Lost in Translation | Natural Doctrine Review

Tactical RPGs is one of those genres that has been struggling to maintain a foothold in Western markets. While the genre is doing quite well overseas, Western games just can’t seem to get into it. It is for that reason that Natural Doctrine seemed like such a risky venture for NIS to bring over to the states. However, with a new console to publish for, and a vast RPG vacuum present over the PS4, it seemed like some of the risk was mitigated. Especially when you consider that Kadokawa games was at the helm, things were looking promising. That is, until you got into the game itself.

Natural Doctrine may seem like your run-of-the-mill tactical RPG since many of the visuals are reminiscent of previous tactical games and for the most part, your senses are correct. The game does play and feel like a standard TRPG, but the problem with the game lies in its difficulty curve. Natural Doctrine tries to offer to much complexity with the battle system and makes the game much more difficult than it should ever be. Instead of offering players something deeply strategic but ultimately satisfying, the experience turns into a frustrating, crushingly difficult, overly complex marathon that offers little reward for the investment it requires. When this game was originally released in Japan, the gamers there complained that it was too hard and forced Kadokawa games to patch the difficulty. Despite that patch being offered in the US release, it does little to prevent the game from completely owning you at every turn.

As far as the story is concerned, it isn’t anything that is overly engaging. In essence, three different species are engaging each other over the possession of a rare mineral known as Pluton. You and your team of human explorers lead, what is left of humanity, into battle against a new and growing threat that could lead to the extinction of the human race. Fairly simple and straightforward, it isn’t anything flashy but it gives some extra purpose to playing the game. The real problem with the story is the pacing. Everything takes a long time to pan out. The characters move slowly, the enemies move slowly and you are even forced to watch every movement on the screen after you take your turns. When you just want to get to the action, this game pulls the reigns back and slows the tempo to a crawl just to drive you insane.

From a technical aspect, Natural Doctrine is competent. Visually, the game looks average at best even on the PlayStation 4. This was mostly likely done because the game is cross-buy compatible with the PS3 and PlayStation Vita. Usually when a game can be played across multiple platforms, the graphics tend to even out between all the platforms so you get a uniform look. It doesn’t necessarily mean the game looks bad, it just isn’t as sharp as it could be. From a technical aspect, the game ran well across all platforms, there were few technical issues to speak of for the time we spent in the game, which is always a plus.

Again, when looking closer are a TRPG, everything comes back to the battle system. Unfortunately, this is where the game suffers the most. There are many different bars and meters to keep track of, several rules which dictate battle and command order and a slew of other mechanics that are the difference between life and death. The game feels bloated and overly complex. It doesn’t challenge players in a good way like Dark Souls does. Instead, deaths in this game feel cheap and unwarranted. Technically, you die because you missed something, but its hard to blame yourself when you missed one of the dozen meters or rules in the heat of combat. In the end, it is just complex for complexity’s sake.

Another issue is the amount of pop up tips and reminders that the game throws at you. There are so many tips, rules and tricks to this game that the game is constantly bombarding you with ways to learn the game. This is normally fine when the game reminds you once in a while to take full advantage of the character’s abilities. With Natural Doctrine, these tips are essential reading because if you miss the wrong one, you’ll have a much higher likelihood of dying. On top of that, you can get several tips in a row and all this reading and minding by the rules gets in the way of the gameplay, which is a cardinal sin of TRPGs. This is all on top of several tutorial rounds which just gives the player more information than they can handle.

Finally, the save system in this game is severely lacking given how long some stages take to play out. You would assume that a stage that takes an hour or more to complete will have an option to manually save or have a generous auto save feature. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Natural Doctrine and you are left with long periods of time between checkpoints. It is not a rare occurrence to play the game for an hour or two, die and have to start back from the beginning losing that hour or two you just played. This save system is just punishing and sucks and sense of accomplishment or fun right out of the game.

One of the better parts of the game is the upgrade system. Characters can swap experience points and you can customize your characters in a number of unique and interesting ways. It has a similar feel to Diablo where you can experiment with different combinations of attacks and see what works best. However, the game fails to get out of its own way because there are several stages which require you to use a certain attack and you don’t always know what you are going to need before you go in. This forces the player to pick a more broad stroke approach to cover all your bases. You’ll not want to gamble on a cool long-range attacker if certain enemies require a close up attack. This system discourages experimentation and tries to push you into a small box.

In the end, Natural Doctrine is a mess and isn’t something that will appeal to most gamers. The game is far too complex for newcomers and even if you invest the tens of hours it requires to just learn the systems given, it takes even longer to master. It unnecessarily punishes you from the excruciatingly slow pacing, to the unforgiving save system, the overly complex battle system to the lack luster story. There isn’t much to appreciate in this package and it is one of those games that just flat-out missed the mark. Do yourself a favor and pass on this TRPG, surely something better will come out sooner or later.

This review is based on a review copy of the PlayStation 4 version of Natural Doctrine developed by Gust, published by NIS America.