Marvel's Midnight Suns

Like Fire Emblem? XCOM? What if they had a baby, and you add a dash of Bioware-style team building (or FE3H if you prefer)? That's basically Midnight Suns.

In this turn-based tactical RPG, you take on the role of the Hunter, a son or daughter of Lilith (you can customize your appearance, but not your backstory) resurrected after several hundred years, by a group of mystic-oriented Marvel characters called the Midnight Suns, who have been watching and standing guard against Lilith's return. Join Blade, Magik (Colossus' sister Illyana), Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange, and Nico Minoru (Runaways) at the start, and eventually join up with Captains America and Marvel, Iron Man, Wolverine, Spider-man, and more.

Most missions allow you to field three heroes (story missions require the Hunter, which by the way is all your friends will ever call you, think "Shephard" from Mass Effect, but non-story missions have more freedom) and will require a variety of objectives from the simple "defeat all enemies" to "protect the servers while you hack the terminals" to "rescue civilians in danger." On your turn, you start with 3 card plays, sometimes you can get a play back if you use certain abilities. Cards may be simple attacks that deal damage and increase heroism; skills that buff allies / draw cards / etc. and usually greatly increase heroism, or heroic abilities that have increased damage and/or special effects but consume your heroism. Battles take place in a 2d circular arena where there may be crates to throw at your opponents, generators you can knock them into to stun them, pits you can try to knock them into, and more. Unlike most games in this genre, you don't have a move and action per hero; you collectively have 1 move and 3 card plays, though card plays will often reposition you (they will automatically move to attack, for example). Positioning can matter for heroic attacks like "damage all enemies in a line," so it can be a puzzle to figure out how best to spend your limited resources, and that's exactly what you want in a TRPG.

Between missions, you can explore the Abbey grounds which acts as your home base. You can talk to your teammates and sometimes hang out with them watching movies or meditating or going fishing, having what you might think of as support conversations from Fire Emblem, but with the ability to choose from 3 responses at different points in the talk, gaining or even losing friendship points and light or dark alignment points (a la Paragon/Renegade from Mass Effect -- look, I'd stop comparing it to these games but it's wearing its influence on its sleeve, it's impossible NOT to).

The abbey grounds are themselves a moderate size area to explore filled with mysteries and mostly simple puzzles, with more areas opening up over time if you complete optional side activities and progress the story. While exploring you may even come across chests in the now-universal color coding of white-blue-purple-orange for increasing rarity of goods, finding resources or items that can buff your combat.

To compare to another of my favorites, the game operates on a calendar of sorts, like Persona. Every day you wake up, can explore the abbey and work on research with Stark & Strange (who have teamed up in one of the best buddy pairings you've ever seen in video games), spar with a teammate, upgrade cards in your deck, and more. You'll then go on a mission -- either a story one or a procedurally-generated one of which there are an endless supply, and unlike XCOM or Fire Emblem, the story will wait forever if you want to do side missions (do not be like me and make the mistake of thinking you can do all the side missions and then do the story afterwards--they won't run out of side missions). At night you can explore the abbey grounds or sometimes (seemingly at random; across 85 hours I never figured out what the trigger was) hang out with your friends.

The game is fully voice acted -- every single line of every single character, plus battle barks and a couple short phrases from each hero if the hunter walks up to them or just stands by them, and features a ton of great actors -- Matt Mercer, Erica Lindbeck, Yuri Lowenthal, Laura Bailey, Lyrica Okano (who played Nico in Hulu's Runaways), and more.

You know what would be really cool? Images in reviews. Super post reviews. I'll post a few pictures later -- the animation is gorgeous. I played 85 hours on PS5 and am starting on my second play to get the last trophies like the sucker that I am.

All this sounds like it should be setting up a 5-star review, right? Here's the problem. There's too much. Too much what? YES. Everything. It's not that the game is too long per se, it's that there's just too much to do. Every hero has 5 friendship levels that will take a lot of work to raise. You'll constantly need to find new artifacts to unlock higher levels of research to unlock new base upgrades, which in turn will add to the ever growing list of ST