The Time-Traveling Quintet: Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers Review

By Teepu Khan

Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch
Player(s): 1

During the holiday season, it’s easy to get so caught up in the big name releases that one forgets to take a look at some of the less flashy games. Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is one such release. Read on to see what we thought of it.

Soulman is the mysterious hero of Clocknee.

Destiny Connect is an interesting game. It pulls ideas from various sources, such as Back to the Future, Chrono Trigger and even Final Fantasy X-2. It takes all these ideas, shuffles them and re-purposes them in a package that feels nostalgic and yet geared toward a youthful player. You play as a young girl named Sherry during a festival in the city of Clocknee (which happens to have a very prevalent clock-based motif). She’s at home waiting with her mother for her father to return home after a long work trip. During all this, time suddenly stops, and things start to get weird for Sherry and friends.

The title screen's art changes based on your progress.

Eventually, you’ll meet a mysterious robot named Isaac. Things come to a head, and next thing you know you are travelling through time to try and save the town. The story itself is quite linear and straightforward. There will be a couple of twists here and there, but if you are familiar with any time-travelling stories, it is unlikely that you will be surprised by any of the antics that take place. For what it’s worth though, the game doesn’t usually hand you foreshadowing on a silver platter, which will make the story have a nice sense of progression that feels just right. There are a handful of subplots that pop up during the course of the game that are never given proper explanation, development or closure. Instead, the clear focus is on the main story. For example, one of the character’s father’s soul is inside of a robot, and yet the guy doesn’t seem at all phased by it at all throughout the entire story. It’s a bit jarring and odd, especially considering the nature of his character. Still, there is a definite beginning, middle and end, with a pacing that never leaves you feeling bored. As I played, I always wanted to continue and see what was going to happen next.

Sherry does not joke about being adventurous.

This story is progressed through the game world as you move from point to point. As you unlock more areas in the city you are almost always given the ability to visit these areas at any given time (outside of a handful of scripted areas). This means that, despite the linear story, you can explore any part of the city that you have seen thus far. The problem is, there’s nothing to do in the city outside of your main quest. There are absolutely no side quests at all, which is an absolute pity because the design of the city and the lore behind the world is legitimately interesting. What’s worse is when you visit other time periods. They often give you no freedom of exploration and are used simply as plot tools. This is rather unfortunate as they are missed opportunities to add some more interesting lore. The only side quest you have is to collect these items called Water Orbs, which give you the ability to unlock various outfits for Sherry. These outfits are entirely aesthetic, so there’s little motivation to look for them. To make matters worse, the game never shows you what these orbs look like. I didn’t acquire my first orb until the final act of the game, and it was entirely by accident. It’s odd they chose to give you no clue as to what the orbs look like, as everything else in the game is given a good tutorial when introduced to you. Still, I can’t fault the game for putting some nice hidden items to find, to add at least some extended value to the game.

What pretty fireworks!

An RPG, ultimately, is only as good as its characters, and that is something that isn’t the best for this game. I’d say about half of the characters are interesting and well-developed, with the rest of the cast feeling like side thoughts who are merely there to keep the story moving. This is made worse by the fact that two of the party members suffer from this problem. They should be important but are mostly ignored in the game’s story. You can have 3 people actively in your party at once, with 2 being on the sidelines. Each character serves as an RPG class archetype, with abilities to reflect this, giving you a little freedom in how you approach combat. Every party member has value in combat, so any way you decide to compose your party will lead to success as long as you utilize their strengths and are aware of their weaknesses.

Pegreo's nervousness is adorable.

The main reason for the party members all being useful is the ‘heart’ of the story: Isaac. He is where my reference to Final Fantasy X-2 comes; specifically, in the form of that game’s dress sphere system. Similarly, Isaac can change his core gear at any point in battle. This changes the way he looks and gives him abilities and stats to reflect this. For example, if you transform into his Rescue form, then he turns into a fire fighter. In this form, he uses healing waters to heal the party and to provide support in the form of removing debuffs or removing buffs from the enemy. Interestingly, his elemental weaknesses change based on the form, which means you must be careful about which form you are using. The flexibility Isaac gives you is what allows every other party member to have value. You can shift his form in order to complement the rest of your party.

Destiny Connect is a turn-based RPG. There’s nothing special or crazy about the system, and it works exactly as it should. As you take hits, turns or do attacks, you charge up your skill points. These skill points, indicated by a percent, are utilized to use abilities. It’s a nice way to add a little strategy to an otherwise trite system. You will always have to manage your SP between all characters. I hardly did any grinding outside of fighting robots that were in the way of my path forward, and despite this by the time I got to the end of the game I had reached the maximum level. None of the encounters, bosses or otherwise, offer any sort of unique scenarios, making combat eventually feel like a chore. Unfortunately, this means that many abilities will also go un-used, as they serve very little purpose. You will focus mostly on maximizing damage to down enemies and bosses quickly. I’m very saddened by this, because the combat is quite nuanced and well-balanced from the perspective of your party, but none of the enemies give you the opportunity to really explore this nuance.

Enemies have a generic category avatar outside of combat.

Along those lines, there were some cool character progression systems put in place. You can use items to level each of your abilities, meaning you can focus on maxing out abilities that are most useful to you. Isaac has his own special stat levelling system, where you place gears on each form’s grid in order to decide how that grid’s stats progress. You have three levels of gears (Bronze, Silver and Gold) which increase the effectiveness of that slot, so as you get further in the game you can go back and upgrade slots you already filled to become even more powerful. Isaac is the only one who gets this progression perk; the rest of the party’s stats are determined by level and equipment worn. The equipment is basic, and you’ll only be wearing whatever gives you the highest stat boost, as only one equipment slot gives bonuses. Even then, the bonuses are very basic, leading to little variety.

You get to talk to many people, who almost never have anything interesting to say.

If you couldn’t tell, there are a lot of great ideas in this game, but due to the intent of the developers to keep things simple and accessible, most of these ideas end up getting the short of end of the stick, having little to no meaning in the grand scheme of things. This problem carries over into the gameplay, the story…every part of the game. A lot of thought was put into various features in the game, then somewhere along the way the development team decided they wanted to focus on telling their story and forgetting about every other aspect of the game.

That's an odd way to celebrate.

On the bright side, the game has a very charming art style. It makes everything feel very soft and pleasing, making the entire adventure feel quite heart-warming and almost nostalgic. Oddly, there is a lot of pixilation and blurriness all over the place. The game doesn’t seem very demanding, so I can’t understand why they abused depth of field and film grain to the point that they did. It’s very jarring and diminishes the value of what should be a very gorgeous game. I was playing on the Switch, so I imagine the PS4 version doesn’t suffer from these same graphical limitations. Despite these limitations, the game still has somewhat long load times and has them often. It isn’t unbearable, but it is annoying, and discourages exploration for Water Orbs, or even getting into combat. Around the final act, due to the linearity, often I found myself running from and dodging enemies when I can in order to avoid the frustration of loading for a 5-10 second battle.

More slots unlock as you level up.

Thankfully, the music doesn’t suffer the same issues. It’s just as charming as the art style, without the unnecessary degradation due to loss in aural quality. It’s catchy, charming and appropriate. As with everything in this game so far, there is definitely a ‘but’ in there. The sound design suffers greatly. The sound effects and cues that are present are good, appropriate and clean. The issue is that there are very few sound effects. There’s no voices at all. Not even a simple ‘Hey’. The mute characters make them feel a lifeless, which shouldn’t be the case because they are full of fun and exaggerated expressions. It doesn’t help that there are portions that feel like there should be sounds, but have none. As an example, when you complete a battle Isaac will hit his fists together as a victory pose. He’s made completely of metal, so there should definitely be a sound effect here, but there is none. Little things like this take away from the experience and could have been easy fixes even with stock sounds.

Most skills are unlocked as you level up.

Everything about Destiny Connect is about a balance between good and bad. The game costs $40, which somewhat explains the budget feel of portions of the game, but doesn’t help its case in the end. The game is plagued with uncomfortable load times, oddly blurry visuals, hollow moments due to lacking sound effects, a very linear story, lacking subplots, repetitive enemies and no incentive to explore. Despite this, it has a charming art style with good music to boot, great character design, a cute and heartwarming story, intriguing combat nuance and interesting character level progression. It’s not the best of games, but I still enjoyed my 16 hours in the town of Clocknee. It’s a decent diversion, but with so many hard hitters coming out through to the end of the year, it’s hard to recommend Destiny Connect. If you want something to curl up with over a weekend that will just please your heart and lack any real challenge, this will likely whet your appetite.

For More On Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers:
https://nisamerica.com/games/destiny-connect/

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Graphics: B-
Sound: C+
Gameplay: C+
Value: B-

OVERALL: C+

Pros:
+ Adorable art style couple with charming music are very heartwarming
+ Time travel shenanigans are handled with wisdom and reasonable restraint
+ Nuanced combat and character progression are simple yet enticing
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Cons:
- Visuals are blurry and lack of sound effects can make the game feel unfinished aesthetically
- Story is painfully linear, discouraging exploration of what should be an interesting environment
- Enemy designs and combat are extremely repetitive, devaluing the inherent features of the game

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Disclaimer: This game was provided to us from the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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