When I finished Gales of Nayeli the one word that kept coming to mind was this: ambition. Gales of Nayeli is a culmination of ideas that I think impress anyone familiar with game development and understands the constraints of a premade engine like the SRPG Engine can see how much effort and ideas was strung together to create this game. So much thought put into the world, its characters, the multitude of mechanic ideas and concepts that, while they don’t quite stick the landing, create a very satisfying and meaty experience. Fire Emblem fans should be interested in this title, but I think newcomers to the genre would enjoy this game if they allow for the jank and hitching that the SRPG Engine can employ. Especially since the game lets you save each turn, it’s great!
If you are unfamiliar, SRPG Engine is a toolset that lets you make games vaguely similar to the Fire Emblem titles on the SNES. It has been used by the former series lead, Shouzou Kaga, in a FE-like title he made in his free time.
But, what sets Gales apart from the rest of its specific subgenre of tactical RPGs is the emotional and creative core. Gales draws on the aforementioned Nintendo series to be sure, but they had a vision that to me feels closer to a fantasy webcomic or novel series. Tonally, the character writing is surprisingly in-depth, grounded, there are jokes and goof characters but for so much of the game’s own runtime it’s a very solemn and ponderous experience. There are genuine attempts to make the character’s struggle feel harrowing, ongoing. The fact that romances are not just an ending goal like in FE, but a lengthy string of romantic interactions, reassurances, pledges, and even sidequests or character skills, or items. It helps that each character is generally unique within your team, they all have weird gimmicks, traits, quirks, and specialties that is a total blast to mess around with. Even the most inconsequential characters have dialogues, and cool things about them, including branching class trees!
Every mechanical flourish was made as someone who is a fan of the genre. They asked, “what if my super cool game did all this weird stuff, let you make an avatar, lets you do environmental attacks, gives you cool weapon skills” like in Awakening, Echoes, etc etc etc.
It keeps together surprisingly well. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the strangeness of each character that you quickly lose the simplicity the subgenre is known for, and toward the end of the game you are juggling a lot of mechanics at once! Thankfully the map design is pretty fun although at the start there is a certain slog feeling to them since your movement is so low but you learn how to use the environments and movement skills to force your movement that much more forward.
That’s what made the game fun for me. Weird gimmicks: character and map wise. Enthralling story. I also really enjoyed the game’s style and variety of designs. Character types of all kinds, I love that the main character and her people resemble American indigenous people, or that so many of the cast are elves, demons, monstergirls (specifically girls, so it goes), fairies, and of course, pirates. All of this feeds back into each other. It just never felt all that FE to me, it felt like GoN.
But, of course, with wild ambition and a hodgepodge goal of design, there were a lot of goofs and gaffs. There’s still one or two typos in the script, for example. I saw one at the end of the game where the character gives a big speech regarding the game’s main villain. There’s bugs, not once, not twice, but three times did a save get corrupted and was unable to be loaded. Some skills are not as spelled out as you would like, a lot of buffs/debuffs in the game are mostly just an icon without much of a reference on what the icon means. There are places where there’s a definition but having to look for a specific character to know what Fear does is a bit off. I generally don’t know if certain skills or things were working as intended, and I flew by the skin of my pants, just sort of assuming certain interactions with elements and items were doing what I wanted it to.
There’s so many items. It’s great, fantastic, it also means everyone has a full inventory which wouldn’t be that big of a problem except for one thing I’ll mention at the end.
The game has a second half that also does get very dour tonally which was good for drama but also it felt like a lot of character things you saw in the first half don’t happen as often. So many chapters up until then involved meeting and interacting with a silly new cast of characters. But the new characters that show up in the second half are more taciturn, and you mainly deal with what I would say is one of the big central characters.
But it’s still really satisfying seeing it all end. Seeing the romances blossom, seeing all the endings with characters that got a lot more development and time than typical. But there was just one thing that I couldn’t stand and everyone already talked about it so I’ll just leave a line here:
Man do I not like the Avatar. Mechanically, cool, I loved having a Rogue that could move and act twice, had a built in debuff, and controlled the convoy. But, they lacked the game’s emotional core. They have no personality, none. No dialogue, even. Their style is bad, with distracting and ugly sunglasses and a fully covered face. And while I loved that I could choose not to use them in later parts of the game, it’s not a great deal because the convoy is so important but if you have the Avatar along you are also missing out on all the connections real characters can have with others. Sidequests, mechanics, etc, gone for the dumb Anon Imageboard face.
I think unlocking a support menu when completing the game would be great. Let me see what I missed, darn it.
While I think the Avatar is an eyesore I personally thought the rest of the game looked fantastic. Some battle animations had wonky scaling, some head sizes are completely different and some of the map sprites can be hard to parse since they’re so detailed, but I really enjoyed the game’s look. The music I admit to not being a huge fan of. I think it was a great production for a small team but the tunes may have been too short or there was just a lack of variety, something about it wasn’t reaching me. I want the genres to go a bit weirder.
I didn’t talk about all the other things crammed in. There’s a lot of secrets I never found. I am currently at the Post-Game which I am unsure of playing if only because I was so attached to the narrative that fighting when everyone is level-crapped felt a bit…. constraining. Plus it was retooled from earlier maps so I didn’t feel the need to play it.
Still, overall, there’s a lot to this game that I encourage other people to discover these things to find themselves. I’m so happy that I put in 40 hours (and 60 hours idling/reloading saves) for the whole main game. If you’re looking for a game that’s both simple and complicated and filled with ambition, I suggest Gales of Nayeli.
