Over the last few days we have had the opportunity to try out the closed beta of Tribe Ninea very particular action RPG created by the creator of the series DanganronpaKazukata Kodaka, and the developers of Too Kyo Games And AkatsukiGames. We were very intrigued by the trailer, and the hands-on gameplay answered many of the questions we had. But let’s proceed step by step.
A Tokyo of the future
It is the year 20XX, in Neo Tokyo. In this place, nothing is as it seems, the city is nothing more than a multi-story tower with districts that look like cities. In the past, conflicts were resolved through a game, called Extreme Baseball (XB), where the loser would have to obey the winner.
However, the bad guy of the moment has shown up, changing the times, and the rules. Now the XB has been abolished, and replaced by the more lethal XG. What will happen, and how should we deal with all this?
Amnesia, my friend
One of the most common tricks used by the father of Danganronpa is amnesia: starting from a point X, which seems to be in the middle of the story, without letting the player (and the protagonist) know how they got there. In Tribe Nine we will control a young boy named Yo Kuronakawho apparently lost all his memories after being trapped for years inside a (pretty bad) video game by a super villain called Zero. Luckily a team of his childhood friends and new acquaintances manage to get it out of the loopbut what he learns will amaze him.
From here on we will begin the prologue, in which we will be taught both the basics of the simple explorationboth those of the combat. But we won’t go further with the story, because as usual, the good Kodaka was able to leave us some twists already in the initial bars.
Between exploration and deadly games
The exploration phase of Tribe Nine is presented in pixel artwhere however the silhouettes of the characters who speak will appear clean in full anime style. Obviously the style of the drawings is typical of the house titles, and the similarities between some of the characters with those of Danganronpa is undeniable. The fights will begin by meeting enemies on the map, and sometimes we can also try to surprise them.
When the fight starts, we will start to beat the enemies to pieces, using both attacks simpleboth moves specials. We are talking about powerful blows not only of our character, but also of those who will be with us on the battlefield.
Characters will become more powerful and activate power-ups as they progress. “heat” bar will rise, but this will also happen to the enemies, who can become even more deadly. Tribe Nine also features a simple but cute equipment systemclever and basic.
The game gets dirty
Of course, as it happened in Danganronpa, there are some special phases which will act as “showdown“, and of course the lethal games that replaced the XB will reign supreme. The challenges will be many, and extremely dangerous, and you may have to use more than one attempt to emerge victorious. In some phases, however, it is not just a matter of fighting, but also of being intuitive and use dialectics: many of the answers you give in these stages will be crucial to your success.
Obviously there will also be others outside of these dialogues to read. Many, many, and we won’t deny that for those less accustomed to it, it could be quite a burden.
The art style is really nice, even if the locations we could see inside the beta were not very original, with environments that repeated the same elements a bit too often. The little music we heard was not bad, but for the rest, silence is very predominant when the characters are not speaking.
From a technical point of view, trying the title on PC, unfortunately we have found some critical issuesbugs that sometimes made us think the game had crashed, or was going crazy (for example dialogues that would freeze and not scroll, which we could only unblock by activating quick replay and retrieving them from the LOG).
The potential is thereundoubtedly, but it seems that the title really still has a lot to sayand sadly the beta wasn’t enough to show us the best. We’re certainly intrigued, but how far can Tribe Nine go?
#Tribe #Closed #Beta #Preview