Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers

If you want to get your girlfriend or ten years old nephew into the world of JRPGs, this could be a perfect entry point. Charming, funny and simple, Destiny Connect is a short yet sweet experience anyone could enjoy.

Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers from NIS America does a lot right right and is a good beginner's JRPG but has some major technical and design problems.

Destiny Connect is a charming JRPG that's full of creativity. However, it's too small and doesn't do much to break from the most basic formulas. If a short but interesting storyline is enough to keep you interested then you may get some enjoyment out of this but those looking for distinct and engaging gameplay should definitely look elsewhere.

Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is very much a "My First JRPG" type-affair. Its story is overly-schmaltzy and safe, the game world is small and disappointingly sterile and its cast of bad guys won’t give you too much trouble over the course of its short running time. However, the combat here is entertaining stuff, intuitively laid out and clearly explained, it’s filled with fun skills and makes light and breezy work out of systems that more grown-up JRPGS tend to get bogged down in. It has a likeable central cast of characters and, although there are many more exciting games of its ilk available on Switch, it does do a commendable job in providing a safe starting point for younger players looking to sink their teeth into the genre for the first time.

While I didn't have huge expectations for Destiny Connect, I feel like the game has settled for simply being average. For a sub-15 hour RPG, revisiting the same places over and over again while posing no challenge struggled to hold my attention for even a third of the time, and the charming art is severely let down by the Switch version's quality. There are so many better examples of beginner RPGs out there that allow kids to customise and experiment much more and give them a robust world to explore. Think Fantasy Life on the 3DS, or any Pokémon game, and you've already got something much more engaging and exciting.

The clearest recommendation here is that Destiny Connect is more for the younger gamer in your life, as it’s a kid-friendly adventure that winds up being a little too basic and uninspired for those with more JRPG experience. This game drifts through the sands of time that is the Switch’s library as just another in the line of numerous RPGs of various shapes and sizes. It’s an okay game, but without any defining features other than competency, it’s hard to recommend over similar games in the genre.

Destiny Connect is not a bad game, but it fails to offer anything appealing or interesting for the player, and it gets monotonous quite quickly. It might be a good option for younger players, but they would be able to find better alternatives as well.

If you’ve got a lot of patience and don’t mind games that are very slow-paced, Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers might be worth a look. After all, thanks to its short playing time, it doesn’t require too much investment. Most JRPG fans will find it not entirely fulfilling though. It should be applauded for trying something a bit different, but at the end of the day a dull game is a dull game. And that’s what Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is: a dull, but beautiful, game.

At first brush, Destiny Connect by all rights appears to be successful in what it seems to have been created for: provide a cute, fun, and polished throwback game for both modern audiences and those who remember the older console generations fondly. The issues with the game don’t become apparent immediately, but do rear their heads before too long, causing fatigue with the bland, aimless narrative and frustration with the repetitive and simple combat. Time travel is a tricky thing, and in Destiny Connect’s case, the only fond memories I’m left with are the good times I’ve had with the games that were its inspirations.

Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers starts off great, with a promising story and fun enemies. But the longer I played, the weaker it became. It’s a simple game (move from point A to point B in a linear fashion) and a short one by RPG standards, so kids might be entertained by it for a while. But the story ultimately resigns itself to cliches, and the backtracking and repetition combine to make this just an average game, at best.

Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is a child-friendly, happy-go-lucky, time-travelling adventure that's enjoyable... for about an hour or so. Simply put, there are far better JRPGs out there - many of them equally carefree and friendly towards young gamers and newbies, and even more so.