Floppy Knights Review (Foshu)
An uncomplicated, entry-level turn-based strategy game along the likes of Advance Wars and Fire Emblem, splashed with uncomplicated, entry-level deck-building mechanics.
While that's certainly a mouth full, for anyone with interests in either turn-based strategy games or deck-builder games, there's just about enough content to earn their interest, without having the complementing aspect hold back the enjoyment of either. In fact both elements go hand in hand really well, making me wonder about an Advance Wars type of game that allows the player to customise deployment options and powers, layering on the depths of tactics and strategy. It's genuinely an exciting thought, though regretfully not something Floppy Knights manages to realise.
As a very beginner friendly entry into turn-based strategy, Floppy Knights doesn't fully capitalise on its own potential. Instead, it offers a slow paced campaign, building up to room temperature difficulty level at its peak, stranding the player trained and ready to take on a proper challenge without anything to bite into. Even the challenge stages timidly crank up the difficulty, which is a shame. The main campaign allows players to tackle the stages completely free form, and to the game's credit, the stages allow for success using a variety of approaches, even if the player slapdashes their deck together. The challenge stages however locks the player into a pre-build deck, which should allow for a more strategy minded approach. Sadly, safe for just a couple of puzzle like stages, the decks are very obvious in their approach, with the penultimate challenge stage presenting an RNG nightmare. Maybe it was my approach, but out of all the stages in the entire game, that's the only one I didn't enjoy playing through. Another gripe, some of the later stages wield large amounts of enemy units, each of which take (or skip) a turn, resulting in tedious waits between moments of player agency. Finally, by the end of the game, the player unlocks the last playing card, with only the previously completed stages to return to. It feels like a missed opportunity to leave fully fledged Floppy masters without something like a Hard mode or New Game+ to flex their skills and cards.
Dressing up Floppy Knights is a charming visual style, instantly recognised from Dicey Dungeons, with the artist clearly showing improvement and refinement in style and animation. True to its children's storybook appearance, the story and writing are easily accessible for younger gamers, which I appreciate for the otherwise lack of gateways into the turn based strategy library of games out there. Arguably it could be said I'm therefore not the target demographic, but in my experience the dialogue, story and characters can't match either the charm of the visual style or even the ankle deep depth of strategy gameplay.
On a tangential aside to that, given the appeal to a younger gamer public, why floppies? Certainly a demographic undoubtedly unfamiliar to the now near ancient storage devices. Thematically the story doesn't have an in-universe explanation for them either, other than the units are stored digitally. And knights? Two out of the over twenty units available to the player could be considered knights in appearance, but they're mostly all small monsters. So wouldn't something like Digital Monsters be more properly descriptive? Like, Digi-Monsters... oh. Scratch that. Floppy is a cute word though, I would thoroughly enjoy something called FloppyMon.
All that said, Floppy Knights offers a brief, enjoyable stint into the turn-based strategy and deck-building realm, though only dipping its toes into its possible depths. If you're unfamiliar with either genre, the foray might just prepare you for the challenges games like Advance Wars, War Groove, Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics present, as it might leave you hungry for more. More experienced players like myself are more likely to devour poor Floppy Knights whole, but I can't deny I enjoyed my time with it, steamrolling the achievements.
Go give it a look, maybe a play ~ 6/10