Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers (PS4)

As the year 2000 approached, there was a great deal of fear of what may come. Some fears were more grounded, the Y2K bug requiring computers to be updated for compatibility to avoid errors as we enter a new century. Some were quite outlandish, some anticipating a terrible apocalypse at the start of the new millennium. In Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers though, the year 2000 came with something far worse than most had imagined. On January 1st, right as the calendar changes over, time stops completely.

Be it the people walking the streets or the fireworks in the sky, all has frozen as time no longer flows. However, there are a few people who were mysteriously spared the stillness, but just as strangely, various machines have sprung to life and now aim to capture those few who had avoided the cessation of time. Despite the dramatic stakes of being some of the few people left who can possibly try and restart time itself, the turn-based role-playing game Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers aims most of all to be a fun time-traveling adventure that could be suitable as a young player’s first brush with turn-based RPGs.

Much of the game’s tone is certainly set by its heroine, a spunky nine year old girl named Sherry Aldeis. Always willing to speak her mind and fairly adventurous, even before time stops she’s the kind of girl to seek trouble because she finds it fascinating. The town she finds herself in is a rather idyllic little place though, Clocknee is cozy and walkable in the vein of an old-fashioned European town where technology is pretty slow to advance. Sherry finds she has quite an advanced piece of hardware hiding her home though, an amnesiac robot named Isaac swearing he’ll protect her as he proves to be the key to traveling through time to try and help find out a way to jumpstart it again. The principal characters and even locations in Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers are kept pretty tight knit. Clocknee serves as the game’s only major setting, but seeing it in the past and future as well as entering specific areas like a mall or sewer change up what it can offer. Sherry’s close friends and family also have close ties to the time-traveling, the story giving you interesting glimpses at people at different points in time as you start to put together just how everything is interconnected across the ages.

While Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers can eventually begin playing up the consequences of time travel for a bit of emotional resonance, mostly the journey leans more on traveling through time as the kind of fun adventure a kid of Sherry’s age might imagine it to be. You don’t need to worry too much about keeping track of anything that complicated, the present and future always hinge on the most recent time someone time travels in the plot, which sounds paradoxical but really just means the causes and effects are closely tied to keep things simple. It fits well into the game’s themes about destiny while the close-knit group of named players in the plot can work on the other theme of how we value the time we spend with others, even machines. The small cast size can make emotional attachment to most of major character a bit harder to build since the spotlight isn’t shared that well, someone like the nervous and nerdy Pegreo feeling like they can go a good stretch without playing much of a part or believably shaking off their early characterization because of the skewed focus. The game isn’t too long though, likely to land between 10 and 20 hours and not containing much side content of note that isn’t something like searching the area for Water Orbs to get Sherry new outfits. This certainly helps with keeping the time travel plot tidy and is a good amount of time to at least get attached to the main characters of Sherry and Isaac, the budding friendships in the group sweet and cute and helped a bit by the exaggerated expressions characters strike when talking. Sadly, all dialogue is voiceless despite it feeling like it could add a lot to the characters and many of the human characters look like cheap plastic dolls when their expressions are neutral, and with the otherwise pretty good music sometimes going way too hard as it backs up a conversation, you get a bit of a mixed bag on the game’s presentation.

The colorful family-friendly world does produce some initially interesting enemy types though. The rampaging machines you go up against on your adventure are basically household appliances turned aggressive robots. Television sets, blenders, pinball tables, and more are all warped into some fun enemy designs, there being some entertainment value in seeing how a familiar piece of hardware might be twisted into some sort of bird or big bruiser. At the same time, as the adventure wears on, you will begin to notice the incredibly limited pool of available machine monsters. While they can have wonderful puns for names like the hair dryer turned hound Scare Dryer, the hopping camera Cam-phibian, and the toaster birds called Toasterrestrial, some enemies can have up to 8 variants where a different color and name don’t really indicate any large change in how they’ll fight you. Some boss robots do enter the regular enemy rotation eventually while others like the fridge are used surprisingly sparingly, something that makes seeing its recolor special but also means you inevitably will get more repetition from other types of deviant devices.

To face these robots, you will have three characters in battle at a time, but Isaac must always be present. Since the rest of the playable heroes are children, Isaac serves as the cornerstone of the team’s strength and power, able to take more hits and dish out attacks with a far greater range of techniques. He’s not always necessarily the most powerful, Pegreo has some special gizmos that can really hurt if their activation conditions are met and most of the cast deal about the same damage with their basic attacks as long as you keep getting them new equipment and level the group up through frequent fighting. The human members of the party can often prove to work very well as support though, boosting the team’s power, keeping everyone healed up, and then letting Isaac do the demanding jobs thanks to his incredible flexibility. Over the course of the adventure, Isaac will unlock new forms like his firefighter themed Rescuer form, boxer themed Champion form, and more. Isaac can shift into any he pleases during a battle with ease and get access to a whole new set of abilities and a change in stats to match, the friendly robot able to more easily respond to enemy trickery with skills that pierce defenses, delay abilities, or otherwise shift the battle in your favor. The energy needed to use special abilities is easy to come by, gained both by attacking and taking hits, some still being high cost so you can’t always do exactly what you like, there some strategy in balancing out the team’s skill output. Isaac does have a fun if familiar robotic personality normally, but the fights often trending towards trying to make him the best battle machine you can and with a completely separate and more intricate upgrade system outside of battle for him, you also feel his importance and grow attached to him for being such a linchpin to your success. Interestingly, should he fall in battle, that will be an instant game over, but the turn-based system makes it so usually you won’t be blindsided by such a result unless you deliberately play riskily.

As implied though, battles begin to get fairly repetitive as you get deeper into Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers. You technically can outrun the little representative robots out in the world that trigger battles once you touch them, but many paths ahead will be blocked by a tougher fight that isn’t necessarily one of the game’s boss fights. Even if you can dodge the little guys once things start to get rote, the mandated battles, despite requiring a bit more work and thought to overcome, don’t reinvigorate the action as much as they need to. Bosses play their part well with their unique skills to place a new squeeze on you, but the story itself ends up helping a lot during the slower moments when you’re waiting for something truly new to enter the battle rotation. It may not be a prize-winning original tale with shocking swerves, but it is endearing enough that the repetitive regular battles can be better tolerated to see the next little development.

THE VERDICT: The time-traveling tale of Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is one with a good bit of heart, the major characters likeable and connected in interesting ways with the jumps through time able to build them up and reveal new details that flesh out Sherry’s connection to everything. The battle system can get a bit involved during fights with foes who can take a hit thanks to regular ability use being encouraged and Isaac having such a range of options as his forms bring new battle styles you can easily swap between on the fly. However, the fighting fizzles out regularly when you’re fighting alternate colors to the same robots you’ve been wrecking for hours and the charming plot backloads its emotional beats while not being able to build things up so well during the lead up to those last hours.

And so, I give Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. For the limited time it had, Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers was right to make this mostly a story of Sherry and Isaac. Their immediate connections to others, even when the characters aren’t necessarily too fleshed out themselves, lay over the plot nicely as a justification for this time-traveling quest. While seemingly crucial characters can feel like tag-alongs for a good chunk of the narrative, they do give you a more robust team for personalizing your battle party and can reasonably rise back up in prominence when the plot finds time to move away from exposition. While a few more hours to properly bolster some moments so someone like Pegreo can travel a more reasonable arc would be nice, the otherwise effective story would certainly suffer from having to pad in more robot fights. While there are options to speed up battle speed (as well as fix the game’s initially horrendous and nauseating automatic camera that can barely handle indoor spaces), dungeon exploration and fights throughout the city become a nuisance all the same. If budget was the reasoning behind so many near identical baddies, at least the stronger ones should have more regularly upped their arsenal in some way with a new trick or two. The lack of voices and the sometimes off-putting character models might be another sign of the budget, but then when the music hits right it certainly doesn’t feel like it was compromised and Isaac’s transformations really spice up the battles so fights with tougher foes can have more layers to them.

Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is not too slow despite the periods where the action drags. The charm and earnestness of its story can still come through and patient players or those who tackle a game via occasional sessions may find it easier to stomach the repetitive elements and see through Sherry’s sweet but still dangerous time hopping trek. Perhaps it’s appropriate a game about issues with time had some problems with pacing, but even though the story didn’t reach for the stars, Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers can warm the heart and tell a fun tale for those who don’t find the slower moments to be a deterrent.