Never’s End Preview: Holy Cow Does This FF Tactics-Like RPG Make a Huge First Impression

If it can hold up against the staggering, expansive weight of its complex systems, Never’s End might be an all-timer. Big words, I know, but playing even just half an hour of this Final Fantasy Tactics-style tactical RPG with its director left me buzzing. It’s painted in a charming, 2D-meets-3D art style and set in an expansive world, and even my demo held hours of content to explore that I only scratched the surface of.

Developer Hypersect knows it’s stepping up next to giants. So it employed a kingmaker in Masayoshi Nishimura, the original character artist behind Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy, to get that distinct East-meets-West look this genre’s known for. Transformed into detailed sprite-like 3D models, Nishimura’s art looks right at home in Never’s End’s pixelated grid. Although each chunk of Never’s End looks like your standard tactical RPG grid, consisting of squared-off battlefields, it’s actually fully open-world.

So instead of bouncing between overworld and battlefield vistas or following a story that brings you to places where a battle happens before whisking you away to another plot point, everything happens in the grid. Thankfully, movement and exploration aren’t locked behind tactics-style mobility. Instead, you can just run around the map freely—until you hit another battle.

Impressively, that open world responds to your presence. Not only does The Never regenerate in certain areas after you leave, but the impact of your magic and casting can permanently change the terrain. Director Ryan Juckett explained how certain types of magic could, for example, compress movement-restrictive sand into hardened sandstone, making it easier to move your units across otherwise difficult terrain.

I mostly messed around with heat magic. Taking advantage of Never’s End’s environmental systems, which track things like temperature and moisture in any given tile, heat magic can warm or cool specific tiles by transferring heat from one spot to another. This might sound silly, but that control over heat, rather than just fire, opens up so many cool (if you’ll pardon the pun) possibilities. Taking heat from a tile behind an enemy and loading it all on a tile in front of them could push them back, potentially putting them in a better position for an attack from another unit. Whereas warming an enemy could cause them to expend extra stamina or even light them on fire, depending on their existing temperature.

I tried that! And then their wooden weapon lit on fire, which wound up being problematic for my units. Never’s End seems full of all kinds of this sort of intersectional, variable systematic design. From weapons’ efficacy against certain materials to any individual type of terrain or biome’s response to magic, Never’s End has a sandbox sensibility to it, echoing Breath of the Wild or Metal Gear Solid V.

The action system diverts from the standard tactical RPG formula in a really appealing way. Where most tactics games gauge actions based on points, two different resources dictate actions and movement in Never’s End: stamina and time. These two lean into the system-heavy combat, again giving this game the feeling that everything in Never’s End intersects with or relates to something else. Where time refills fully with each turn, stamina can be more limited.

Handled poorly, all this stuff would make Never’s End an impenetrable, frustrating mess of unknowns—a killer in this genre. Instead, Never’s End takes extreme care to make sure you know what’s going on. Not only is its tutorial clear and concise, but there’s a hint mode, which lets you hover your cursor over anything (and I mean ANYTHING) on the screen to get a helpful tooltip about an effect, a property, an item, or a tile. This is the kind of careful communication without handholding that makes or breaks this kind of game, especially one bold enough to ditch the undo turn option.

This lack of undo turn button might prove painful, especially since it seems like there’s permadeath in Never’s End. But losing a unit didn’t feel like the end of the world. I’m sure I’d feel differently deeper into a campaign, but mistakes generally felt less punishing and more like learning opportunities that showed me something new about End’s systems.

As intricate and involved as Never’s End seems, I should have left this demo crosseyed with my head spinning. Instead, I left ready to download the demo, mess around with its overlapping mechanics, and marvel at its diorama-like art style. While Hypersect hopes to launch Never’s End later this year, you can play the demo for yourself today on Steam.