If patience is the cardinal virtue shared by all role players, then Natural Doctrine will be the game that turns a lot of saints into profanity-slinging, rage-quitting sinners. To some extent, this is what developer Kadokawa Games wants.

Unique; complex; and satisfying battle system; Well-implemented skill trees

Artificially inflated difficulty; Story is disposable and unavoidable; Interface and animations make battle more arduous than necessary; Too often devolves into frustrating trial and error

Heads will roll. Mostly yours.

Innovation requires boldness. Any creative mind who seeks to evolve a genre must be unafraid of ill consequences or criticism that could result from such an endeavor. In that respect, I appreciate the turn-based strategy game Natural Doctrine .

tries to be an unforgiving and brutal tactical RPG that punishes you for the tiniest mistake, and it most certainly does that. But it also punishes you for things outside your control, leading to frustrating, messy battles.

Free skill respec

Lame story and characters; Unfair challenge; Convoluted combat; Awful magic system

I'm the kind of critic who can forgive general roughness, sub-par graphics, and bizarre idiosyncrasies if a game's core concept is a solid one. As such, Natural Doctrine is the sort of thing I would ordinarily champion, happily looking past minor problems in celebration of the things it does right.

The zone system and linking are great concepts

Moving one character three pixels too far over means annihilation

Natural Doctrine is far from a ‘bad game', it has great ideas but it seems to be struggling as it virtually always sticks you in compact situations where strategy goes out the window and luck plays a far too important role.