I, like many of you, am a pretty big fan of Kazutaka Kodaka. Don’t look at me that way – I know the negative rep that some Danganronpa fans get. However, with my long-term interest in horror games, visual novel games, and anything with a dark and twisted mystery at its core, it was inevitable that I’d fall in love with his work.
I even enjoyed the Tribe Nine anime. Okay, maybe that anime was a little underwhelming, but I still loved the setting, characters, and ideas behind it, and I was eager to get my hands on the Tribe Nine game.
Entitled the ‘Deadly Playtest’, Tribe Nine’s closed beta ran from August 9 until August 15, with sign-ups taking place the month prior. This game has been a long time coming – the 12-episode anime series aired from January to March 2022, with Kodaka and his studio, Too Kyo Games, pairing up with Akatsuki to announce their collaboration on the project all the way back in February of 2020.
The anime received a pretty lukewarm response from viewers, though the biggest criticism seems to be that it’s “forgettable”. As such, it seems a bit of an oversight to release the anime and the game so far apart – but, while they both feature the same world, core ideas, and characters, the game is a huge step up from the anime, featuring a far more intriguing plot and plenty of unique mechanics to keep you invested. In fact, it’s currently shaping up to be one of my top mobile games of the year so far.
The Tribe Nine beta had me hooked from the start, it pulls you into a simplistic 2D RPG about a chosen hero running mindless fetch quests for a goddess. However, the world soon starts to warp as reality comes into focus, and everything shifts into 2.5D.
From here, you learn that your name is Yo Kuronaka, and you’ve been trapped inside a dangerous, underground zone known as 24 City for the past two years. A maniacal villain called Zero has kidnapped you and wiped your memories, putting you through a ‘Hero Training Game’ to see whether you’re a worthy opponent to stave off his boredom.
And this is where the game starts to overlap with the core focus of Tribe Nine. The anime is set in a dystopian future and revolves around a group of disaffected youths who have formed their own tribes. These tribes soon turned violent, running rampant across the city, prompting the government to implement the SB Law, which states that all conflicts between tribes must be settled through extreme baseball (XB for short).
From what we see in the beta, the events of the game take place after the anime, where Zero has “accidentally” become the ruler of the surface and modified all of the cities into places where everything is decided by games.
Yo teams up with two of his childhood friends and a group now known as the Trash Tribe to take on Zero by participating in his series of lethal games. In each of Neo Tokyo’s sub-cities, they must face off against one of the “Numbers”, who Zero has hand-picked as candidates to be his opponent.
If you lose a game, you die. If you refuse to compete, you die. And all the while you’re under Zero’s careful watch as he continues to put your skills to the test in just about every way imaginable. It’s the perfect mix of dark humor, unhinged twists, and high-stakes threats that make Kodaka games so special.
Tribe Nine’s gameplay consists of a few different parts. At its core, it’s a visual novel, and is extremely story-heavy – moreso than any gacha game I’ve played before. The visual novel segments are well-written, featuring great interactions between the characters. There’s a pretty natural, conversational feel to the dialog, with each characters’ voice feeling pretty clear.
There were very few typos or translation errors in the beta, these sections are fully voiced with brilliant Japanese voice actors, and the text is also accompanied by vibrant, animated 3D sprites that blink, breathe, react, and gesture while they’re talking. There’s also a skip button, the option to switch between manual and auto mode to cycle through the text, and a log where you can read back over the dialog and even replay the audio for each voice line.
When you’re not knee-deep in the story, you can explore the world of Neo Tokyo in 2.5D, taking control of adorable pixelated sprites as you wander around zones, interacting with objects and NPCs, collecting items, and solving puzzles. NPCs often have little side quests for you to complete, such as finding lost items or slaying specific enemies. These are generally short and simple, but add a sense of life to the world, especially as you see those same NPCs pop up again later on asking for help with related topics.
There are safe zones in each city, where you can visit clinics to heal or revive your team members, food stalls where you can eat meals to gain an EXP buff, and job centers where you can take on up to three daily commissions to earn currency and materials. The map also features respite units, where you can heal yourself and teleport to other locations, and rifts, which are mini-dungeons where you can farm specific materials or equipment.
The next major part of gameplay is the combat. In true RPG style, while out exploring Neo Tokyo in the 2.5D perspective, you often come across enemies. Approaching, hitting, or being hit by an enemy initiates combat, where you enter a 3D arena with your current team.
Tribe Nine’s combat is actually surprisingly intricate. Each character has a normal attack, a dash, two skills, an ultimate, and a chain skill. On top of this, there’s also the tension system. Tension represents the morale of either side – the higher the morale, the greater the chances of winning. Both sides can hit ‘extreme tension’ to gain a temporary boost to their damage – when your enemies hit the extreme status, their attack patterns can change, and they become even more ferocious, with some even capable of one-hit-killing you or your allies.
The enemy’s tension gauge increases steadily as they hit you and your team throughout the battle. Yours also increases as you hit your enemies and pull off skills, but the key to increasing your tension level quickly is through chain attacks.
Each character relies on one of their teammates inflicting the enemy with a specific impairment in order to trigger their chain skill and grant their own impairment, which can then trigger their next ally’s chain skill – hence the “chain” part. Don’t worry, it’s not as complex as it sounds – the main thing this system impacts is your team composition. You simply need to line up the impairment icons when picking your team in order to unleash their full potential, as shown in the picture above.
This can be a bit restrictive at first, and even after obtaining all the characters in the beta, I was cornered into specific team compositions if I wanted to make the most of the chain skill system. However, the icons make it easier to work out which characters work well together, and the free team they give you works great. Plus, I’m sure more options will become available as new characters join the roster.
Your team can consist of a maximum of three characters, and you can control one character at a time, with AI controlling the other two. You can switch between the three characters freely, or you can simply activate their chain attack or ultimate remotely.
I really appreciate this flexibility as it allows you to adopt a playstyle that best suits your personal preferences, and having your two teammates fight alongside you really adds to the ‘tribe’ feel – however, the AI can be a little hit or miss with some characters and seems incapable of dodging, so I’m really hoping that will improve in the full release.
The Tribe Nine characters are brilliant, whether they’re new to the game or familiar faces from the anime. Not only do they capture that signature Kodaka style perfectly, but their kits are also fun and varied, with some very unique playstyles and mechanics to explore, including different movement speeds, dash animations, and skill types.
There are kits that focus on heavy-hitting melee attacks, buffing allies, placing constructs or AoE zones on the battlefield, QTE-like skills where you have to hit them at specific moments, and more. This really helps keep combat fresh as you try out different teams.
The final major gameplay mode shown in the beta is XB, which really took me by surprise. Rather than your typical sports minigame, XB showdowns are actually debates, somewhat similar to the ‘combat’ in Master Detective Archives: Rain Code.
Whether you’re batting or pitching, the core focus is listening to your opponent’s arguments and picking the correct rebuttals. Beyond that, XB still follows the somewhat violent, parkour-infused rules from the anime, with cutscenes and overviews showing your team making their way around the bases.
To boost your chances in an XB game, you can also collect verity orbs by talking to different NPCs while exploring Neo Tokyo. These generally come in the form of little pieces of intel about the character you’re facing, which you can then use as rebuttals during a match.
On top of this, different characters have different XB abilities that you can unlock and improve over time by boosting their ‘instincts’, allowing you to choose different lineups for your XB matches to help you secure a victory.
Character instincts aren’t just for XB, either – and they’re just one of many ways to increase your team’s power, in addition to leveling them up, increasing their rank using specific materials, unlocking more copies of them to boost their potential, and equipping them with gear.
There are two main types of gear. First are tension cards, which offer teamwide boosts. You can equip five at a time, and they’re tied to your entire party rather than just one character. Then there are the compatible monsters, which are essentially artifacts or relics that take the form of cute little Digimon-like creatures. You can equip each character with a head, body, and wings to unlock specific stat boosts and passive buffs. Again, like HSR’s relics or Genshin Impact’s artifacts, you can farm compatible monsters via those aforementioned rifts, but the main way to get tension cards is via the gacha.
Speaking of gacha, the beta featured three banners – the limited character banner, the limited tension card banner, and the standard banner. Tension cards come in one-, two-, and three-star rarities, while characters come in two- and three-star rarities, with the three-stars being the strongest. The standard gacha rules normalized by games like Genshin Impact are at play here, with a three-star guaranteed within 80 pulls.
While not stated, it also looks like you’re guaranteed at least one two-star every ten-pull, however, this seemed to be broken in the beta. While doing ten pulls at a time, I consistently got one or two two-stars each time, but when I tried performing single pulls, I got halfway to pity (40 pulls) without a single two-star. I gave up and did a ten-pull, which immediately gave me two two-stars. This seems very unusual, so I presume it will be fixed in the full release.
Despite the limited three-star being incredibly powerful (and my favorite character from the beta), Tribe Nine also feels quite free-to-play friendly. In fact, the three characters they give you at the start (Yo Kuronaka, Koishi Kohunata, and Tsuki Iroha) make for a great team that could carry you all the way to the end of the beta with enough investment, and all of the characters I tried, both two- and three-star rarity, had their own strengths.
Additionally, while this is often the case in betas, I was quite surprised by the steady flow of gacha currency, called enigma entity. Beyond the free enigma entity that beta testers received via the in-game mail, there’s an abundance of little achievements and side quests for you to do, with a decent amount of rewards up for grabs. I expect this flow to slow down to a trickle eventually, but by that point, you should have a pretty solid roster to play with – so, as long as there isn’t too much power creep in Tribe Nine’s future, I see it being pretty friendly to both free and paid players.
Visually, Tribe Nine is gorgeous. As I mentioned earlier, the characters capture that iconic Kodaka style, and could easily be mistaken for brand-new Danganronpa characters. The world itself is also very aesthetically pleasing, with a dark, moody atmosphere illuminated by vibrant, neon lights that capture the dystopic, futuristic vibe perfectly.
The combat arenas can be a little dull, but the shifting perspectives and attention to detail in the 2.5D settings truly brings life to Neo Tokyo. The enemy designs are also pretty great, with a variety of robots and monsters (and robotic monsters) for you to take on.
The UI and menus also fit perfectly with the rest of the game. I especially love the character screens, which remind me of Zenless Zone Zero as the characters strike different poses when you switch between tabs. The compatible monsters page is a personal favorite, showing your character holding up a Tamagochi-like device with the little monster bobbing up and down on the screen.
The audio for Tribe Nine is solid, with both the JP voice acting and the OST reflecting the environments really well. In fact, I had the battle theme stuck in my head for days after playing for only a few hours. There are also plenty of little sound effects that enhance actions without being overpowering, whether you’re interacting with objects, slaying enemies, or going to the clinic to get yourself healed up.
Performance-wise, the beta was pretty polished considering the game is still in development. Playing on my PC, load times were generally quick and snappy, with very little stuttering or frame rate drops, and both the cutscenes and gameplay animations were smooth as butter. However, I did experience quite a few crashes and server disconnects, which would sometimes force me to restart my entire PC. Luckily, as it’s a live service game, I could generally pick up right where I left off, but it was a little frustrating, nonetheless.
I also tried the Tribe Nine beta on Steam Deck, and, as you’d likely expect, that didn’t go well. In fact, I had a whopping four crashes within an hour, and eventually gave up. I didn’t expect much, considering Tribe Nine has likely not been tested on or developed for Steam OS, but I thought it was worth a try for any potential portable players out there. Luckily, Tribe Nine is set to come to Android and iOS, but I do hope that it’ll also be Steam Deck compatible in the future.
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with the Tribe Nine beta. It’s a very unique game with an impressive level of depth and attention to detail, and so many different elements to it that it kept me entertained throughout the entire beta period, and left me wanting more when access ended. I also feel like the lethal games format is going to translate well to the live service model, with future updates seeing you travel to the different cities and participate in new, even more twisted games.
My main concern is that, while it suits my personal interests perfectly, it’s very niche, and I’m not sure whether it will find a big enough audience to support it as a live service game. I feel it’s a very daring choice to combine the dark visual novel style of the Danganronpa games with 2.5D exploration, 3D action combat, debate-based sports games, and the live service gacha model. And, while Kodaka does have a strong core fanbase, I’m not sure whether a game like this can survive in this industry, especially when competing against Hoyoverse who has a much wider appeal and several years of live service games under its belt.
However, I honestly respect Too Kyo Games and Akatsuki Games for trying something different here, and I hope with all of my heart that Tribe Nine will find its ‘tribe’ of players and get the success it deserves. But, for now, I suppose I’ll just have to sit tight and wait for more info on the Tribe Nine release date. I’ll be sure to update this preview as soon as I get the chance to head back to Neo Tokyo (hopefully we’ll get a mobile beta test soon!), but, in the meantime, be sure to check out our interview with Kodaka to hear from the man himself.