Super Splash League
This might be the most Final Fantasy Tactics Advance game on the Playdate. Yes, specifically the handheld one, which opens with a snowball fight and has a lot of imaginative children in the lead roles. This doesn’t have any of the serious gravitas of the main FFT, or Jeanne d’Arc, or Tactics Ogre, or any of those other “serious” tactics games. This is more like if Splatoon had isometric, grid-based, tactics gameplay. It’s set in a world where a big turn-based water fight tournament is the most important thing in town, and it has bite-sized levels and a cute, straightforward story to hold you until the end.
It’s not a long game, and it’s not a complex game. It doesn’t have dozens of jobs that you can change between, and you’ll never have more than four characters on your team at one time. The only “experience points” type of system is being able to increase one stat, one time, for a particular character by doing one of a handful of character-specific sidequests after progressing through the story. You can change each characters’ weapon and ability between matches as you work towards being the tournament champion, and they have specific friend-helping stat boosts, but that’s it! Each level is just a few minutes long, and there are only about a dozen of them. It is focused, it is precise, and it is not mean.
For me, the entire tactics genre has always seemed pretty daunting. Juggling a dozen characters, all with unique abilities (many of which have limited uses)... trying not to let any of them die, it’s always been very stressful for me. I can’t even wrap my head around the Mario + Rabbids games, despite really wanting to. The low-stakes nature and feel of Super Splash League, however, makes the entire genre feel accessible to anyone. If you lose a battle, just try again. They’re like five minutes long. The characters are positive, and they just want everyone to have fun. No one “dies” when they run out of HP, and there’s always someone to lift them back up, both physically and emotionally. It’s a very positive experience, and it’s a very different thing than Mirror Door Interactive’s last Playdate game, Teddison Inc.
I had it crash a few times but not so many that I got to use my “Super Crash League” quip I had locked and loaded, and there are some minor weird things that happen like a water spray will “jump” up to a different level when flying toward the enemy, or things on the screen will continue to happen for a few moments after the battle has been won or lost, but these things are easy to ignore. It’s probably the best tactics game on the whole platform, and it has so much positive energy in a world that desperately needs it right now. It’s worth playing – and totally beatable – even if you’re not a fan of the genre! If you are, though, you’re in for a bite-sized treat that’s unlike basically everything else on the Playdate and just like some of your favorite games from the PS1/GBA era.
(Released August 19, 2025, on Catalog and Itch. Copy provided by developer.)