God Wars: Future Past (PlayStation 4) Review

Sometimes the best thing to do is to go back to the roots to find inspiration. God Wars: Future Past goes back into Japanese folklore to find the inspiration for its setting and characters, and delves into older tactical RPGs for its game system.

The story takes place in Mizuho, following Princess Kaguya on a quest to confront her mother and unite all of Mizuho in peace to calm the wrath of the gods. To help her, she has several colourful characters at her side that are also inspired from Japanese folklore.

Despite having a traditional tone, many parts in the story have pretty modern themes to them that are very relevant in this day and age. It takes up subjects such as the threat of disrespecting and overconsuming nature, and conflict seeking, and the consequences of these. This makes the story feel modern, yet thanks to the setting, ageless.

What is fully traditional, however, is the gameplay. It is by the book tactical RPG gameplay, but it is made on a very solid foundation. Its biggest strength is the job system, which sets each character up as having a unique "job" and up to two general jobs.

This system has its strengths, but also flaws. While it allows the player a lot of freedom, it also ensures that some jobs get the longer end of the stick. There is one job in the game that gets both a map-wide AoE and an EXP buff. It doesn't take much genre savvyness to figure out that this is the most broken class on paper.

The developers likely caught up to this, as well, partway through the development, because somewhere in the middle of the game almost every enemy gets some ability that either reflects magic damage back on the user to punish AoE spam, or simply gives them a 100% dodge rate, severely punishing magic users to the point that they feel obsolete in some encounters. This can create a problem, as the player, thanks to the fact that the magic-using class gets the arguably most important passive skill in the game, and arguably most powerful AoE in the game, is very likely to spec every single character in this direction.

While it is a problem that one job gets all the best stuff, this sort of solution is very bad, as it comes into effect first once the damage is already done, and does not change the fact that the other classes are underwhelming. It just leaves a sourer taste in the mouth of the player.

Despite this, which will likely only happen to min-maxers during their first playthrough, the job system is fun, and the individual jobs help to form the route the character should take, but it is possible to change it if so desired, and some characters have some really interesting jobs. One character has a job that is specialised in summoning units, and another has abilities specialised in field control through the creation of decoys. It gives individuality to the characters without limiting the imagination of the player.

God Wars: Future Past is a solid, but safe, TRPG. While there is not much wrong with it, it does very little new and interesting, but at the end of the day, it is something most fans of the genre are going to enjoy.