Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the regular feature where we maintain a healthy fear of Etna. Last month, we took a look at the early history of the tactical RPG genre followed by its blossoming in the 1990s. It was an important time for the genre, as the vague concepts of the 1980s were finally drawn together into a functional set of genre guidelines. While the genre really started to take off in Japan, things went a different way in the West. Besides occasional hits like X-COM, Western game developers were largely focused on a considerably more popular sister genre, the real-time strategy game. This gap would only become wider as time went on. This month, we're taking a look at some of the significant tactical RPGs of the 2000s, as the Japanese variation of the genre rode a massive wave of popularity worldwide off the back of Final Fantasy Tactics.
The split between Japan and the West, consoles and PCs, and the players of all types was at perhaps its peak divisiveness in the early 2000s. Although turn-based strategy games remained popular among PC gamers, particularly realistic war simulations, the RPG variant was rare. MicroProse had some serious financial troubles that kept it from properly taking advantage of X-COM's success, and Sir-Tech was running on fumes as Jagged Alliance 2 went out the door. Between Blizzard's StarCraft and Warcraft games and Westwood's Command & Conquer series, the RTS genre was firing on all cylinders. PC RPGs, long ...