A couple of months ago, Tactics V: “Obsidian Brigade” developer Paul Metcalf got in touch and let me know about a new patch that was scheduled to hit around Cyber Monday. A lot of its little changes—like more representative hit chances and greater experience gains for magical abilities—are difficult to show off in a video, but patch 2.1 also includes features that speed up the gameplay considerably by drastically reducing the number of confirmation boxes and automatically fast-forwarding between turns without the need to hold the dedicated speedup button. There are other features like thieves being able to steal equipment off of their opponents (which one would imagine has significant potential against armored enemies), but being able to breeze through clashes is what makes patch 2.1 of Tactics V: “Obsidian Brigade” truly worthwhile.

While patch 2.1 went up as expected on Cyber Monday for the Steam version, the Switch version lagged behind a little, hence the delay; all of my saves are on the Switch version, and the PC version is giving me some weird visual glitches in both OpenGL and Vulkan modes. I suspect that something caused the game to default to a non-native resolution, causing the internal process that turns the 3D art into pixels to freak out.

Tactics V: “Obsidian Brigade” on the Nintendo Switch doesn’t suffer from any of the same visual glitches, fortunately, nor did I encounter the frame rate degradation that plagued it at release. The new speedup features are called “Quick Confirms” and “Quick Battle,” and I played through the same encounter twice in the embedded video to show off how much of a difference they make. The first encounter starts at 2:40 and uses the standard confirmation box and battle settings. The second encounter starts at 10:26 with these new features enabled, and the improved flow of battle is immediately apparent. Pre- and post-battle scenes still have to be sped up manually with ZR, but all of the speedup during battle is automatic, and the combination of automatic speedup and fewer confirmation boxes to click through results in much breezier gameplay almost on par with the streamlined Fire Emblem series.

I also made a point to go back and test a map that gave me lots of trouble when Tactics V: “Obsidian Brigade” first released thanks to enemy units’ penchant for moving off of the map and out of reach. As you can see from 15:33 on, that doesn’t happen anymore. This seems to be one of the rare cases where updates have improved a game without there being any noticeable tradeoffs, which is far rarer than most would believe.

Followup – Tactics V: “Obsidian Brigade” (patch 2.1) first appeared on Killa Penguin