Unsung Story will take players on a trip through time

Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians, the upcoming tactical role-playing game, won't offer random battles because the player will choose from groups of historical battles, developer Yasumi Matsuno explained in a Kickstarter update yesterday.

The world map in Unsung Story will resemble the ones in Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre. However, players won't be roaming the map from battle to battle, dealing with random encounters.

"As the focus of this game will be participating in slices of history, the player will not move from town to town, but from time to time," said Matsuno. "At any given time, you will have a range of 'scenarios' (i.e., battles) to choose from." Side quests won't be available at Unsung Story's launch, but Matsuno and publisher Playdek plan to add them afterward.

As for the battle system itself, it won't include charge/casting times. According to Matsuno, that element of Final Fantasy Tactics only existed because of the memory limitations of the original PlayStation hardware — the casting time was implemented so the game could load graphical effects.

"Speaking as a developer back in those days, I can tell you that we weren't happy with it," said Matsuno.

Since players will be reliving battles that already took place in the history of the game world, they'll play out similarly in each session, although Matsuno said, "You could well find yourself surprised by unexpected events, like the arrival of a new army, that went unrecorded by the chroniclers of the day." Additional replay value comes from the five difficulty levels on each stage.

All of these elements will make it into the existing iOS and Android versions of Unsung Story, so even if the Kickstarter campaign (which is for the Mac and Windows PC versions) fails, these features will still be included. With four days to go, the campaign is almost 80 percent of the way to its $600,000 goal.