Children of Zodiarcs

I don’t usually like SRPGs, but an SRPG card game? Sign me up!

...Maybe I should have trusted my preferences more.

Children of Zodiarcs is an SRPG, like Fire Emblem or Disgaea, but the main draw is that it’s based on cards and dice. It’s a strong system, and despite all the randomness it overall can feel more fair than a traditional combat system.

As is standard for SRPGs, combat in Children of Zodiarcs takes place on a square grid. Each character and ability has a predefined movement range. However, all abilities are represented by cards. Rather than gating abilities with cool downs and a secondary resource, to use an ability you just need to play its card from your hand. Each character has their own deck of unique cards. When you play an ability card it’s discarded, and when a character’s deck is depleted all discarded cards are shuffled back in. You can hold a maximum of seven cards in your hand at once, and if you get more than seven the oldest cards are automatically discarded. At the end of each character’s turn they can choose to guard or draw two cards.

Whenever a character uses an ability, the result is determined with a die roll. Not an invisible die roll behind the scenes, but with a set of dice you get to actually roll on-screen. Children of Zodiarcs uses an original dice set with six types of symbols: gems increase the strength of your damage and heals, hearts heal your character, shields reduce counter-attack damage, stars activate the special effects on cards, +1s allow you to draw a card, and lightning bolts give you an extra action. Each symbol also has a red counterpart that has the equivalent negative effect. A card’s effect is determined exclusively by the card’s base power, your attack stat, the target’s defense stat, and the dice results; there are no hidden modifiers or effects. Buffs and debuffs function by adding extra dice to your rolls (with debuff dice having lots of red negative symbols).

There is a load of customization within these parameters. You get to construct each character’s deck from their unique set of ability cards, which allows you to shape each character’s general strategy. You also choose the dice that each character rolls for their abilities. The dice are randomly dropped as loot at the end of each fight. This lets you focus on different objectives, such as maximizing damage, drawing lots of cards, or activating special effects. There is also a “dice builder” feature where you can change one face of a die by spending other dice, but I ended up never using it. If you can edit dice, the obvious action is to change each face to the same symbol to guarantee a result, but nearly every die has locked faces that can’t be changed. I eventually did get a die with zero locked faces, but then putting on the symbols proved too expensive. Oh well. You can get through the game perfectly fine without editing your dice, but the feature is there if you want.

The characters also level up and grow more powerful over the course of the game. Children of Zodiarcs has a similar system to Fire Emblem where characters get some amount of experience for doing basically anything, and they always need 100 experience to level up. The amount of experience gained for doing activities varies a lot, and I never really got a feel for what affected it; sometimes you’d only get a few experience, and sometimes you’d get half a level’s worth for one action. Leveling up increases your characters’ base stats, unlocks and improves ability cards, and unlocks additional dice equip slots.

This might all sound a bit overwhelming, but in practice it’s intuitive and straightforward. Move a character, play a card, roll the dice. Nothing is locked in until you select your ability’s target, so you’re free to play around with ranges and positioning, and the game shows you the possible damage ranges for all attacks. Despite the massive amount of variance, the control over the cards and dice you bring into battle and the lack of hidden randomness prevent the fights from feeling like you’re at the mercy of RNGesus.

This unpredictability also keeps battles engaging, but this ends up being both a blessing and a curse. Unlike many RPGs, it’s basically impossible to fight in Children of Zodiarcs with your brain off; this isn’t a game where you can just blast off the same attacks every turn every battle. You need to pay attention to the cards in your hand, the number of cards in hand, and the positioning on the battlefield to plan out your turn. But, on the flip side, you can’t plan much more than that: with so much variance in the die rolls and no knowledge of the next cards you’ll draw, it’s basically impossible to plan out a strategy more than a turn or two into the future. This isn’t helped by the fact that it’s nearly impossible to glean the relevant information about the enemies. You can easily see their movement range, HP, and number of cards in hand, but you don’t know the types of cards in their deck, the cards in their hand, or the ranges or shapes of their abilities. This keeps the battles dynamic, but may be frustrating for players who prefer more strategic games.

It’s a solid system, and really comes into its own in the later stages of the game once your cards have been upgraded. The lack of information on enemies’ abilities makes it easy to have one character suddenly get focused and die in one turn—which basically makes the battle unwinnable (unless you’re already at the end) since you only have three party members, and losing one third of your turns is too huge a handicap. The only other real complaint is that the game doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with the enemies. They managed to come up with interesting skill sets for the party members, but none of the enemies have or do anything that forces you to use any special tactics.

Children of Zodiarcs’ battle system is good, but unfortunately the story that it’s housed within is... not. Children of Zodiarcs manages to accomplish the dubiously impressive feat of being both rushed and padded. It feels rushed because the plot happens way too quickly without proper development. It feels padded because a majority of fights are just the party crossing paths with a replaceable group of city guards, cannibal cultists, or rival gang members.

The solution to the padding is obvious: remove it. The other issues with the plot, however, are deeper and more interesting.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the plot is that not much happens. The protagonist is Nahmi, also known (by her enemies) as the Ebony Flame, a cat thief from the Shambles (slums) of Torus and a member of “the Family,” a gang headed by a man named Zirchhoff. The vast majority of the game—specifically, every single mission except the last one—is about Nahmi running a mission to steal an ancient artifact for Zirchhoff. You go to the mansion where the artifact is kept, break into the vault, escape, then head back to Zirchhoff in the Shambles. Along the way Nahmi keeps on running into various groups of people that want to kill her, and has to kill them in return.

That’s it. That’s the plot. There are no personal stakes or motivations for Nahmi—she’s just running a mission, going from Point A to B to C, as usual. There are a handful of unexpected developments, but they don’t change the trajectory of the plot until the very end. The vast, vast majority of enemies are nameless goons or one-off characters with zero development or plot relevance; the number of enemies that are actual “characters” or have a modicum of importance can be counted on one hand.

Children of Zodiarcs takes place in Torus, capital of the Toran empire, where the nobles live in lavish luxury protected by the city guard while the masses live in destitute poverty in the Shambles. Thousands of years ago, beings known as the Heralds brought powerful items known as Zodiarcs from their dimension to ours, ushering in an age of peace and prosperity—until the Zodiarcs led to a massive war, eradicating much of civilization. Now Zodiarcs are rare, prized relics, and the Heralds—and the dimension from which they care—are nothing more than a myth to most...

None of this has anything to do with the plot. The game’s introduction makes it seem like the game will be about bringing true prosperity to Torus by unlocking the secrets of the Zodiarcs and Heralds, but, as I’ve already explained, the plot doesn’t actually attempt anything so grand. The plot ends up being much more about Nahmi, personally. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that! It’s just weird how the game goes so far to set up a JRPG plot but does literally nothing with it, and that Nahmi’s personal plot isn’t handled very well.

The game trudges along on Nahmi’s heist, and then tries to swing up into an emotional climax at the end. The issue is that the Children of Zodiarcs doesn’t succeed in making the necessary emotional ties to the player for the climax to have the impact it aims for. The game wants us to grow attached to the characters, but too little happens too quickly for that. The entire game takes place over two days. I actually thought it was one day, but near the end of the game the characters start mentioning “yesterday,” so it’s obviously two days—but it also might just be one “night” that stretches past midnight.

The climax hinges on the characters’ relationship with each other and the player, but this just isn’t enough time to do that. Nahmi meets both of your final party companions for the first time during the game, meaning the time Nahmi has known them (in-game) by the end may be shorter than the amount of time I spent playing the game. One of them is also a random girl you pick up off the street for no particular reason. These bonds are not nearly deep enough to convincingly carry the climax. It is possible to create attachment to a character quickly, but Children of Zodiarcs doesn’t provide the proper environment for that.

There are twenty missions in the main campaign. This would probably enough for Children of the Zodiarcs to do what it wanted to do... but then we get back to the issue of padding. If we got to actually do things, and watch the characters do things together, perhaps the situation would be different. But instead we spend over half the missions killing a random group of guards, or cannibals, or gangsters, who have no characters of import and who have no plot relevance besides the fact that Nahmi and her gang just happen to cross their path. I think the experience would be much improved if the game covered three or four of Nahmi’s jobs rather than padding out one.

The plot boils down to a personal struggle for Nahmi. Nahmi isn’t the chosen one, or gifted with special powers, or anything like that. She’s just a girl with an inner struggle. Again, this is all fine. The issue comes from the fact that the success of the plot rides on the strength of Nahmi’s character, and let’s just say that she’s not as strong as her in-game stats might suggest. For most of the game, I just wasn’t sure what to make of her. Sometimes she seems to loathe bloodshed, and other times she has no problems letting out a witty one-liner before slicing someone to ribbons. Sometimes she acts horrified at what she is, and other times she refuses to allow anything to get in the way of her quest for vengeance. Are we supposed to empathize with her, sympathize with her, identify with her, judge her, disapprove of her, or what? I couldn’t tell. It felt like the creators were trying to make a complex character, but unfortunately they just made her inconsistent.

I think the main reason Nahmi comes off as inconsistent more than anything else is the fact that we never see more than one of these sides of her at once. The game’s cutscenes are short. Like, really short. So we get a scene showing Nahmi’s thirst for vengeance, and a scene revealing the guilt she feels for what she’s done, but we never see how Nahmi is reconciling these feelings within herself. Nahmi does resolve her feelings by the end, but it feels more like Nahmi just randomly decides to settle it once and for all rather than being led to a conclusion by her experiences during the game.

This tension within Nahmi’s character—as well as the messages the game is trying to convey—is also hindered by a disconnect with the gameplay. Nahmi (sometimes) expresses doubt about killing, and yet in battle we have no choice but to ruthlessly murder every single person we come across. There is absolutely no other way to interact with the game world. The shades of gray the plot is trying to portray are undermined by the merciless kill-or-be-killed gameplay.

The other characters are all flat and one-note (if they’re lucky—there are plenty of mini-bosses with nothing more than a name and custom portrait). They don’t show any sort of depth or growth. Your party members are the most fleshed-out, as each mission has a few “moments of quiet” where you get to see the party interact with each other. These moments of quiet do help develop the characters and the world... but it might do so a bit too well. Sometimes an idea or plot point will pop up in these conversations that feels like it should have been developed and addressed in the main campaign. For instance, in one conversation you learn about one party member’s “life-mystery,” which is their entire purpose for existing... and yet is literally never mentioned outside this one scene.

The art is colorful and expressive, but the character designs are... inconsistent. The character designs that the developers actually created are fine. (My one real complaint is that the “random girl off the street” character is a bit over-designed for a random girl off the street.) The issue is that Children of Zodiarcs is a Kickstarter game, and the backer-designed characters stick out like sore thumbs. In fact, the reason I discovered Children of Zodiarcs was Kickstarted was that I kept on thinking that some of the characters looked like a modern guy randomly inserted into the game, and then had the epiphany that these characters were probably the result of an “Appear as an in-game character!” backer reward.

The game does seem like it wants to discuss complex issues, but the cutscenes are so short, it doesn’t have time to do much but bring the issue up and move on. There isn’t enough time to resolve or even discuss them. For instance, in one cutscene, one character says that becoming a criminal is always a choice and another character replies that for some people in the Shambles, it’s literally their only option for survival. And that’s literally the entire conversation on the topic. I appreciate Children of Zodiarcs’ ambition in trying to discuss topics like this, but that ambition can’t remedy the fact that in the end all they do is give these issues a cursory mention.

Children of Zodiarcs features an innovative battle system that inserts cards and dice into SRPGs, and that comprises the bulk of the praise I can give it. While there is a lot of randomness, the facts that we have a fair amount of control over the parameters of the randomness and that none of the randomness is hidden prevents the randomness from feeling unfair or out of our control. The aesthetic and music fit the fantasy setting, but the plot and characters just don’t deliver. The game sets up a mysterious backstory for the Zodiarcs, but the plot centers around Nahmi’s personal story, yet fills most of the game’s missions with filler and develops the characters only through extremely brief cutscenes. Children of Zodiarcs brings up issues but never develops or says anything interesting about them; it goes “This issue exists” and then immediately drops you into the next battle. It feels like a lot of work went into this game, and the gameplay is neat, but as a storytelling experience it’s rife with too many faults. Maybe check it out on sale if the battle system interests you, but that’s as far as my recommendation goes.