Whether it was growing up with Final Fantasy or getting your start with Pokémon like me, we all began our love of RPGs somewhere. Now, many of us have kids and want to introduce them to the genre we fell in love with, and there are plenty of RPGs that act like a taster or as an introduction. Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers feels like an attempt to do this: it’s got a cutesy art style and a basic story about love and family. On paper, it looks like exactly the kind of short and sweet beginner RPG to get your kids started on, yet it totally misses the mark with how uninspired and boring it is.
The game is set in Clocknee on New Years Eve 1999. Just as the fireworks go off to welcome in the year 2000, the entire town is frozen in time apart from a young girl called Sherry and a couple of her friends. While trying to find her mum, she becomes friends with a time-traveling robot called Isaac. With her new ally, Sherry decides to travel back and forth in Clocknee’s time to find out what happened and see if she can save her home. The story is just fine, but unfortunately suffers because of the structure and linearity of the game. There’s nothing secret and no twists, and while it’s simple to understand, it doesn’t do anything to make you care about the kids or events surrounding them.
The first thing to notice about Destiny Connect is just how different it looks. Back at E3 2019, I compared the game to Western cartoons like Jimmy Neutron, and I still stand by that. No other RPG from Japan looks quite like this. I really love how visually appealing the character models are, from their expressive faces to their big eyes. It’s a shame there’s no voicework to accompany these fun expressions, because it would stop the characters and the world from feeling incredibly bland otherwise. This also isn’t helped by the fact that the entire game is set in one town. As you travel between the same maps regardless of the time period, it all feels very samey. The accompanying music doesn’t help liven things up much because most of it is gentle, and while sometimes pleasant, a lot of it is forgettable.
Unfortunately, I’ve played through the Switch version, so as much as I love the style of the characters, visually the game is slightly blurry at best and very pixelated and at worst. I don’t remember this being an issue with the PlayStation 4 version I tested at E3. There’s always a faint blur over the screen regardless of what you’re doing, and when characters are not the focus of cutscenes they’re blurred out to the point where it’s a real eye-sore. Character portraits are frequently fuzzy around the edges and sometimes take a while to render cleanly. And it looks bad whether docked or undocked! It’s extremely sloppy and spoils one of the best things about the game.
Moving on from the visuals, Destiny Connect is fairly bare-bones with very little to explore or do. It’s extremely linear, and this sucks a lot of the fun out of it for me, mainly because there’s no unique towns or locations to explore. You can only do what the game tells you when prompted, so you can’t go and revisit the past unless the story tells you. Aside from one sidequest where you can collect blue orbs to change Sherry’s appearance (honestly, I’m jealous of some of those adorable outfits she gets to wear), I couldn’t find anything extra to dive into. I’m sure that’s part of the design, but isn’t part of the fun of these games finding some hidden quest or dungeon?
Combat isn’t much more varied either. Battles are turn-based; you can attack, use items or skills to heal or do more damage, or even guard to reduce damage — nothing unusual for the genre. Most battles are a breeze too, with all enemy weaknesses visible the moment you encounter them. Skills use up Skill Points (SP) and regenerate by doing literally anything. It’s okay for a while, but just as with most things in this game, within a couple of hours, I was bored. All you need to do is rotate ordinary attacks with skills, so you regenerate your SP, and you never have to use any items or run away from any fights. The only big difference is Isaac.
Isaac, unlike the rest of the party, can’t use items. Instead, he has the ability to change form. Similar to the job or class systems we’ve seen before, Isaac acquires different Gears through the story which, when installed, allow him to change his role. His starting form, called Guardian, specialises in protecting the party, as well as applying elemental resistances. Then there’s his Rescue form, which transforms Isaac into a firefighter who can heal the party. My favourite is the Swordmaster form, where Isaac dons a samurai outfit and deals a lot of damage very quickly. You can swap between these jobs at any time during battle, and while they make things even easier, I thought they were a really cute and fun way of implementing a job system into the game.
There is a little bit of room for customisation and upgrading though. You can upgrade your human party members’ skills to help them master them further to improve their effectiveness. Isaac again functions differently because you upgrade him by installing bronze, silver or gold Gears to improve his stats and learn new skills. Gold Gears cause the greatest improvement, and you can swap out the lower-grade ones for higher ones as you progress. Instead of buying weapons, you have two slots on each weapon to equip modifiers: the top slot must always be an attack mod, but the bottom slot can take all others. It seems strange when you have characters who are much less suited for attacking who are forced to have an attack modifier, when they could have a defensive and HP modifier simultaneously equipped. As Destiny Connect lays it out, it’s either defense or HP, and always attack.
While I didn’t have huge expectations for Destiny Connect, I feel like the game has settled for simply being average. For a sub-15 hour RPG, revisiting the same places over and over again while posing no challenge struggled to hold my attention for even a third of the time, and the charming art is severely let down by the Switch version’s quality. There are so many better examples of beginner RPGs out there that allow kids to customise and experiment much more and give them a robust world to explore. Think Fantasy Life on the 3DS, or any Pokémon game, and you’ve already got something much more engaging and exciting.
