At a time when big game developers shy away from putting missable content in their games, Foretales is designed in a way that you would only experience about half of the game in your best playthrough. It means you have to play the game multiple times to learn which missions are essential to achieve that “good ending” and which can be skipped. After a tutorial mission, you are put in the missions map from where you are given a few mission choices that you must make to progress through the branching narrative that changes depending on your choices. There are three different endings depending on how you play the game, and yet there are missions that you wouldn’t experience after finishing all three endings.

The game also has a high production value with all the characters properly responding to your decisions and there’s even enjoyable banter among your companions. The card game is quite intuitive – your skills, resources, characters are all represented by cards and hovering on a card usually highlights possible interactions and even lets you know of the outcome beforehand. The randomness of card draw is also minimized with the use of food, which allows you to redraw any chosen card from your deck. The card art, animations, narration, little voice-acted snippets are all done very well, and I’ve never seen the game getting stuck if you do things out of order (I’m sure all of us have experienced such bugged quests in some bigger games), in fact, I was pleasantly surprised when I acquired all required cards before the mission popped up and the game immediately recognized the available resources and moved the narrative forward accordingly. There are various factions like guards, bandits, pirates, etc. that need to be dealt with differently, but in most cases it is possible to deal with them without fights as long as you farm the respective resources beforehand, which only becomes difficult in some late-game missions. However, most of your collected resources in one mission do not carry forward to the next, forcing you to farm again.

As you can imagine, being able to undo your actions and replay certain missions is important for a game designed in such a way. From within a mission, you can abort to the menu and restart the mission as many times as required without time penalty. Each mission is further broken into three or four sections that have different main (and potentially side) objectives. If you save the game and exit mid-mission, you’d come back to the beginning of the section you were in, potentially losing a bit of progress, but the two options to restart the whole mission and the specific section is welcome (you restart the last section if a key character dies). However, you do NOT unlock the option to undo your last mission(s) (in case you made a bad choice of mission) until finishing the game for the first time. While one full playthrough is usually ten missions long, the game can end much sooner if you go for the bad ending. Moreover, you cannot reach the good ending without experiencing some missions from the not so good endings; meaning that you cannot experience the good ending in your first playthrough (in fact, a minimum of three playthroughs are needed to finish the game, more if you want all the achievements). So, you can potentially do a bad ending to unlock the mission undo option and then try out different missions to unlock various paths to finally be able to finish the good ending in your third playthrough (you’d definitely need to follow a guide unless you want to spend a ridiculous amount of time in trial and error).

Now, coming to the tricky part: although the gameplay is fun, the game is a nightmare from a usability point-of-view because you cannot speed up or skip through dialogues and other pop-ups to quicken your game in repeated playthroughs. When the characters talk and dialogues pop up, even hitting Space or Escape or Enter buttons do not progress the story like in most visual novels – you are required to keep clicking to move the story forward (controller not supported), and then there are certain narrated lines in black border in the bottom of the screen that cannot be skipped even by clicking, same goes for new skill or health/attack increase pop-ups. So, even though individual missions usually should take 15-60 minutes at most, with 3-4 sections in each mission, there is no way you can speed up time in repeated playthorughs. You are bound to be bored to death by unskippable repeated content by the time you make it to a good playthrough. This makes me think that the devs either didn’t play their own game long enough to feel the need for some usability tweaks or they were too enamored with their own creation to feel the drudgery of the experience. For some silly reason, you also cannot replay missions from a completed game save.