Our friends at KEMCO are back again with another port of an obscure Japanese mobile game! Developed by WorldwideSoftware, Tears Revolude is a traditional turn-based JRPG with a few interesting ideas and an aesthetic that’s straight from the PS1 era. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though as nostalgia for simpler games makes this a bit of an interesting experience.
In Tears Revolude you play Sion, an orphan who is obsessed with the painter Orwiel. Along with his mentor Michelle, he’s looking for paintings and information about Orwiel and some of his potentially lost paintings. Instead, they find Liara in a dungeon. While she has no memory, she has some skills and seems pleasant enough so they decide to bring her back to down with them and help her find out who she is. This is about as generic as an RPG can get aside from the painter spin and the fact that the main character isn’t the one with amnesia, but it’s not as terrible as you might think. Before we get into the story any further (no spoilers mind you), let’s look at the gameplay though.
Tears Revolude is a turn based dungeon exploration RPG. There’s no overworld, you just move from dungeon to dungeon and town to town on a map via menu, very old-school and kind of cool. While you’re in dungeons, you have 4 directional movement and a camera option. You can rotate from a vertical to an isometric perspective in either direction, giving you 8 potential camera vantage points. These are locked in until you move them again. Moving through the dungeon is as simple as walking until you find the room’s exit and fighting anything in your way while you’re at it. Enemies, treasure, and doors all appear on your minimap so it’s easy to find everything and the monsters themselves appear as glowing purple and black balls that home in on you when you get close.
Combat is turn based and menu-driven, very much resembling combat screens from games like Etrian Odyssey, though nowhere near as polished or advanced. You have to choose from attacks, skills, or a special attack and the turn order is shown at the top of the screen. That’s key because a lot of damage can be avoided simply by hitting the right enemies at the right time and taking out the ones that are moving up in turn order. Some attacks have elemental attributes to them while others have physical or status effects. Again, all very straightforward. Once you’ve used an ability enough times, it levels up, allowing you to boost it by pressing up and right on the controller. Sometimes this means you can then target multiple enemies (say with a fireball) which you’ll do by hitting the up arrow again.
Special is a bit different however. Special Points (or SP) are earned through repeated combat and once your SP meter at the bottom of the screen is high enough, you can use a special attack. These are incredibly powerful and have the potential to turn the tide of even the fiercest battle. The more special points you have, the more of your party can join in and once you fill out your four person roster, that’s a lot of damage…if you can pull the attack off. This isn’t a simple menu selection however. Instead you’ll have to move the stick to the corresponding points of the pattern onscreen to multiply the damage of the special attack. The more patterns you complete, the more damage you can do, up to over 300% of the damage from a normal attack merged with your party members. That means you’re mopping the floor with bosses in only a few hits!
In between dungeons, you’ll go back to town, talk to villagers, and visit the shops and blacksmith to build up your provisions and strengthen or change your weapons. You can also add slots to your weapons to allow you to use gems that boost your stats and abilities as well. Villagers add a bit of story (not much) and occasionally ask you for favors that will net you additional items, accessories, and gems that will help you along the way. Sadly, the towns aren’t meant to be explored and they’re menu driven too, kind of like Shining in the Darkness wayyyyyy back on the Sega Genesis only with less flair.
Once you know where to go, it’s time to go back into the dungeon and figure out what’s going on with Liara! Unfortunately, the story in Tears Revolude isn’t nearly as compelling as one might hope. The core of an interesting story is there, but there’s very little character development here and the characters are inconsistent. Michelle seems like she’s firmly from our area of the real world while Sion feels more like an NPC from a more mainstream RPG. Other characters and enemies are hit and miss too, but overall, everyone is fairly shallow and two-dimensional and even scenes designed to have a solid impact only land light blows. That goes double for the townsfolk who are literally named things like “Man”, “Woman”, “Unhappy Man”, and “Busy Woman”. Each has a single phrase or two to repeat and no personality whatsoever, making towns a big let-down.
The same odd design elements are present in the dungeon design. Yes, you can move your camera around and you need to because you can’t see, but there’s a persistent first-person camera in the top right of the screen area as well, constantly showing you the front view of your characters. This is because switches and other hidden items are not necessarily visible once you have locked in a particular camera view (we played almost exclusively in isometric) and the only indicators that there are things to notice are with question marks that appear over Sion’s head for interaction points and visual flashes in the first person camera. Sadly, there’s no free-look at all and you also cannot drop into a first person mode or clear that front-facing camera so you’re stuck with a weird hybrid system that feels somehow unfinished.
That’s the same vibe you’re going to get from the visuals in Tears Revolude though. This feels like a single-person or small dev team’s old-school indie project from the early 2000s. The line art for the characters is rather amateur and the outfits are rather inconsistent. Michelle’s outfit is particularly odd compared to everyone else’s and there’s simply no reason for it. While the chunky 3D art of the dungeons is rather endearing in a PS1 RPG sort of way, the dungeons themselves have limited embellishments and the town art is entirely static. The entire GUI feels only partially finished as well with rough boxes and text choices that don’t feel substantial enough. Honestly, the only thing that really looks great aside from the basic blockiness of the dungeons is the enemies. Enemy designs are excellent and complex and it’s clear that there was a labor of love in designing them, even if there are a number of repeated enemy styles with color palette shifts.
The music in Tears Revolude is surprisingly decent however. While you’d expect rough music to go with the weak visuals, the tunes are actually pretty good here and while repetitive, they don’t annoy at all (though the default music volume is a bit high). There’s no voice work of course but the musical shifts for big fights are fun too. Sadly, the sound effects are weirdly hollow and sound like they were recorded in mono rather than stereo but they aren’t actually bad, just insufficient.
At this point you’re probably wondering whether there’s any more to talk about but Tears Revolude is a weirdly compelling game. The story is thin at best, the visuals, are weak, and the sound effects are sub-par, but there’s something underneath all that that makes it a playable game despite its long list of faults. Going through the dungeons is relaxing and fun and the lack of challenge actually makes this the perfect mindless chill game. You can even automate the battles if you want with the L button, though you won’t want to because your spells won’t power up. Sure, it would have been nice to have a conversation log in case you hit a button too fast, but even with the bad GUI, it’s just kind of fun to play. It’s almost like Tears Revolude is more than the sum of its parts somehow. It’s not good, but more importantly, it’s not entirely bad.
That being said, there are some major flaws aside from the stuff above too. The biggest one is that the analog sticks don’t work well for the game. For some reason, the controls on the Switch are hyper-accelerated with analog controls and you’re forced to use the d-pad for most all menus. This lack of fine control is particularly noticeable in the town menus and in combat attack selection. Selecting skills and special attacks is almost impossible without the d-pad. In fact, it was so bad that we didn’t realize at first that you could even amp up the power of your spells and add area effects because it was too hard to select with the stick! The special attack is also wildly broken, but in a fun way as you can just rotate the stick rapidly in a circle to hit the points you have to hit for the patterns and massively boost your special spell, taking out three quarters of most bosses’ health in a single shot.
Despite all its many, many flaws, there’s some indefinable quality about Tears Revolude that makes it bearable to play. It’s not a great game or even a good game, but it’s not a bad game and that’s something. Sion gets just enough character development to be almost likeable and occasionally the dialogue is funny even if it’s terribly written. This is a game that’s more like the gaming equivalent of a B movie. You know it’s not good, it’s not selling itself as good, but you enjoy it for what it is anyway. Sometimes that’s enough and if that’s what you’re looking for or you need something to fiddle with in the background while you watch Netflix, Tears Revolude is your game. It’s not a long game or a game that will stay with you, but it’s good for what it is.
This review is based on a digital copy of Tears Revolude provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally on both. Tears Revolude is also available on Xbox, Playstation, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.