Tenderfoot Tactics

It’s rare that I feel like a particular game has been tailor-made for me. There are not many games that are so unique and focused in their vision but that also appeal directly to my left-of-center, disparate tastes. Games that I want to 100% just for the sheer joy they bring me. I can’t think of very many off the top of my head: Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land was probably the first game like this that appealed to me as a kid so much that I still find it charming and imaginative. There are other games that I’ve been completely enraptured by, like Earthbound, Pokemon Gold/Silver, Super Mario 64, and Final Fantasy Tactics. Tenderfoot Tactics is a game that I will gladly and loudly add to this list of games that have changed my thinking in some way or another.

Tenderfoot Tactics boasts a few elements that I think are difficult for hardcore tactics RPG fans to swallow: it’s an open world exploration game as well as a tactics game, and the art style is incredibly stylized. For me, these elements work perfectly together to make a game that feels incredibly fresh, and I hope people meet the game’s extraordinarily thoughtful and fascinating quirks on its level rather than foist their own expectations on it. It’s not Final Fantasy Tactics despite drawing a lot of inspiration from it, but fans of the classic game will find a lot to enjoy about the battle system if they let themselves. It doesn’t have an all-encompassing grand story, but the hints and clues to be found in the open world add so much mysterious and intriguing lore to the archipelago that my imagination was tickled trying to uncover the next secret.

I can’t stress enough that Tenderfoot feels like a completely realized vision. Everything comes together, from the tactical battles to the exploration and the minimal plot. Everything feels intentional, from the game design marrying two seemingly opposed genres, the impressionist art, and the player-driven world-building. It’s also completely uncompromising in that vision; the player must learn to use the map without a GPS-style marker, the art style is strikingly creative but also obscuring, the goblin villages are intriguingly enigmatic. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever played in this regard, nothing feels like it was a case of making ends meet in-game, and it instead uses limitations as intention. Usually, games with such a distinctive art style are far too focused on the style and provide little substance, but the balance in this game is perfect. There are small things to discover on the map, but it doesn’t take away from the focus on the battles.

And the battles! Each of the player’s goblins has a “breed” (class/job in other games) that dictates their abilities in-battle. Goblins gain levels in each breed rather than as a unit, and each level allows them another skill point to unlock a skill or remain unused for a modest stat increase. While leveling down in a new breed could be frustrating (I’m looking at you, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for the PSP), the power level of encounters doesn’t massively change throughout the game, meaning that enemies hit about as hard in the beginning as they do in the end. This gives the breed system a balanced and thoughtful edge, where training a new breed mostly feels like your trained goblins are fresh recruits again, needing protection on the front lines. Switching to a new breed also has a direct benefit, since each goblin has a “memory” slot where they can equip a previously-learned skill from another breed. Some breeds additionally have an “affinity” slot for yet another skill; these additional slots provide a spectacularly flexible system for building units with incredible synergy. The skills themselves are also very thoughtfully designed. Almost every skill has a discrete purpose that can be used to turn the battle in one way or another. I occasionally feel like I want a few more skill points for a little more flexibility, but overall the breeds are well-balanced and I find myself thinking flexibility is overrated vs. specialization.

The actual encounters are also quite engaging, often feeling like a puzzle rather than an all-out war. Battles mostly start when enemies on the map see the player and chase them down, turning the world map into a procedurally generated battlefield based on the local geography. Like Final Fantasy Tactics, each tile has a height, but in this game, the height can be changed by many of the attacks in the game, making height control a core gameplay loop. Attacks can also add other elements — fire, plant, and water — to burn enemies, impede movement with bushes, or make attacks impossible by flooding. The elemental system is impressively complex, and compared to games with similar elemental systems like Triangle Strategy, Tenderfoot Tactics feels like a truly dynamic battle system with so many different variables. The battles are also fairly forgiving; one can immediately restart a battle after failing, and fleeing a battle will place the player at a previously-visited checkpoint on the world map. The battles are also mostly short enough that a reset doesn’t feel like a punishment.

The story is minimal, and it feels intentionally designed that way. Your party of goblins enlists the help of a guiding spirit to put an end to the dangerous fog enveloping the archipelago. The goals from there are as nebulous as the fog itself, allowing the player to visit landmarks and towns to uncover the terrible fate befalling the land. It’s quietly philosophical and political, while working in an odd liminal space between classical fantasy, post-apocalypse, and something else entirely. The story isn’t completely fleshed out, but I think the style works for the game. Snippets of flavor are especially evident in the goblin towns, which each have their own ideals and philosophies, ranging from reclusive hermits to marauding cannibals to welcoming collectives. Each town feels unique, and even if they are a little static, the towns are some of the most joyful areas to encounter in the game.

Part of the reason these towns are such a delight is the art direction. The game has an impressionistic art style, with details implied in the polygons of tall mountains and tiny goblins alike. As the player moves, the world warps and changes, and bushes, trees, and hills coming in and out of focus. As engaging as it is, the art style is admittedly jarring at first, but I was used to it after spending just half an hour or so exploring the archipelago. Each portion of the map also has its own color palette, which is reflected in the scenery and the UI, making some regions vast green meadows, others bright red sandstone, and others still a beautiful nighttime vista. Even the goblins themselves are colorful and creatively rendered, their designs rivaling the gorgeous art from classic RPGs. Each town also has a dyer, who can use ingredients found in the wilderness to dye the team’s clothes. It’s truly a visually stunning game in its simplicity, but the simplicity feels intentional rather than a limitation. A lot of folks online were put off by the art style; while I was into it from the beginning, I’m begging you to give it a chance if it doesn’t appeal to you at first. I took so many screenshots of the gorgeous landscapes during my playthrough. The music is also a lot of fun: the towns each have unique, charming goblin music, and the battles use a dynamic system where every encounter reacts to the action so that no two battles sound exactly the same.

There are a few things I can critique, most prominently that many of the encounters lose a bit of the careful design present in the rest of the game with their procedural generation. They can feel like a bit of a dice roll, with difficulty being established by the enemies that could appear rather than a specific challenge. The difficulty also automatically scales on recent successes or failures, which means that while resetting a battle might roll easier enemies, I felt that I lost a chance to prove my skill by handling the battle differently. A little more curation in the battles — especially the fixed encounters — would have improved the gameplay a bit. I should also quickly note that I played the game on my Steam Deck, and while the best resolution drained the battery in a couple hours, dropping down to the highest “crunchy” resolution roughly tripled the battery. Otherwise, the game handled perfectly fine on the Deck and I would absolutely recommend it.

Tenderfoot Tactics rapidly became one of my very favorite games, and I’m so glad to have finally played it. It’s a singular and unique vision, something that feels truly one-of-a-kind and kept me hooked from start to finish. I can’t say enough good about it. I eagerly look forward to whatever Badru and the team make next!