I’m always down for a good time travel story, be it a novel, movie, or game. Some of the most memorable games I’ve played involve time travel in some respect (obvious choices being Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross, although I’m quite fond of Radiant Historia). Naturally I jumped at the opportunity of playing a new RPG from NIS that dealt heavily with time travel. So where does it stack up against other time traveling RPGs?
Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is a bit strange, as it comes off as very childish in both its aesthetic as well as how it’s written. The opening sequence reminded me of Kingdom Hearts which was unexpected. It was only a few minutes into the game that I found myself wanting to skip dialogue altogether as it seemed obvious as to where it was going. The game is devoid of voice acting, which I’m 100% onboard with, but the length of time it takes for the game to progress should you put it on auto advance (kind of a strange option without voice acting) is painstakingly slow. Even while clicking through to speed it up I felt the drag of time and my internal clock clicking with every wasted moment.
Outside of the dialogue sequences, you’ll be able to customize your skills and equipment for the party so they’re adequately prepared for battle. Fighting consists of a pretty basic turn-based combat model, allowing you to see the order that everyone fights so you can make tactical moves to avoid damage. You’ll be able to utilize weaknesses and resistances, as well as level up your skills with items in order to make them more potent. There’s also the ability to enhance your robot Isaac, who serves as your time machine after meeting up with The Doctor. No, not Doctor Who, but a colleague of Sherry’s father that helped create Isaac, although he does dress up pretty silly and even wear’s blue and red goggles, perhaps to see the effects of The Void.
I’m not quite sure what I expected or wanted from the game, but this apparently wasn’t it. The game is fine, but it’s hardly anything special, especially when compared to the other games NIS just published. The different time periods you travel to don’t differ enough for you to really care, and it seems more like an easy way to expand the game without creating new areas. With the graphical style, the quality of writing, and the length of the game, I hope that this wasn’t developed for too big of a budget as it almost feels like an indie game, and not in a good way.
To make the game go faster, there’s a pretty snazzy quick travel system that keeps things moving along nicely. I got through the first six chapters of the game within a couple hours. Of course, these aren’t long affairs by any means – if I recall correctly, chapter five is only a couple of dialogue scenes. But that brings me to another issue I had, which is triggering scenes. Throughout the game you’ll be tasked with going to a location to progress the story, and many times that will end and you have to walk five feet to start another. It’s annoying at best as I’d rather not be given hope of playing the game to only be told to move for one second to watch another scene that could’ve easily piggybacked the last one.
There’s a lot that I want to like about in Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers. It has a fun premise and competent gameplay mechanics, but it feels like NIS was given a fraction of the necessary budget to make this something special. I have no doubt that given the proper resources, they could make a sequel that outshines this by a long shot, but I’m not sure that’ll happen given the results yielded this time around.
5 out of 10
Pros
- Time Travel
- Competent Combat
Cons
- Shallow Dialogue
- Scene Triggers
- Story is Dragged Out
Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers was developed by Nippon Ichi Software and published by NIS America. It will be available on NS and PS4 October 22nd, 2019. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers, check out the developer’s site.
Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.
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