Introduction

Voidspire Tactics, and its closely related sequel Alvora Tactics, are turn-based tactical role-playing games (RPGs) that merge the general battle structure of games in the Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) family of turn-based tactical RPGs with some of the aspects of Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)-era adventure games. These games are not new; Voidspire Tactics was released in 2015 and Alvora Tactics was released in 2017, but I believe that they are both examples of modern tactical RPGs done correctly and neither received a lot of attention and are worth examining further.

What Is A FFT-style Tactical RPG?

Before I get into a description of what makes Voidspire Tactics and Alvora Tactics fun and interesting, I would like to define what a FFT-style tactical RPG is. It is important to understand what a genre is, before identifying how something exceeds that genre.

Within the larger realm of turn-based tactical RPGs, there are several families, mostly defined by their original or most well-known member. Some of the more prominent ones currently are Fire Emblem-style, X-Com 2 style, early Fallout style, Roguelikes, and finally Final Fantasy Tactics style. Covering what defines the other styles is outside of the scope of this article, but I would like to specifically call out what I believe define FFT-style tactical RPGs and discuss how Voidspire and Alvora Tactics relates to it.

First, a FFT-style tactical RPG will be an RPG. This means it has levels, character statistics, and an equipment system.  

Second, a FFT-style tactical RPG will have a job system. This means that there are jobs or classes you can gain experience in that is separate from the character experience. This experience can be used to purchase job abilities, some of which can be used even when you have another job. Frequently it is possible to get bonus job experience based on other character’s job advancement. Another common feature is the ability to get passive or reactive abilities separately from overall activated job abilities that are equipped in one or more ability slots that are specific to that type of ability.  

Third, a FFT-style tactical RPG will have initiative- based turns rather than having alternating turns. This means that characters will have a speed characteristic, either character designed or assigned based on character action, or both.

Fourth, a FFT-style tactical RPG will have a battle map. This can be taken from where the area the characters are at or can specifically pop up as they are travelling on a world map, but the map itself defines the boundaries of the encounter and will involved characters moving across it to engaged with enemies. FFT-style tactical RPGs will frequently have a square grid as a map, but I don’t see this as being mandatory for a game to fall into this family. Additionally, FFT-style tactical RPGs will frequently have varying elevations and specific statistics to indicate how characters move between elevation, but this also does not seem mandatory to define a game as being a part of this family.

Voidspire Tactics and Alvora Tactics both fit the core of this style but do not fit with all of them. The biggest difference from games that are closest to FFT, is the lack of relevance of height on the battle map. They are RPGs with a job system, initiative-based turns, with a square grid battle map.

How Are Voidspire Tactics And Alvora Tactics Adventure Games?

One of the biggest innovations that Voidspire and Alvora introduce is there integration of adventure game aspects to the FFT-style combat system. These present themselves in how the game’s characters are presented outside of combat and how they interact with the world.

This game has exploration. There are secrets to find; locations, treasures, and characters that you can’t gain access to unless you find the objects or abilities that give you access to them and think to look in the locations where they are hidden. There is some backtracking and the game generally makes it worthwhile to do so, and it is even possible to skip over entire sections of the game as I inadvertently discovered during my last play through of Voidspire Tactics. There is a real sense of dimensionality in the world and the feelings of varying height that are absent during battles are very present during exploration, and it feels like you are travelling up and down through various regions of the game world.

The abilities you gather aren’t just relevant in combat. There are parts of the world that you can only access with certain types of spells or abilities reminiscent of classic exploration-focused adventure games like Legend of Zelda or various Metroidvania titles. Your torches or fire spells can burn down plants that hide a hidden dungeon or treasure, your ice spells can freeze water to let you cross them, your hammers can break rock barriers, and your teleportation skills or increase jump skill lets you jump to areas that you have no other way to get to.

What Works About Voidspire Tactics and Alvora Tactics?

You can probably guess this, based on the previous sections, but I find that the fusion of two different game styles works very, very well. It helps that the component parts are both successes.

The tactical turn based RPG elements are well designed, with the individual jobs being distinct and offering real choices in regards to how to spend your job points, and how to build your characters, filling roles that are mostly familiar for those who are familiar with fantasy rpgs, but there is enough distinction to also make them feel very specific. This is especially true in Alvora, where additional jobs are introduced that add a further layer of distinctness to the game; the most prominent of these is the bat handler, which summons and controls bats and has abilities that are very “batty” in style. The abilities (and terrain) also add a real feeling of dimensionality to the battlefield. Fights will shift and change based on spells that are cast and zones that are created; ice, water, portals, and killing machines all can be created and will continue to impact the battlefield past the moment when the spell or ability is used. There are more elements to this system that I enjoy and care about but aren’t necessary for this review. Suffice to say that the designer(s) obviously knew and cared a lot about making a good FFT-style turn based tactical RPG and are talented at designing it. The battle system and job system is excellent and among the best I have seen for this sub-genre.

The adventure elements are similarly well-implemented, though they are a bigger part of Voidspire Tactics than Alvora Tactics. Most everything can be interacted with in some way, and there are mountains of useless gear that you can collect or ignore. Spells and gear give the ability to unlock new areas and there are secrets to uncover (including at least one secret boss!) and treasure to find and the crafting system also enables you to put together or take things apart that may be relevant to helping you find something new. Every time I go through them, I find something new and I suspect that even with multiple play throughs there are things that I have not found. It is possible that there are some things I will never find. It is fun figuring them out too. Identifying what parts of the terrain could potentially interlock with my party’s capabilities is only sometimes obvious, and usually it is only when it is required to advance the story forward.

These aspects are both tied into a shared world which helps feed into the game’s uniqueness. These games take a pretty strong show don’t tell sort of attitude, and while there is dialogue and exposition it feels like it is there to provide a point and structure to the stories that the designer is trying to tell; it never feels like you are trapped in an endless wall of text trying to get back to the fun parts of the game. The races are not typical of any other fantasy RPG, except the generic humans, and many of them are rather strange by fantasy RPG standards, with various animal-type humanoids, living rock, individuals without faces altogether, and a variety of others featured. The settings are also rather distinct with Voidspire being set in a tower that is magically constructed from parts of the world stolen and stitched together and Alvora being set inside a giant, dead worm that has terrorized civilization before suddenly dying. They both lend themselves to battle set pieces, and they take advantage of it, with a plethora of fun and interesting battles that feel both distinct and challenging. 

The game avoids a lot of the pitfalls that other RPGs fall into. Grinding is not required but it allowed, and while normally I find it to be dreadfully dull in Voidspire and Alvora I find myself jump into it in order to try out a specific build or to see how classes fit together. It features a crafting system that avoids getting you bogged down in complicated recipes or hunting for 30 platypus livers, instead being a way to enable further flexibility in character building, allowing you to create cool and interesting weapons that are appropriate to the characters you are making rather than forcing you to use specific powerful artifacts. Both games are relatively compact lasting between 15 to 20 hours if you are exhaustive in your explorations, neither game requires you to play an extended arc that overstays it’s welcome about 75% of the way through, which is something I greatly appreciate.

What Does Not Work About Voidspire Tactics and Alvora Tactics?

In two words: Inventory Management.

Alvora Tactics is better about this, but both games have a habit of throwing endless piles of stuff at you, a fair bit of it which is useless, but enough of which can at least be sold for a reasonable amount of gold and thus are worth carrying around. Part of this may be my fault, and my inability to just ignore stuff that has a low chance of being useful later, but a lot of stuff is not easily ignorable. This is an adventure game, and who knows when you will need an exact item or something like it. It can get overwhelming and when you have bags upon bags upon bags of stuff it may be difficult to remember what you have much less where you put it, and even if you aggressively clear our your storage it will inevitably just fill up again.

It feels a little weird to complain about this after lauding for them it earlier, but for Alvora tactics I wish that the overall narrative arc was a bit longer. It feels a bit less dense and interesting than Voidspire, and the procedural generation left it feeling a bit more repetitive. There are some clear advances between the two games mechanically, but it feels like a bit of the thematic resonance and deep story of the first game was lost in the transition.

Differences between Voidspire Tactics and Alvora Tactics?

Voidspire’s setting encourages backtracking and continued exploration. You have no real home designated home base, and while it is possible to set up one, the game doesn’t push you towards anything specific or a place to call your own. Alvora has a gold rush sort of atmosphere that results in you having a home based with a town, and specific buildings you that you call home. While this is mostly important from the perspective of having a sense of home and a different sense of place, it also leads to a shift in mechanical balance and arc, from all abilities being individual to a selection of them being applied to all of your characters through a training ground. Alvora also has expands your available set of characters. Similarly, Alvora tactics allows a larger roster, and a larger party, with a system that encourages you to leave home characters who get knocked out during an expedition and the ability to recruit characters you are not actively bringing on your missions.

Voidspire is a crafted setting. Each battle, stage, and area of the game is specifically designed with the whole experience in mind where Alvora Tactics is a mixture of crafted and procedural. This leaves Alvora feeling a bit less deliberate and almost emptier than Voidspire though the designer still manages to make Alvora a quality game out of it even if it feels to be not quite as thematically rich as Voidspire.

Alvora feels like a step forward mechanically and from a UI perspective. Five additional and six additional races feel like welcome additions from a variety perspective and the ability set is refined in a way that results in what I feel provides a smoother experience and more interesting battles. With an eventual six characters and a larger range of jobs and races, and thus job and race combinations, there are also a lot more possibilities for different team compositions which helps increase the possibilities of multiple playthroughs.

Conclusion?

I love both Voidspire Tactics and Alvora Tactics, and mostly do not consider one without the other due to their similarities vastly outweighing their differences. I am excited about the fact that the designer is currently working on a third game in the series, and my hope is that the designer is able to make the equipment system a bit deeper, and is able to regain some of the thematic resonance and better story of Voidspire while retaining some of the mechanical advances that Alvora featured. I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys turn based tactical rpgs in general and those based on the structure of Final Fantasy Tactics. This is a very good game.