Introduction to Tribe Nine
TooKyo Games is a group I’ve been following for a while. The creatives involved in the group had developed some of my favorite titles or were heavily influential to me when I was younger. So seeing the directors of Danganronpa, Zero Escape, or Root Double team up for various projects like the World’s End Club, Death Come True, or the anime Akudama Drive has been exciting, and I’ve enjoyed their works.
One title that was announced some time ago was the extreme baseball live-service game Tribe Nine. Two years ago, it got a tie-in anime to set the scene, but we haven’t heard anything since. Then it turns out they’re teaming up with Akatsuki Games, a subsidiary of Koei Tecmo, to bring it to life. So, I spent some time in the closed beta test to see what this experience has to offer.
Story and Setting
Tribe Nine stars the amnesiac youth, Yo Kuronaka, who has been rescued from the clutches of a dragon quest parody by the ‘Trash Tribe’. The world, formerly an over-the-top sports world where everything was decided by youths in ‘tribes’ playing extreme baseball, has been destroyed and taken over by the Mysterious Masked Man Zero.
This eccentric entertainer loves to make people play games with executions on the line to raise the stakes.
The Trash Tribe finds their rescue attempt entirely thwarted by Zero, who anticipates their actions but wants to toy with them and thus will send them to the territories he controls to play more games with them.
Gameplay Mechanics and Combat
Taking control of some of the Trash Tribe members, you will guide their retro-esque sprites across 3d overworlds, navigating the cities turned into Zero’s game boards. And then you’ll run into grunts, goons, and sentry bots to beat up in action RPG combat. You have access to a team of three, and you can swap between which one you control at will while the others are AI-controlled. Each character has a regular attack combo, a dodge, two action skills, an ultimate, and an assist move.
These skills charge over time as you play, and assist skills can be used when you inflict particular ailments on your opponents, which can chain together for considerable damage. On top of these, as you deal with hits through your various skills, you also increase the tension gauge. This gauge up to the top will trigger the effects of various tension cards you equip as you fill the gauge.
Attack boosts, temporary time slowdown on a successful dodge, defence boosts, increased ailment chances, buffs that boost your close range damage but nerf your distance damage, you can trigger all sorts of effects this way. And if you don’t keep up the gauge, it will peter out.
Your opponents’ gauges are similar, and they go up as they make hits, which boosts their damage and makes them very scary to fight.
With a presentation style that’s second to none, Tribe Nine sets a new standard for visual storytelling in gacha games.
As it currently stands, it feels quite fun; the skills add some variety to regular combos, and swapping control of various characters in a team gives some weight to the group you’re playing as. Especially given that characters have voice lines to reference their party members in battle, chain attacks lead to direct calls.
Gacha Mechanics and Character Progression
When issues start to pop up, they are caused by elements that are part and parcel of mobile game systems.
In the beta, this is how you obtain both tension cards and characters. Still, several powerful tension cards are given to you by default, and developer interviews have confirmed that they’d like to make cards related to especially interesting mechanics freely accessible via play rewards. Hence, this isn’t much of a concern. It feels weird for characters, as there are cast members you just can’t use until you pull them in the gacha. This is normal, except for the fact that the game goes out of its way to have a small scene justifying how you can get others: strange choice, but a lose-lose choice.
The integration of debate-style baseball matches is a brilliant nod to Danganronpa, making each encounter feel intense and unique.
As you level up a character, you can tweak their stats with gems, however you also get extra gems (and passive skills) for pulling duplicate characters, encouraging you to pull more, even when you have your full team.
This game does have a stamina gauge, which is consumed exclusively in dungeons. These dungeons reward accessories that can be combined into sets for stat boosts, and they all have bosses or boss-like encounters at the end.
In terms of design, these boss fights rule.
Bosses have attack patterns reminiscent of raid fights from MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV (as I found out from some friends who were watching me get my ass kicked). But you aren’t just running rotations. The fights in the CBT are a blast, requiring player positioning and careful timing to exploit openings.
The character variety also helps, with cast members feeling like they have their own niches in battle.
The blend of extreme baseball and RPG combat in Tribe Nine offers a fresh take on the genre that’s both fun and engaging.
There are two significant issues I have, though. Chain attacks are cool and very fun to use, but to make the most of the combos, you need characters with specific follow-up ailment affinities to make a team with. This makes it easy for certain characters to be highly incentivized and pulled for via particular affinities. Having characters unable to chain really detracts from the feel of a team.
The other issue is in the damage scaling.
If you haven’t hit the current required level, your offensive stats are scaled down, basically requiring additional leveling. Currently, leveling is slow; thus, this turns into a grind.
Visuals and Presentation
The game’s story presentation is fantastic, alternating between its retro-esque overworld and visual novel style. Character poses are great, and the large CG backgrounds being cut up into smaller pieces to simulate scene depth during its transitions between characters is a brilliant choice. This is easily the best presentation I have seen in any gacha game. There are clear limitations, in that there are never more than two characters on screen to make it easily viewable on mobile devices, but they can get around more action-based scenes via clever sprite work and transitions. The biggest presentation flaw is the translation. It’s currently very scuffed and needs some work to clean up, but hopefully, that can be fixed before the game has a proper release.
Baseball and Debate Mechanics
Finally, I mentioned at the start that the game involved baseball. How does baseball come in? Sure, the characters have vague baseball theming, with weapons that are technically mits, helmets, and bats, and… the rulebook is a Necronomicon. But the real baseball comes in the form of the Extreme Baseball (XB) game that forms the climax of the chapter.
Well, you can only imagine my surprise when the game with the involvement of Kazutaka Kodaka (the Danganronpa director) showed up with the prompts ‘XB is a debate’ and ‘‘finding a rebuttal is important’.
This baseball is still very much baseball, but it’s just as much a verbal debate and a showdown between the characters’ beliefs. While you line up pitches or swings on a grid, you also pick out dramatic arguments, sometimes enhanced by collecting evidence throughout the chapter.
Final Thoughts on Tribe Nine
It is very easy to make a pointed comparison to Danganronpa’s class trials. And you should; the influence is clear, and it’s fantastic. He can’t keep getting away with this! Then you see the characters you’ve been with throughout the chapter, staring down your foes and pulling out crazy gymnastic feats!
Without the stamina cost for dailies and maybe a shop system to buy tension cards, Tribe Nine would have killed it on the PS Vita or Nintendo Switch. I will have to play the full release when it drops just to see what else they can cook up with the formula.
Tribe Nine is coming to iOS and Android devices and PC via Steam as a free-to-play title.
