Toons meet Tactics

One of the best routines of my childhood was waking up on a Saturday morning and having brand new episodes of my favorite cartoons grace my television. Like many kids of that generation, no shows grabbed me more than the ever popular genres of monster taming and card collecting (or sometimes a hybrid of the two). There is something magical about a story of a child, similar in age to myself, able to build their own team of monsters or collectables, and then setting out to adventure and battle it out with others. The state of excitation I was filled with when sitting down and watching a premier episode of Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Monster Rancher (is this a deep cut?), or Medabots (now I know this is a deep cut) was unparalleled. I think that’s why the game, Floppy Knights, resides with me so well.

From the opening screen, both the art style and charming music snagged my attention immediately. The overarching story within Floppy Knights is fairly simplistic in, again, your typical Saturday morning cartoon kind of way. This, though, is all purposeful. The game’s main character, a young aspiring scientist Phoebe, is a teenager with a quirky robot sidekick attached to her arm named Carlton. Phoebe’s main goal is to move out of her parent’s house and step out from the life that her parents set out for her. We get introduced to the inception of the Floppy Knight, as a means for Phoebe to enter and win a local science fair. As the story progresses, our protagonists are set out to use the “Floppy Knights,” which are aptly named due to the manner in which they are stored, to clear out different parts of the surrounding lands as the story beats move them along.

The story itself is easy to follow along, the writing and dialogue of the characters can be fun at times, and each new area has a sort of “villain of the week” just as they do on those Saturday morning cartoons. The nostalgia though wasn’t the only element that I latched onto, the fact that this is a tactics game through and through pulled me in even tighter.

The base gameplay is a mix of two genres, together forming a board game-like experience. The first genre is that of a card collecting/deck building one. The player is granted a deck with deployable character cards, ones for movement and attack, cards that can manipulate others in your hand or ones that are already deployed. Quickly, you will notice that the cards have a sort of synergy, and there are certain cards that cannot be removed when composing your deck, as the set themes must stay mostly intact. The second genre is that of a typical tactics game, much like a Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. The deployed characters that the player has put onto the board each come with their own stats, such as HP, Attack, and Movement speed. The two systems put together make up an engaging and unique experience.

A typical round would go as follows - the player would get a new hand from the deck, deploy any characters they would like onto the designated area on the board, use any movement cards in their hand to position a friendly unit beside an enemy, and finally perform an attack. Granted, there are no restrictions on the ordering of the moves, which veterans of tactics games will know is crucial to the actual strategy part of it all. Without getting too much further into what is available as the game goes on, you’ll acquire new cards that you may or may not choose to place into your deck, different enemy types that have sometimes surprising abilities especially towards the later half of the game, and a matches’ objectives get much more interesting and unexpected.

There aren’t many holes to poke in this tactical adventure. If I were to mention a couple small flaws with the game it would be with difficulty spikes and the often surprising and unforeseen new enemy maneuvers round to round. These surprises, paired with new enemy types in the new levels, definitely threw me for a loop sometimes on how much more attention to subsequent moves I had to give. Another nuisance that adds a layer of difficulty (or perhaps just annoyance), is that the more difficult levels become longer in playtime, and if you find yourself failing in the last sections of a level, there are no checkpoints, meaning you have to do the whole level again from the start. These aren’t necessarily problems specific to Floppy Knights, but there are systems in place in seasoned tactics series that help against these kinds of issues. For instance, in the later Fire Emblem games, there is an optional rewind mechanic to take the game a turn or so back to avoid taking a loss on the level or potentially losing a character. These are more just nitpicks though as a seasoned tactics player, and by no means take too much away from the exceptionality of this game.

Rose City Games has sneakily become one of my more favorite game studios, and Floppy Knights just adds to its list of hits. On the cover, Floppy Knights could be mistaken for a light-weight board game type with fun quirky cards. Players will quickly find that the gameplay is quite deep, and takes inspiration from some of the best tactics games, and incorporates a card system not unfamiliar to those that play deck builders or even the game Slay the Spire. The worlds (or neighborhoods in this game) are familiar enough to where you know what obstacles might be coming, but will almost always surprise you with late game obstacles and missions. I feel like this is a game that would fit right in next to your game collection as a kid, right next to gems like Monster Rancher, or Advance Wars. This is a beautifully done game, from the gameplay, to the art and music, everything was so thematic and I’m just sad it had to end. Maybe I’ll binge some 90s cartoon collections after this gets posted.