Children of Zodiarcs is a pretty cool tactics game where you use dice and cards to attack, use special abilities and defeat enemies with a group of interesting characters in a neat setting. Card and dice customization is a big part of the game, and most of the time is spent fighting, leaving some small interludes for story between each mission. I had a good time with it, but at some point it felt like I wasn’t engaging with the game mechanics anymore and just cruising through the game and that lost my interest.
The core of the game is fairly simple, you have multiple characters with their deck of cards and you move them around before using the abilities themselves to attack enemies or heal your characters. Certain cards have different ranges, damage values and added effects, but most of your extra power comes from dice you roll afterwards. The dice that you equip have symbols that can increase damage dealt, give you temporary shields, give you extra actions or just do special effects that depend on the card you play in conjunction with the dice. Then you pick directions for your characters, and the enemies have a turn where they also play abilities in much the same way.
At the beginning of the game, that worked well for me, I managed my character’s decks and dice and upgraded them, tweaking and crafting dice (breaking down dice to get new symbols that you can use to replace ones you like less on your other dice), but as things progressed I couldn’t really figure out what the ‘best’ dice were or why I should change my cards. I didn’t have any issues beating levels and no matter the dice I rolled, it just kinda worked, so I stopped being engaged by these mechanics and kinda went on auto-pilot, very soon I stopped playing because it didn’t feel fun anymore.
Everything around the fights themselves - the setting, characters, story beats - are pretty neat, and the game is well balanced, with a fair difficulty curve, presenting some though challenges while not being too punishing if you fail a fight. If you enjoy games like Final Fantasy Tactics, maybe give it a shot! It won’t overstay its welcome and its systems are quite deep!
