Welcome to our review of Tanzia, a new indie RPG for Nintendo Switch.
Unravel the mystery of your grandfather’s disappearance while preventing a terrible evil from destroying your island home. Tanzia is a single-player RPG that combines fast-paced strategic combat with elements of favorite classic RPGs in an open 3D world of magic and monsters.
As you venture deeper and deeper into the world of Tanzia, you’ll face increasingly powerful creatures, from a lowly Akiri bird to the Skeleton King himself, with water spirits, giant spiders, zombies, corrupted beings and many more powerful creatures in between!
After a very powerful intro, explaining all the backstory, you are plunged into the story. We start off with the tutorial where it becomes clear that physical attacks are the weakest and should only be used as a last resort, a lesson that will hold very true later in the story. Everything is about Mana and the attacks it will allow you to perform. The term coined in this game is arcanity.
This game sports a very strange attack system where the most effective way to slay most enemies is to run away from them, wait for the spell to cool down and then recast the spell. Repeat until you killed off the enemy or enemies, most attacks do also damage neighboring enemies and it allows you to take out a horde of big turtles on the beach or the enemies in a village nearby.
Tanzia starts off like most action RPGs, with tasks to perform and a preset story to follow. In Tanzia, we need to figure out why the boar in the neighboring area is so violent, only to find out evil voodoo is in play. We then set out to the beach and need to solve the needed mysteries like finding out what is preventing you from crossing that bridge.
Tanzia is quite a challenging game as the majority of the world is open and while you can just follow the storyline, you are able to stray from the path and suddenly facing a big and bad enemy that is clearly overpowered for you. No matter how many Mana potions or healing potions you got, you just know to avoid them or get slain in battle. At this same time, I should point out that you can not just run away from most enemies, despite having running potions.
When a horde of wild boars is on your tail, you basically need to defeat them or leave the area. Now, it is usually easy to do this, it is tiresome, to say the least. The tutorial actually refers to the running potions as a great way to travel. They were not kidding. So imagine a lot of wild boards are following you and you are out of mana and the needed potions. One would just go to one of the totems where you can reset your HP and Mana, right? Wrong, as long as an enemy is “locked onto you”, the totem does not activate its healing properties. I got slain in action a few times because of this. So if you are reading this, be sure to stock up on Mana! This is my best advice for this game aside from suggesting you should pick it up, despite some of its flaws, Tanzia is a really nice action RPG.
When you see it for the first time, you would not really believe this is an indie game. It just looks very polished, despite somewhat more kiddy graphics, this game is not to be underestimated. Even the easy mode is still somewhat challenging and I admit I played on this mode so I could advance more easily and further down. It is addictive in a good way, despite getting slain often, never getting the impression it is going too far in its unfairness, is a sensation I never experienced. I was mostly to blame for my own foolish ideas that I could really slay that one enemy without another potion…
In conclusion, Tanzia is an experience that deserves its fair time in the spotlight. If you are in the market for an action RPG, check it out!
