Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children - Review

The RPG Codex reviewed Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children:

RPG Codex Review: Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children is like the best goddamned game ever made

I fucking hate anime. I hate the exaggerated art style, I hate the androgynous, omega-cucked protagonists, I hate the hyper-fixation on (and sexualization of) child characters who participate in the drama on the same level as the adults, I hate the nonsensical storytelling and I hate the juvenile combination of cartoon silliness and world-shattering melodrama that always seems to haunt every bit of writing in the genre.

So when I tell you that I have put a categorically shameful number of hours into my two playthroughs of Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children, despite the fact that it ranks among the worst offenders in the history of anime in most of the areas above (the art is… well, it’s fine for the genre), I want you to understand what this means about how insanely addictive the gameplay can be. I am putting up with what is perhaps the most incoherent, crackbrained, idiotic, loose-threaded story told in video game history and with writing so terrible and poorly translated it will make your 5-year-old cousin Billy's "and then..."-stories seem like poetic masterpieces, because this game is just that fucking great at tickling my brain in all its funny spots.

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Is Troubleshooter really the best game ever?

No. God no. No, no, no. The story is terrible, the writing is insulting, the aesthetics are juvenile, the mission variety is non-existent, a few of the game’s systems are superfluous at best and intrusive bloat at worst and it can be intensely grindy in the shittiest, most JRPG fashion possible. For all the favorable comparisons I've made to Owlcat's games, at least those games allow you put their bloated management content on auto. Troubleshooter will offer no such abeyance of its content barrage.

But, also? Yes. Yes it absolute is the best game ever.

Troubleshooter caters more specifically and with greater results to the character customization fetishist in all of us than any other game I’ve played. All while being a suprisingly balanced experience, all things considered. That last bit is particularly important, because all that character customization would ultimately be pointless if the game was too easy to break, or if it was too easy to just pick a strategy early and spam it endlessly for the rest of the game. Like any RPG, Troubleshooter can be munchkinned to absolute death, but given the depth of its systems, it's fairly impressive how little restraint you have to show in order to avoid cheesing it. Or in other words: for most of the punches you can throw, the game will present an at least somewhat adequate answer. You can break the game in multiple ways and still have it fight back if you avoid just a scant few of the most over-the-top interactions. Troubleshooter also manages to make most of its build combinations viable even on its hardest difficulties, which, of course, is even more important.

This is the sole reason Troubleshooter has won the dubious honor of being the single-player game I’ve played the most hours of, at least according to Steam (though of course, Steam can't count the childhood I lost to Baldur's Gate and Might & Magic VII).

So no, Troubleshooter is not the best game ever made. But it might just be the most addictive one yet made for those of us who think the most intoxicating part of playing an RPG is the endless amount of time spent in character creation, agonizing for hours upon hours about every little decision.

Thanks Couchpotato!