The humor and open-ended skill system in this strategy RPG convinced me it isn't just another Final Fantasy Tactics wannabe

I’ve conquered a small menagerie of foes in the demo for Guild Saga: Vanished Worlds, which is still available even though Steam Next Fest has come and gone. Shipwrecked on the shores of a faraway land, I’ve had to take on pirates and man-eating terror birds, while my adventurer allies seem convinced that I’ve been hit too hard in the head because of some recurring nightmare visions about an all-consuming horror creature and a mysterious girl. All-in-all it’s a standard Tuesday for an RPG protagonist.

None of Guild Saga’s battles are all that tough, and I grasped and enjoyed the flow quickly. A good strategy RPG layers on mechanics beyond just the chessboard style of combat: With Final Fantasy Tactics the big thing was the active turn system, which required you to track and estimate when your powerful charged abilities would go off, lest enemies simply walk away from them.

Guild Saga revolves around another familiar one: Knocking down enemy defenses (armor and magic barrier) so that your abilities can damage enemy health directly. Different abilities will impact one defense or the other, and if they break through to health can add various debuffs, like stun or poison.

Character customization sidesteps classes to focus on both attribute points and a bunch of skills you can put points in—from various elemental magics to staples like warrior and rogue, or my choice in engineer—serving as the spice rack for your adventurer gumbo. Once you have the prerequisite level of a skill, you have to find skill books to learn new skills, and then the number of them you can equip for battle are based on one of your attributes. My character was a little bit warrior and a whole bunch woman of science, with points piled into engineering.

I relied on a powerful engineer skill, an armor-shredding nail bomb that caused bleeding, backed up by a wild card skill that would lock a random enemy ability behind a 10-turn mandatory cooldown. While I only got a few levels of progression in the