics (except for one, who plays very differently than any of them), and I really liked how their impractical, physics-defying action movie stunts were explained through that. But apparently the Resistance didn’t need telekinesis to fire a zillion arrows at once or leap 20 feet after all. Psychic power – the cornerstone and namesake of the entire franchise – feels like an afterthought here. The series has lost something that made it feel truly unique and original.

Which brings us to the story component. It’s generally good, and the developer toots his horn about some of the reasons why in the latter half of this blog post. However, due to the switch to a railroad format, it loses something crucial: interactivity and roleplaying. You do get choices sometimes, but they’re all purely mechanical. Not even minor fluff like different manners of speaking is spared; the protagonist has her own, immutable personality (a rather bland one, to be honest). I can understand the reasoning behind this creative choice, but I still feel like the story loses a lot of depth because of it. I can’t really immerse myself fully in the story or struggle through moral issues the same way the characters do. There are also way too many characters, and you’re never given the opportunity to have deep conversations with any of them, so most remain shallow and underdeveloped. There are a few “downtime” scenes where the characters talk among themselves, but it mostly feels too little, too late.

The plot itself is kinda weak; it’s a pretty standard corporations-are-evil thing. The protagonists were enslaved by a shadowling mining company, but managed to escape, and now they want to go back and free the workers. While I can get behind the general sentiment, it leaves something to be desired as an actual story. The shadowlings don’t even enter the plot until about halfway through, as you fight through their human patsies first (so, like with the class distribution, we continue the pattern of arbitrarily withholding the fantasy elements of a fantasy setting, a creative decision that always baffles me). When they finally do appear they’re nicely creepy, but also pretty generic and over-the-top evil. In my review of the first game I praised how the demonic race was given a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal, but here they’re just a way to literally demonize the greedy corporate slavemaster archetype. Sure, it’s not like corporations aren’t deserving of such treatment (and it serves the analogy of stuck-up Westerners exploiting foreign labor), but it leaves something to be desired. While I thought Servants of God displayed a deep and interesting analysis of religious fanaticism, this is just “They’re evil irredeemable monsters, go kill them.”

The best aspect is probably the treatment of women. The developer made a big deal about this leading up to the release, and I think the story does deliver. Women are absolutely everywhere; the two protagonists are sisters, the love interest is a woman, and your starting party of 8 has exactly one guy in it. Though you do get more men eventually, the final ratio is still something like 3:1. (And in a reversal from the first game, the best healer is a girl while the worst one is a guy.) Furthermore, the world treats this as par for the course; no one ever bats an eye at these two swordfighting sisters or their army of female warriors.

(Also, despite there being a species of humanoid lizards, no lizardboobs! Sexual dimorphism is instead shown through head frills.)

This female-dominated cast is very freeing for the narrative. The story is allowed to use a wide variety of general tropes and archetypes that, while technically gender-neutral, often become sexist because the sole woman must take the burden of representing her entire gender. For instance, here’s one scene I liked: the older sister separates from the main group to perform a risky solo mission, and leaves her younger sister (16) in charge. Of course the little sister is nervous and overwhelmed, and thinks she can’t keep the group together. She asks for help from one of their allies, an older knight who served in the military – a normally male archetype, but represented by a woman here. The focus is solidly on her youth and inexperience, rather than carrying the implication that women just can’t lead on their own – an implication that comes unbidden to the same situation as soon as you gender-flip the older sibling, the knight, or both, as is usually the case.

Unfortunately, despite his good intentions, the developer still dropped the ball in other places. Most notably: with two exceptions, the villains are all male. Of the two exceptions, one turns good only to be murdered by her husband (so not only do we have the positive discrimination of women being nicer, we also have a fridging), and the other is a subordinate to a more major villain. While she’s built up to be important, her plotline is dropped pretty quick and she never ends up mattering. I’ve mentioned before that truly powerful and dangerous female villains are disappointingly sparse; they’ve gotten more direct power over the years, but they always tend to be subordinates or have a focus on some kind of indirect power like seduction or mind control. The shadowling queen of the first game was one of the few exceptions and made me optimistic for later portrayals, but no dice. The heroes may have a 3-female-to-1-male ratio, but female villains are still, in 2015, playing second fiddle to their male superiors. Come on, the bandit lord couldn’t have been a woman?

There’s also the fact that the sisters’ primary motivation is to save their father, who is still trapped in the mines. The developer claims this reversal of the woman-saved-by-man scenario is very progressive, and it is to an extent, but I find it kind of ironic that in doing so he falls into the bog-standard trope of the irrelevant mom. The most we get on the topic is one line confirming she’s dead, right before the sisters go back to agonizing over how very important their dad is and how they’re going to save him. While it is nice to see a man in a weak needing-to-be-rescued role, I’m very disappointed by how it inadvertently reinforces another sexist trope, and one that’s arguably even more prevalent and damaging at that. I don’t want to be too harsh on this, though; storytelling is just riddled with so many awful, misogynistic tropes that sometimes you’ll run into one no matter what you do. I’m sure that even if the sisters were rescuing their mother I’d still find something objectionable about it. Regardless, this is something to keep in mind.

But while it’s generally good with women, the story is…less good when it comes to racial representation. There’s nothing actively bad, but black people just basically don’t exist. I can remember like…three dark-skinned characters, and one that looks kinda sorta Asian, but that’s it. Considering that the story is supposed to be set in an entirely different region from the past two (also white-dominated) games, it would be a perfect opportunity to show more diversity, but nope, still Europeans everywhere. It’s also pretty awkward given the mining company’s overtones of Western exploitation of nonwhite countries.

So, the game is pretty good overall. It’s $15, which I don’t think is that expensive, especially if you like supporting media with strong women. Plus it has a feature for making your own campaigns, and downloading other peoples’! Go get it and have some fun.