“After all, the game’s far from over!”
Part 0: The Background of Tribe Nine
Tribe Nine is a multimedia project by Too Kyo games that began with a teaser trailer in February 2020, promising to be an action baseball property set in a futuristic Tokyo, complete with rampant destruction, superhuman feats, and a fixation on the preposterous and cool. The trailer itself was vague, but the reporting on the title both strongly implied it was a mobile-based live service and the next big project taken on by Too Kyo Games, having just finished the first part of World End Club (2019).
After this, word on the game went silent, which was understandable, COVID-19 disrupted everything. And when the property resurfaces in September 2021, it was with a trailer for an anime series, simply called Tribe Nine. A move that clearly indicated there were big plans for Tribe Nine as a multimedia venture. The anime debuted in January 2022… to a fairly muted reception. With critics of the time considering it a fairly average affair, if not forgettable, despite promising high octane action. Which is not really surprising as this was when studios were pumping out anime like crazy to meet a global animation demand, and a lot of the ones released were meh.
Despite this less than stellar reception, the Tribe Nine game continued its development, with screenshots released sometime in 2022, though if I may be critical, these look more like doctored concept screenshots rather than something captured in-game. This was followed by a re-unveiling in August 2023 with a trailer that presented new characters not seen in the anime, fending off against a prominent character from an anime, Kazuki Aoyama. The nature of the game was still vague, but with target platforms of mobile and PC, it was obviously going to be a live service. …Except, how do you turn a baseball action series into a live service? Well, the answer was not revealed until the first proper non-CG trailer in June 2024.
This trailer generally reflects the final game, barring UI changes and some dropped mechanics, typical things you see change between previews and the final release, but what was striking was that the game had two distinct art styles. A typical 3D anime arena brawler character action lite affair, along with an HD-2D inspired world, filled with lavish lighting adoring SNES-style character sprites.
It looked so good that [I was upset that it had the audacity to be another damn gacha game](Tribe Nine), but my curiosity led me to check out the game’s Steam Next Fest demo in October 2024, if only to offer some relief from the stress of tax season. And I did not like the game. I found the storyline jumbled and thematically perplexing. I thought the combat ran an uneasy balance between a standard hack and slash and a hardcore character action game. And I thought the tutorial boss was downright atrocious for a game meant to lull in a casual user. In fact, the whole tutorial section was so hostile that I stopped playing the demo partway through.
This negative experience stuck with me, but I was glad to see the game release on February 20, 2025 and garner an impressive 10 million players in less than a month, a surefire sign of success in an era where player time is at a premium. …Except the game was not doing well in terms of finances. Estimates show that the first two months only brought in a measly $1.4 million during the first two months, and when the game had its first significant content update in April, the game’s revenues plummeted to under $100,000 a month.
This is nothing short of disastrous for a game of the scale of Tribe Nine, requiring a staff of over 300 people. As Akatsuki Games realized that they had a bomb on their hands, they announced the game’s end of service on May 15th. Now, an EOS announcement does not necessarily mean the end of all new content. Just look at my beloved Dragalia Lost, which saw new content for four months after announcing its EOS, concluding the game’s story. However, Akatsuki took the scorched earth approach, canceling everything. The characters who were previously announced to be in development, Ichinosuke Akiba and Saizo Akiba, were canceled and will never be released. All future events, a side story slated for June, new endgame content, chapter 4 and all future chapters, and game balance updates— all were canceled!
They also chose to not schedule any future events, opting to not extend them indefinitely or repurpose old events, and when the game’s battle pass progression system reached the end of the current season, the feature was just suspended. A move that made progression significantly harder with the removal of daily and weekly rewards. I have heard of games announcing EOS and then entering maintenance mode, but this is not even maintenance mode. This is leaving key features of the game broken.
The future prospects of this multimedia project are dire. It’s likely going to peter away after the servers shut down for good on November 27, 2025. Thus relegating Tribe Nine to a game that will only remembered by those who played it, those who worked on it, and those who are amazed that a game that spent over five years in development was only supported for three months and died in nine. …More like Tribe Nine Months!
This is why I personally chose to check out this game, as I had a passing interest in it when it launched, when the game was given its proper reveal, and if I didn’t play it now, I’d never get to play it. So, I played Tribe Nine from May 19 to May 28, picking it up right after the EOS announcement and when the events were still ongoing. I devoted about 55 hours to it, cleared its three chapters, and while archived playthrough will do a far more thorough job than I could, I would like to reflect on my experience. What Tribe Nine did well, what it did wrong, and whether or not it is another stellar gacha gem that was taken away from the world too soon.
Tribe Nine Review
Platform: PC(Reviewed), iOS, Android
Developer: Akatsuki Games and Too Kyo Games
Publisher: Akatsuki Games
Part 1: The Story of Tribe Nine The Video Game
Before discussing the story of Tribe Nine, I should clarify that I have not watched the anime series that this game acts as a sequel to. Arguably I should have to get a better understanding of the world and certain characters, but I did not feel compelled to for the vast majority of the game. Part of my decision has to do with the very name of the game, Tribe Nine. Nothing about the title implies it’s a sequel, and if one just glances at some key art, they might think this is a video game adaptation/expansion of the original series. Which would actually make a decent bit of sense. Just reuse the same characters and story across two mediums and massage things based on what one does better.
However, Tribe Nine is a largely indirect sequel that tries to create a clean slate for people who have not seen the anime by beginning the game with one of the most baffling introductions I have seen. The title begins by presenting itself as a pastiche to retro Famicom era RPGs, with a tube TV and game carts lining the title screen before an 8-bit-ish game is loaded, the player is in control of a blasé hero character, and are instructed to do some chores for a goddess statue. They do the chores, the hero notices something amiss, and the goddess statue malfunctions. This turns the skies dark, kills all the villagers, and spurs the hero to leave things behind.
The hero is then confronted with the reality that the world he knew was actually a painting on a rooftop with wooden standees, before two characters from the anime recruit him to a resistance, calling him Yo Kuronaka. Yo, a brainwashed amnesiac, is then given a rundown of his life by his childhood friends, Tsuki Iroha and Sui Yakumo. He used to be an enthusiastic player of XB (Extreme Baseball). The world they’re in is a 20XX Neo Tokyo where all 23 Wards are under the control of a masked enigma by the name of Zero. He’s some chuunibyou teenager who is somehow in control of a floating ward dubbed Ward 24 24 City, advanced surveillance technology across all of Neo Tokyo, and a legion of orbital satellites that fire high power precision lasers capable of destroying anything and killing anyone.
Yo is then enlisted into Trash Tribe, an organization of loosely assembled people, mostly teenagers from the look of it, that are determined to bring an end to Zero’s domination of the world, or Tokyo. Rather than try to take Zero down now, Trash Tribe tries to escape to regroup with more allies, only for the escape pods to be demolished by Zero. He says a lot of guff about the nature of games, how the real world bores him, and how he thinks everything should be decided by death games. It’s a bunch of sophomoric ramblings from the type of person whose idea of the world is based on what he sees in his day-to-day life and per a trickle of media. Instead, of you know, reading books or articles about the world’s complexity and nuances so he can learn why the world is the way it is.
Zero then kills Tsuki and Sui, leading Yo to challenge him to a game of XB, where Zero single-handedly wins, as he’s God for all intents and purposes. Yo faints from this encounter and is then sent into a ward of Neo Tokyo where Tsuki— who was resurrected— and the rest of the Trash Tribe brief him on how this world works. Every ward is controlled by a series of XG (Governing Rules) that force people to compete in some way, shape, or form, or else they will face death. These rules are dictated by the NUMBERS, a group of individuals who were given authority and power by Zero. Get it? Because 0 is the greatest and coolest number of all? So in order to bring salvation to each ward, Yo and friends must defeat the NUMBERS in a game of XB, gain control of the ward, and abolish XG. Why do they decide things in XB? Because of meddling by Zero, characters wanting to dish it out in XB, it being a signature element of the IP, and it serving a gameplay purpose.
During their adventures, more allies are recruited to Trash Tribe, growing so large that certain characters need to be literally flown out of the story. Myriad revelations about the world and its lore are revealed. And Zero shows up routinely, taking the form of this fat dog-cat-ball thing called Zero Sensei. Because when I think of a chuunibyou obsessed with death, I also think of a quirky mascot character.
This just covers the game’s first four hours. Afterward, the game adopts a far more formulaic structure, with pretty much all three chapters playing out pretty similarly barring their revelations. And since the game is on death’s door, I don’t need to worry about spoiling anything! It’s all gonna die anyway, so who gives a hoot? Not this bitch!
Chapter 1 is set in Shinagawa. The Governing Rule is that the entire city operates under the structure of a stereotypical Japanese/Asian company, where everybody is an employee. They don’t get paid or do any clear work, so I don’t get the designation, but the ones in charge of the city are ultimately the president and director. The president, represented by an iron maiden with a Zero Sensei and ghost hands, is the real ruler and, once a week, he consumes an innocent employee. Furthermore, the president cannot hear any of the employees, and can only hear the director, NUMBERS #1, Kazuma Ichinose. A painfully sub-mediocre man who somehow managed to obtain a place of power, and promptly abuses it every opportunity he can get. Relishing in the freedom to shout at others, claim them to be incompetent, while having a history of being a bad, lazy, and unreliable employee.
After Ichinose kills a kind woman who let Trash Tribe stay at her hotel, Yo and the gang decide to seek vengeance by earning favor with the president by getting him a rare and ornate cake that is located somewhere in the city. Their search leads them to run into two characters from the anime series, Minami Oi and Yutaka Gotanda, a pair of office workers who triumph the power of their AI smartglasses in a very dated and unwanted move. The expanded squad then goes to a marine biology research center and an aquarium, where they fight a robot shark named… S.H.A.R.K. before finally returning with the extra special Peach Mountain Semi-Baked Cake. Through some subterfuge and knowing Ichinose is an asshat, they are able to AI generate an incriminating photo of Ichinose eating the cake, which leads the president to kill him.
…Except it turns out Ichinose was a robot— Zero turned him into one when he was turned into a NUMBERS— and Zero forces him to play XB against Yo and friends. They win, expose Ichinose as a bad man and worse worker, the Governing Rules are abolished, and Shinagawa is largely saved, but a few characters stay behind to do… stuff to help the city recover. This leads Yo and five friends to venture off into the train-less subway, where they fight some exploding slimes before arriving at Minato for chapter 2.
The gimmick with Minato is that it operates under a rigid caste system of dominance. Where battles, conversation, social status, capabilities, relationships, social media posting, purchases, and gift-giving all affect one’s ranking in society. Most are commoners, those with a lot of points are nobles, the one with the most points is the king, and those with zero points… get space lasered to death after a couple seconds.
It’s a pretty compelling concept that would drastically change the way society operates, taking the idea of a social credit score (an idea manufactured by the American Propaganda Machine) and making it a rule of society. But one that also would deliberately harm society, encourages people to be mean, violent, and angry assholes, as I’m pretty sure if you kill someone, you get their points. Because this does not measure social credit, it measures capital-D Dominance!
The problem is that this idea is more set dressing as Yo and the gang hit up every end of this city, looking for ways to boost their Dominance by doing odd-jobs and taking cues from Santaro Mita, a little man-nugget from the anime. In their search for clout though, they run into the aforementioned king, and it’s… Sui! He’s back, he’s now NUMBERS #9, and he traded in his sports jacket for a white robe lined with colorful patches. It’s neither a cool nor intimidating look.
After traveling around a whole new city for a while, Trash Tribe are eventually offered aid from the nobles responsible for determining everybody’s Dominance, known as Influencers. A faceless group of people who want to see Sui taken down from his throne and go back to manipulating the city through economics and trends. While hesitant, they forge an alliance, do some dirty work by fighting a mini Gundam named Brave Diver, and use Yo’s newfound Dominance to challenge Sui to a game of XB.
Trash Tribe wins this six-person XB game— where some of Yo’s allies are recruited to Sui’s team for reasons I still don’t understand. After being defeated, Sui reveals that he became a NUMBERS because he was sick of playing second fiddle to Yo, that he wanted to defeat him for once, and was willing to cast aside everything for this sense of victory. All of which seemingly comes from nowhere, represents a complete 180 of his character, and feels… undeserved because we only got to know Sui for a few conversations before he was killed. Yo also does not really know him, as he is still an amnesiac, so this disdain just seems like an excuse, a way to get the fanbase all riled up and shocked by turning a character evil.
It does not work, but it might have worked better if the developers hadn’t changed the introduction as much as they did. In the Next Fest demo, Sui was actually a playable party member, making his death feel sudden, and leading the player to think he would come back as an ally, like Tsuki did. But in the live game, he was never playable, and was replaced with a free character, Koishi Kohinata. It would not have fixed the fact that this heel turn feels hollow, but it would be better. I will say that the rage and conviction of Sui does make him a compelling antagonist though, the voice actor doing an excellent job at capturing his sense of rage, and I even like the edgy transformation he undergoes as his outfit becomes black… along with his skin which— goldarn it Akatsuki. It’s 2025, you can’t give characters dark ashy skin when they turn evil!
This eventually leads into a boss battle— and a damn frustrating one— with Sui before Yo and Tsuki eventually beat him to death, his body turning into ash, in a move that is meant to give the protagonists pause over what they are doing. Harkening back to a liberal storybook ideal that heroes should not kill people under any circumstance. However, what else are they supposed to do? If they push forward, people will die, but mostly the people deliberately harming the innocents. If they do nothing, more innocents will die, while their slaughterers will continue to live in luxury. Still, it is enough of a moral quandary that Yo, who has still been conditioned to just follow orders, and has largely been doing as everybody has told him throughout the game, to think about alternatives.
This neatly leads into chapter 3, the first and only chapter released after launch, which takes place in Akihabara Chiyoda. Or rather Neo Chiyoda, as this was the setting of the Tribe Nine anime, and this chapter is, in part, a direct sequel to the events regarding that game, at least regarding a recurring party member of the group, the enigmatic ruffian-looking Q. Right at the start of the chapter, it’s revealed that he is actually Ojiro Otori, a powerful antagonist from the anime series who was the pawn of his father and old man mastermind antagonist, Tenshin Otori. Tenshin (allegedly) died while Ojiro was ultimately crushed under a pile of ambiguous rubble until being rescued/recruited by Kazuki Aoyama. The exact justification for his shift over to the good guys is not very clear, but it probably happens somewhere in the anime.
With the defeat of the Otori family, Neo Chiyoda has evolved from a city locked in eternal night to one in eternal twilight, but a new leader swiftly sealed the power vacuum. NUMBERS #4, Zenichi Magata. A man who dresses up zombie cultist Joker wannabe— specifically Jared Leto Joker— and has garnered favor with the people of Neo Chiyoda by being a streamer, life guru, cultist, and dictator all wrapped into one. A man who claims to speak for the betterment of people, but really is just a grifter who is trying to take advantage of an abused populous whose leaders betrayed them. How topical!
Regardless of how kind he is trying to be, he is still someone who is implementing Governing Rules designed to gradually dwindle the population down to nothing. This time through the art of streaming. In Neo Chiyoda, you either stream or you die, and if you get less than 1,000 views a month, you will be sent off to the sky. In fact, everything that is deemed irrelevant or forgotten it sent up to the sky. Buildings, people, fixtures of the city itself, a giant robot, all are left sifting through the sky. …Which raises so many goldarn questions about how this is possible, what Zero is able to do, and just… why? But this is all taken for a given. Those who die, no matter what they are, go skyward. I mean, I guess that makes some sense. Many people think the sky’s where you go when you die.
With the XG known, Yo ‘n’ da boys ‘n’ two girls start looking for ways to max out their ratings to avoid getting murdered. To get help, they head out to a subservient family of the Otoris, the Akiba family. And they are just a grab bag of weirdos. You have Hinagiku Akiba, the cat-themed maid girl with giant robot arms that she uses like cat paws. Ichinosuke Akiba, a ninja with a crazy mane of black and red hair that seem like it would be awful for ninja-ing. And Saizo Akiba, a pudgy little weirdo who is the techy of the family, and mostly serves as an unlikeable double agent who the story wants you to dislike, at least until he reveals he was just gathering intel on Magata.
While grinding for views on the livestreaming platform, Yo struggles to express himself before an audience and, forlorn at his profound lack of charisma, he wanders off. When Yo’s alone, Magata appears to give him a pep talk about how he should not accept that things only work a specific way, and should reconsider what he thinks is possible. It makes sense given Yo’s point in the story. He does not really know who he can trust, he beat his best bud to death with a baseball bat, and was looking for a new leader to follow, even if he didn’t know it. Yo falls for Magata’s honeyed words, leaving the gang with the mission to infiltrate Magata’s lair to get Yo and knock some sense into him. …Except Yo is too groomed to see reason.
In a bid to reject what Magata has done with his city, Ojiro, née Q, reveals his true self to the public and challenges Magata to an XB game to expose him as the fraud he is. This ultimately culminates in the reveal that not only is Magata a war-controlling grifter, he’s not even alive! He’s just an AI hologram regurgitating Magata’s words. Meaning that the ultimate antagonist of this chapter is an AI livestreaming scam artist! And if that isn’t the most appropriate villain archetype for the modern era, I don’t know what is!
As for why Magata died, his answer is… deranged yet basic. He was fascinated in death, the afterlife, and wanted to die so that he would know what lies beyond the pale, hoping to cash in his goodwill with Zero in order to resurrect himself, leaving AI Magata execute his plan. An idea that makes some vague sense, but is swiftly revealed to be a flawed goal. While Zero can resurrect people, they come back different. It’s why Sui was so much more aggressive and evil, because the resurrection just kind of did that to him. And we see another example of this as Ojiro heads to do battle with a giant robot, presumably from the anime, who has been reactivated following the end of the Governing Rules.
This leads into an unlosable battle where Ojiro fights against a fully unique boss not present anywhere else in the game. Ojiro ultimately wins, but perishes in the process. Zero, baffled by Ojiro’s self-righteousness, decides to resurrect him— because he thinks it will be more interesting, I guess. However, Ojiro’s resurrection comes with a bad case of amnesia. This leaves Ojiri’s his friend, Kazuki, furious at Zero, but Kazuki is determined to support Ojiro no matter what.
…And that’s the ending!
Part 2: Does Tribe Nine Have A Good Story?
Tribe Nine’s story is… a lot to take in, involves a swath of characters, and slaps the player in the face with a wet book of lore from hour one. However, it does many things well. I find the cast of characters to be a well envisioned gaggle of weirdos with enough contrasting personalities and general comradery to turn the idle conversations into a highlight. The Japanese voice acting for the characters does a lot to bring them to live, elevating the performances beyond the average, somewhat stilted, English script. While Danganronpa series creator Kazutaka Kodaka was not involved in the game beyond broader worldbuilding, I can tell the uncredited writers of Tribe Nine wanted to capture a similar spark to the banter across Danganronpa. Clearly aiming for something that can freely flutter between the morose and dire and the light and fluffy, and I would say it succeeds on a moment-to-moment level.
There is enough tension, drama, and sillier moments between characters for the game to firmly grab my attention whenever the story resumed, and I can tell the writers really cared about what they were doing. That they want the players to love the cast, want to see them grow, and become invested in the game not for the gameplay, dailies, or so forth, but for the characters. It does not feel overly constrained, the cast are able to die and grow as people as the story goes on, and the story was not beholden to the same standard gacha rules as certain other titles. Hell, they even give you every relevant story character as a guest party member for several hours so you can learn to appreciate them on multiple levels.
However, the storytelling ultimately suffers from live service pacing, where there are often prolonged gaps of gameplay between meaningful story. Side missions purport to add more texture and background to this world, but in practice they are little more than glorified fetch quests with writing that reads like it was written by a separate writer. And from three chapters released, I can already see signs that the writers were struggling with the game’s central premise. Tribe Nine is ultimately a story about visitors going to a strand land with strange rules, killing the king, and liberating the people. They learn the rules in order to reach the king, to gain the opportunity to defeat him in combat and end his reign, but they never need to live by the rules. They are treated as a roadblock, an inconvenience, and are just brushed aside when all is done, which… does not really gel with whatever thematic intention the writers had.
These rules are all a form of social commentary, looking at office politics, social media, and streaming, taking these concepts in extreme directions. But what is being said other than these things are bad and destructive? I’m sure that the theme and message would be more pronounced in later chapters, but whatever cohesive societal message or theme Tribe Nine is trying to capture is too hazy for me to understand. Oh, and the messy introduction sure doesn’t help either. Is this supposed to be a pastiche of other JRPGs? Are you trying to make a slightly futuristic Dragon Quest VII or something guys?
Okay, okay, let me just actually answer the question here. Do I think Tribe Nine has a good story? …I’m going to say yes. It does not hold up to scrutiny in certain respects, in part because it’s not done, and is a bit too dense in others. However, it has enough fun interactions, entertaining scenes, and hype moments that I cannot say I didn’t enjoy the story. And, fortunately, this is one element of the game that will live on.
While Tribe Nine the game is dead in the water as of writing this, Akatsuki has [announced](Chigiri Hyouma) that they will, somehow, release the chapters 4 and 5 of the story, as they have already been written. This is actually a really cool parting gift for those who were invested in the narrative, and something that would have de minimis costs for the developer. Though, it will only be released in Japanese. Oh well. Fan translators have worked on weirder stuff than this.
Part 3: How Do You Make a Baseball Action RPG Live Service?
(You Don’t.)
One of the things that confused me most when I saw the 2020 trailer announcing the Tribe Nine multimedia project was how this would work as a game. How would you take high octane extreme action baseball and turn it into something playable? Baseball RPGs are not really a thing per my purview, and most baseball games I can think of are variants of simulators and Power Pros. So, what new genre could Tribe Nine possibly take? …Well, with regards to combat, it’s a party-based arena brawler where the protagonist has a baseball bat, the secondary protag-girl throws baseballs, and everybody else has their own assorted weapons that are not baseball related. Also, they all just hit things a bunch until they die. Huh.
Conceptually, the combat system for Tribe Nine is fairly simple. Every character has a couple bespoke attacks and actions, and the player is expected to cycle through them while dodging enemy attacks, whittling their health and invisible stagger meter down all the while. The attacks include a standard attack that uses no stamina. A stronger yet slower ‘heavy’ attack that consumes stamina. And a special attack that often involves using a gauge that is somehow filled using the standard and/or heavy attacks. For example, Yo does a heavy baseball bat swing with his heavy attack, which grants him a rapidly depleting red meter that he can spend on a strong special attack that deals damage and helps break enemies.
When enemies break, the player is able to send their party out to perform assist attacks, dealing damage while the world around them freezes. It’s free damage, and gives player tension. Tension allows players to perform a high-powered ultimate skill in exchange for meter, but the player is also encouraged to preserve it for when they need it due to a series of customizable passive effects determined by tension cards. I’ll get to those later.
Additionally, the player has access to a dodge and counterattack commands, allowing them to avoid or retaliate damage. Two action game staples, but something that require precise inputs and learning the tells of an enemy before finding the narrow correct time range. They are often paired with flourishes and sparks, but that does not really communicate when the game wants the player to dodge. That depends on both the character’s counter animation, and what the game considers to be the real point of impact.
Tribe Nine markets itself as a “brutal action RPG” and I would not refute this after spending so much time with the game. Though, probably not for the reason the developer intended. Tribe Nine is a game of basic math with big ramification and enemies hit too damn hard for their own good, often capable of cleaving away over half a health bar in a single strike. Combined with how boss battles frequently range from 4 to 8 minutes, and the opportunities to make a mistake are plentiful. This is not a bad thing on its own, but the combat pacing is rather fast, enemies and bosses often have multi-part or follow-up attacks, and while the game has healers who can support their allies… I never got a good one. Meaning I instead had to rely on equipment that provided passive healing, which I will get to later.
Now, I would like to clarify that while Tribe Nine can be difficult, it has one of the most bizarre difficulty curves I have seen in a while. Regular jobber humanoid or robot enemies cannot deal much damage and are easy to break, making battling them a digestible yet flavor-lite experience, even when crowd control gets difficult during chain encounters. The lower the enemies’ levels compared to the player’s the more trivial the battles are, but they can be decent challenges if the player is significantly underleveled, which I often was when I trailed off the main path.
There are also miniboss enemies that prowl through the streets of Neo Tokyo, who are a considerable jump in difficulty. Large imposing figures capable of dishing out higher damage than regular enemies, and typically featuring at least three health bars. They take a bit too long to beat most of the time, but once you are able to understand their patterns, they are not particularly difficult. They break up the monotony of regular encounters without being as daunting as proper bosses.
On that note, ‘proper bosses,’ run the gamut from genuinely good and straight bullshit. The aforementioned S.H.A.R.K. is actually a rather good boss, all things considered. An imposing foe that requires the player to work things out organically, has a weird inhumanoid attack pattern that will give most players some trouble at first, but their movements are far more formulaic than they seem. The chapter 2 boss battle against Sui is a needle in the ass due to attacks that cannot be clearly blocked, flying enemy bullcrap, and the gall of the developers to slap on a second phase. It took me about eight tries, but I did it, and could never do it again, because that was a story boss. Then, when I got to the optional boss of chapter 3, a giant plant monster that liked to hop around and never gave me an opening, I was left wondering if the developers knew how to balance their game. Erring on the side of no.
To be fair, Tribe Nine is an RPG with a many moving parts that go into building a team. So maybe I’m the problem. …Well, I consulted with some tier lists and fan created guides, and assembled parties that, while not ideal, are pretty good per these measurements, so I’m inclined to think that it’s not my fault, it’s the balance. So allow me to go over the aspects of a party, starting with the characters themselves.
As a gacha game killed well before its time, Tribe Nine only 16 playable characters. The game gives you four as permanent party members at the start, and through 171 rolls of the gacha, I was able to get… another four. Of these eight characters, I frequently experimented with them, trying to use all of them, seeing what worked well in a team, before coming up with a few decent selections I would rotate in. Though, I would only play as one of three characters.
Yo, who as I said is a standard sword/bat fighter man with a very simple kit, yet one that is good at breaking enemies. Tsuki is a ranged attacker who stands in the background, throwing balls at enemies, and not drawing aggro, which is handy for when I don’t want to dodge every five seconds. And a story irrelevant character named Miu Jujo, a mixed range attacker who can place a magical turret on the battlefield for passive damage, while also dishing out some of the highest damage of any character in the game. …Miu was my go-to favorite for this reason, and of course her design. She’s a tall brunette with a baseball cap, varsity jacket, tight white jeans, and a face mask accessory that gives her pink eyes and burning punk bunny ears. I’m a woman of simple tastes.
Naturally, there is an upgrade system to gradually improve the rank of these characters by collecting however many doodads, gated by farming dailies, careful investments, and choosing the right attributes to upgrade. But all of that is secondary to Tribe Nine’s equipment system, which is driven by two things. The gacha, rather than be character-driven, like an honest gacha, is primarily a dispenser of tension cards. These are party-wide passive effects that can be upgraded through money and resources and are triggered by reaching certain tension levels. Meaning that if you want a premium effect, you probably need to have tension level 3, or rather EX, for the effect to kick in.
There are over 100 tension cards in this game, and most of them suck. Such as increasing a single attack type’s damage by 22% for 10 seconds after performing a successful counterattack. Or anything that involves shields, a mechanic that I only saw the game use once. Or bestowing minor buffs that are otherwise not obtainable in the game as far as I can tell, and serve as triggers for other cards. It is clearly laying the groundwork for a complex buffing system, and… I genuinely love buffing systems in gacha games. In practice though, I just stuck a basic defensive build to ensure survivability during combat. Two healing cards, a card that gave me slowdown when doing a perfect dodge, a card that gives unity, and a card that gave a critical rate and defense buff when unity was activated. Nothing flashy, but it was cheap and kept my party alive!
In addition to tension cards, there is also the equipment/gear system of Tribe Nine, which takes the form of Patimon. Patimon are basically Tamagotchis that every character carries, and they influence their stats through the power of… shut up. Patimon pieces are obtained by finding chests in the overworld and defeating certain enemies, come in different rarities and classes, and each carry with them a set of base stat increments and a series of passive buffs. It takes three pieces to form a Patimon— head, body, and other— and if you have two with a matching icon, you also get a set bonus.
The base stats for each piece prove to be useful over time, boosting defense, HP, and attack stats, but the buffs are what are really important here. Each Patimon can have up to three buffs, and they are pretty significant, starting at about 10% boosts for stats and going up to 30%, maybe even higher. There are a lot of smaller and more niche buffs that are theoretically useful, like movement speed, ultimate proficiency, or extra stamina, but really, you just want extra attack and critical rate, because damage is key. With the options before me, this just made the most sense, and this approach seemed to match the community sentiment.
Patimon are also unique in that, for the majority of the game, the gold rarity versions have a character specific buff, often boosting the power of one of their attacks. This made upgrading far more complicated than it should have been, basically assign new gear to party members you may not have. Hell, I received equipment for characters who were never added to the game! Yet, as I went further into chapter 3, the Patimon gear meta changes with the introduction of tier 10 and tier 11 pieces that offer a universal buff instead. They range from useful, like a backstab buff, to useless like the ability to run without getting detected by enemies. This system is complicated, but compared to the Portrait Wyrmprints from Dragalia Lost, something I, Queen of the Kaleidoscape, am exceptionally versed in, this was both basic and quite usable. …I mean, the inventory management for these things suck, but it’s a random loot system. I’m pretty sure the inventory management is supposed to suck.
…All of this begs the question of if the combat is fun, and my answer to that is… not particularly. The combat, character progression system, and core underlying gameplay works, and it fun enough, but it also gets very repetitive due to the limited character skill sets, and the fact that the game does not encourage the player to use different characters. There is no element system in Tribe Nine. No forming different squads for different encounters, and it does not even have the incentivized character swapping of Zenless Zone Zero (2024), which did a lot to make the gameplay more engaging. Encounters start blending together, the lower tier grunts are not simply not engaging, and when battles are long, they become remarkably more difficult by design.
Something that I have not mentioned before now is that enemies have their own tension system, which works completely differently from the player party’s tension system. As the battle goes on, the enemies will passively accumulate tension, advancing further as they deal damage to the player’s party. As tension goes from 1 to 2 to EX, they will enter an aggressive state, dealing more damage and adopting new strategies. This will continue until the tension drops from level EX to 2, where the bar will start building up to EX again. As far as I can tell, there is no way to force enemies out of an EX state, no way to lower them past tension level 2, and raising your tension does not affect them at all. Time goes on, the battle just gets harder, and the game plays siren noises so you know you’re in trouble.
The game’s also not great at giving the player meaningful rewards for combat. It starts out fine enough, giving the player enough EXP from encounters to keep their levels rising in lock step, and showering them with a scattering of materials. However, after reaching level 45 or so, the game became frustratingly stingy with handing out EXP. Even as I fought a higher level miniboss every 15 minutes, and spent hours going around in circles in the highest level environment in the game, I still struggled to get a team to level 52 by the time I stopped playing. In a game with a level cap of 60.
Materials are similarly underwhelming. They scale up nicely for minibosses and bosses, but regular enemies? Level 46 or level 6, they have a habit of dropping the exact same materials. Except, you can auto-kill enemies who are however many levels weaker than you, turning a two minute encounter into a two second non-encounter. Sure, the material yield is maybe 3-to-1, but 6 seconds is still a lot faster than 120 seconds.
The gameplay systems of Tribe Nine are not unsalvageable. It reminds me of the jank balancing and difficulty of the first year of Dragalia Lost in a way, and what’s here is considerably better and easier than what was seen in the Steam Next Fest demo I played last year. However, the problems run deep. The numbers on many things are just wrong. There is a good action RPG framework in here, yet it would take a full-on version 2.0 rework to ever achieve its true potential.
All of which I say before even acknowledging the live service elements as… they just feel perfunctory at this point. The dailies that keep players coming back in exchange for a generous single summon. The battle pass weeklies, seasonal goals, and FOMO. The same post-Genshin FGO-inspired garbage rates on getting new characters. The weekly battle tower where players need to fight incrementally stronger opponents for loot, points, and rare drops. Hell, it even has the same menu design inspired by Genshin, with a poorly laid out menu tree that covers half the screen. They are arbitrary, and in a way where I actually think the game could be turned into an offline experience with minimal investment. …Not that such a thing will ever happen.
Part 4: No, Really, Do You Even Play XB In Tribe Nine?
The combat of Tribe Nine is pretty standard fare for a live service of this breed. But that begs the question of where’s the damn baseball? Where’s the XB? This should be the key defining feature of the game, right? RIGHT? Well, I think that was an idea at some point in time, but in practice XB is a Danganronpa debate for babies mixed with some hype-as-hell cutscenes. XB takes the form of debates between two parties within the structure of a baseball game. The opposing party makes some sort of statement, the player chooses a good retort, and this triggers an effect that allows their party to secure more outs or snag more bases. Sometimes this is done by selecting a simple choice arranged in a 3×3 gird, other times it involves using a Truth Bullet Verity Orb at the right time.
Aside from choosing the responses, the player has no involvement in how the game plays out, and they are just watching characters play the most extreme and hyperbolic version of baseball ever devoted to the medium. Which sounds cool… until you realize how few unique animations there are and the same animations are repeated with different characters. It all lacks the timing, involvement, and tension of a Danganronpa class trial, and with little in the way of mystery to solve, it feels more like a game of ‘guess what response the writer wanted you to pick.’ There are a lot of effects and flashy abilities that are activated, but it does not really matter. These segments are so automated it requires zero mechanical understanding to win.
XB is also something that is only used in story sequences and, like every other part of this game’s story, cannot be replayed upon completion. This was likely meant to be added in a later update, but that never happened. Instead, XB only exists for four story events in the main game… and for the PVP mode.
Right! Tribe Nine actually has XB as a PVP mode where players can battle against each other with a team of nine characters. …This feature is only available after 30 to 40 hours of play, and was gutted before I could try it out, removing the ability to play battles against random players. However, even if I were to seek out another player to make my in-game friend, I did not have nine characters to form a full team. It’s possible that this feature was a great way for players to duke it out with high octane anime baseball battles, but the publisher clearly did not think it was important enough to keep in the game as it was. And if I can’t play a part of the game properly, then I cannot review it.
Part 5: Tribe Nine is Double Gorgeous
Something truly bizarre about Tribe Nine is its use of two graphical styles. For decades in RPGs, it was common for the overworld and battle instances to look considerably different, often reserving more robust animations and sprites/models for combat and using abstractions for overworld and story sections. Hell, sometimes the games even shifted between 2D and 3D during this mode transition. However, I have never seen a game with as drastic shift in presentation as Tribe Nine.
Combat involves highly detailed premium-quality anime-style character models, and they look fine as hell. Animations are fluid and flashy, filled with flourishes that go to further express each characters’ personality. I would even say they have some of the best exaggerated expressions I have seen for 3D game character models, capturing the personality of a single illustration while maintaining the liveliness of a consistently moving 3D model. Combat simply looks excellent all around, with oodles of care going into the movement and attacks of enemies, playable characters, and bosses alike. And I am thoroughly impressed by how well the art team translated Rui Komatsuzaki’s designs and sensibilities into the third dimension. I know Ultra Despair Girls (2014) (or I guess Danganronpa 2) did that first, but this game does it much better.
With art quality like this, the game would easily stand out if they could figure out how to maintain this level of fidelity across a semi-open world, allowing it to compete with other mobile game big shots. …But that was not in the cards. Instead, management chose to render scenes outside of battle using a variation of Square Enix’s HD-2D art style from games like Octopath Traveler (2018) and Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (2024). This serves as a bold and striking choice, giving the game a look that is unlike any other live service on the market. I guess there’s Sword of Convallaria, but that’s not really the same thing.
Simply put, I think that Tribe Nine is the best looking HD-2D style game released so far, and is a stunning blend of retro-style pixelated graphics, blocky 3D environments, and modern visual effects. As someone who dabbles in sprite art, I am impressed with the level of detail and animation the developers infuse into these SNES-style character sprites. They capture the character designs with little to no compromise, give them robust animations for running, attacking, support multiple outfits, and even perform some cute emotes. …Shame that the UI has to be so LOUD, covering up so much of this artistry!
Environments are lushly populated with all manner of stray bits of rubbish, intractable doodads, and little bits of flavor that makes the city streets feel like a realistic, lived in place. The use of 3D works wonderfully for lite sci-fi urban environment likes this with block architecture, vehicles, and structures. All of which is dressed in a rich array of lighting, particle, and depth effects. Normally, I think this results in a messy image, but it is reserved enough that I find it to enhance the look of the environments. The lighting looking right in these inherently unnatural locales with streetlights and glowing signposts. The mist and smoke effects are subtle and match what real cities are like. It all congeals together to create a look, a setting, that is distinctly Tribe Nine, and I adore it.
It’s the sort of thing that I think should be an inspiration to AA and indie RPG creators, as this all looks extravagant, yet is far in a way easier to create than something similar using full 3D models. Hell, as a part-time spriter, I’m just getting inspired looking at how good its darn floors look. I’m delighted that someone has posted the character sprites on The Spriters Resource, but someone needs to extract the environments, as they are simply too good to be forgotten.
Needless to say, I love the look of this game’s world… but navigating it is kind of a pain in the ass.
When designing a 2D RPG, there is typically an overworld and areas of interest that you visit for a few purposes. Towns are typically places you visit repeatedly for quests, shops, and other purposes. While dungeons are usually one-in-done affairs. You go through them, solve some puzzles, learn the gimmick, and ultimately leave them behind after getting the goodies and beating the nasty whatsit at the end. …Tribe Nine‘s environments are trying to do basically all of these things at once.
Every new city has a hub area with (not very useful) shops and the like, but there is no overworld. You are just moving from screen to screen to collecting loot, finding wandering enemies, and engaging in made-in-a-day puzzles for babies to reach treasure or new rooms. When going through an environment the first time, this is a sufficient structure, preoccupying the player, giving them clearly definable goals, and sending them on a roundabout route that still bears dividends. The problem comes from how this world is full of tiny roadblocks and inconveniences.
While shortcuts exist, the world is full of pathways that must be navigated in a particular manner. Whether they be blocked off by switch puzzles, feature a path broken up between several floors, or just take place in such a big stretch of environment that a map is a necessity. …Which leads to another problem with navigation. The map kind of sucks. Despite featuring a mini-map in the upper left corner, Tribe Nine does not have an actual mini-map. I know that sounds stupid, but it I know what a mini-map looks like, and Tribe Nine’s is blank, only featuring icons of interest, not the layouts of any rooms, walls, or how navigation is limited. Similarly, the larger world map is often not a help, often taking mini labyrinths and mapping them out as simple squares.
This adds a level of friction to navigating the world, which is a problem, as the player is expected to go through the world repeatedly. Progression systems are driven by players getting access to doodads they accumulate de minimis quantities of by bashing weak enemies and plundering chests. The game mechanically wants players to go through this world over and over again, with loot refreshing every few hours or days depending on the rarity. Thus forming a cycle that is spurred by the daily side quests that encourage this behavior.
Navigating the world should be easy, but in Tribe Nine, it just starts feeling like a chore after a point. Such as the multi-floor sewer section in chapter 2, where one floor is cast in darkness and every floor has barriers blocking the player from progressing in certain direction. Whether it be a gate, trash, or a gape in the grates. It took me 30 minutes to get through, and it was terrible.
But things get so much worse when reaching chapter 3. Chapter 3 offers some of the most ambitious design present in this entire game, taking place in a truly gorgeous rendition of Chiyoda that is divided between two levels. The regular street level, where everything is baked in an attractive ‘evening lighting’ and the area above the city. A locale filled with floating buildings, connecting walkways, and a deluge of visual effects that feel warranted given the fantastical premise. It looks gorgeous, but navigating between these two planes just sucks.
On the ground level, barriers, walls, trash, and fences block players from going in lateral directions. While the sky is filled with narrow pathways that are only sometimes joined by shortcuts. You need to learn, memorize, and internalize the precise route required to progress, while disregarding the map. Because the map is so vague, does so much smoothing over, that I’m tempted to say it’s an incorrect representation of the world.
This is made worse with the fact that enemies at this point start becoming ripe pains to deal with. They guard choke points, chase you across a surprisingly long distance, and reset every time you fast travel. …Oh, and there are also roaming minibosses all around, including some that are so girthy and stubborn I’m inclined to just call them bosses. Namely those damn tentacle bastards, who are the action game equivalent of pulling out weeds while it’s raining.
I love looking at this world, I don’t like being in it.
…Oh, and this should be a given, but the soundtrack kicks butt! It’s a Masafumi Takada joint as far as I can tell, and Tadaka has been delivering bangers for nearly 30 years now. It would be really nice if they could release an official soundtrack, but this this is a gacha game. We don’t even get the luxury of knowing who a fifth of the 300 person dev team was.
Part 6: I Think Tribe Nine Was In Development Hell
Something that I was wondering while playing Tribe Nine was how and why did this game take at least five years to develop? Mobile game development is seen as attractive as you can ship out a game in less time compared to a complete console experience. Akatsuki is a veteran of this world and has seen the live service genre blossom over the past decade, meaning they should know what they are doing. So, why is the game… like this?
Why does it focus on a sequel story to an anime that came and went three years ago? Why does it only feature dribs and drabs of characters from the anime, not even featuring the protagonist of the anime beyond a tease in a trailer? Why is XB relegated to an occasional mechanic for story purposes rather than being the core defining gameplay element? Why does the game feature such disparate art styles that, simply, do not mesh well? I think they’re both beautiful, but the contrast is weird.
Why did the initial three months of this game’s life lack new content additions, when, in a gacha game, you typically want the next few updates at least 90% done by the time the game goes live. Why was the game’s difficulty and balancing so screwed up at launch that it required several balance patches? Were the developers just not playing it enough? Who the hell thought this map design was good? Let alone good for a live service action game?
My answer to all of these questions is rather simple, if not dismissive. Something went wrong with this game’s development. If I were to guess, the combination of COVID, which the Japanese games industry was NOT prepared for, and the success of Genshin Impact led management to reboot the game’s development. Then the game had to undergo another reboot at some time, which for some reason saw the game implement HD-2D environments, as it was probably far cheaper, and less demanding, than creating a fully 3D world a la Genshin.
This appears to have been paired with various changes to the game’s initial story. The awkward meta-game framing device of the intro, establishing Yo as the game’s protagonist, making the title a sequel, and spreading out the anime’s characters for later on, in order to keep fans engaged over a long period of time. …Which is just a weird way to go about things. I admittedly have precious little proof beyond speculation and intuition, but just looking at, playing this game, it really does feel like a something that had to be retooled at least twice, over the course of a turbulent development. I’m glad that the game was able to push through, that the developers were able to ship something despite these challenges. …Yet, it makes its fate, only lasting three months before announcing end of service, all the more unfortunate.
It is one thing to go through development hell and for the game to flop and live on to become a joke. But games like Tribe Nine lack such a luxury. Because when November comes, this game is going to die. It’s going to happen. It might be revived, some day, some way, but I won’t count on it.
With that in mind, it’s time for me to answer one final question.
Conclusion: Should You Play Tribe Nine?
So, after all of this, would I recommend Tribe Nine? …I was going to say yes when I started this review, but now that I’ve gone through everything in exhaustive detail… I don’t think it’s really worth it. I would sooner recommend just watching a playthrough as you get to enjoy the visuals and story without any of the mechanical frustration. For me, I think it was worth it, but that’s because I played the game when it still had a functionality it has since lost. Now that the game’s more stringent, more grindy, it’s a different story.
Tribe Nine is a fascinating game, one swirling with potential, and one that I think could, and should, be repackaged and re-released as a retail game for a discounted price, just to preserve what the developers had accomplished. But it’s also a pain in the ass to play, regularly trying my patience as it thrust me through repetitive combat over and over again, rewarding my devotion with greater challenge, while also failing to provide meaningful catharsis. The 3D events and interactions are lavished with love from the animators and art team, who do wonders to imbue life into these characters. The game, overall, is beautiful and has the best looking HD-2D world that I have ever seen. But it’s a damn maze and navigating it gets worse with each new area.
I want to like Tribe Nine, I wanted to come away thinking that this was a true gem that is being lost here. Its highs are undeniably high, and there is no shortage of things to fall in love with from this game. …But there is simply too much friction, too much faffing about, and too much time-wasting in getting from place to place for me to recommend it.