Takt op. Symphony / Takt Op. Destiny in the City of Crimson Melody is the first mobile game based on the Takt Op anime series by Mappa and Madhouse. The game recently held a closed beta test starting on March 16, and we got a chance to try the game out early as it was restricted to 3,000 players.
While Takt op. Symphony is still a couple of months away from release, the beta shows a lot of promise, showcasing its fairly simple but fun combat system, incredible attention to detail and presentation, an engaging story, and tons of extra content for you to enjoy outside of combat, that expands on the world of Takt Op. in a great way.
Though the game has a few issues that drag down the experience, Takt Op. Symphony has a whole lot to offer, and if this beta is a good indication of what we can expect when the game launches, this could be one of the few big mobile games that could manage to stay alive for years to come and something fans of the anime should look forward to.
This game’s beta was played on a Samsung Galaxy S8 running at low graphic settings, and is not indicative of the game’s final state on launch.
▍20 Years Later, The Battle Continues
This section will briefly spoil the ending Takt Op’s anime, and if that’s something you want to enjoy without any spoilers, you can skip the next paragraph.
When you begin Takt Op Symphony’s story, you emerge as Takt Asahina again, this time you are met face to face with Destiny, voiced by Kaede Hondo, after a brief battle, she explains to you that it’s been 20 years since Asahina was gravely injured and put to sleep. That’s right, this game is a direct sequel to the anime, following the anime’s conclusion where Cosette died saving Takt, and Anna took her sister’s place as the inheritor of Destiny.
Due to the passage of time and her sudden transformation into a Musicart, neither Asahina nor Destiny can recall each other, with Asahina losing all memory of every event from the series, down to the concepts of Musicarts, Composers, Symphonicas, and the world. The implications of this are heartbreaking for fans of the anime, but it’s also a fitting in-universe way to help guide new players and those unfamiliar with the world’s concepts alongside Takt.
As he wakes up, Takt finds himself at the Berlin Symphonica hall as it’s under attack, you navigate the halls with Destiny running into new and familiar Musicarts, Twinkle Star, Jupiter, Carmen, and Walkure. After a series of battles and getting to know them, you are ambushed by a giant D2 that injures Walkure, and the rest of the group depending on how you respond, and then the battle ends and she is taken to intensive care.
The story continues with Takt heading outside of the Symphonica to Berlin, meeting more Conductors, and Musicarts, learning more about life in the city while dealing with the ongoing threats, and learning more about what life is like for the common folk.
Takt Op Symphony’s story is fairly engaging and doesn’t treat each scenario as a combat encounter, as there are often story segments with just dialogue, and sometimes animated cutscenes and other visuals, and it’s great that the story is fully voice-acted except for Takt himself. In between story segments, you can also take control of Takt, running around talking to and listening in on the Musicarts and other characters in the world.
Saying the right things to a Musicart can build up your friendship with them, and if you said the right thing the game will mark your progress with a token indicating you picked up the Friend point from that scenario, and if you fail you can always go back to that stage with at no cost to your stamina, but more on that later.
One thing I enjoy about Takt Op’s story is that a lot of the dialogue options can have fairly minor effects on the game’s story, such as in the early section where if you manage to tell everyone to run, they’ll avoid getting injured by the massive D2, though since you can replay story sections these choices don’t have much of an effect on gameplay or story.
And as nice as it is to be able to replay story segments, I can’t say it’s my favorite part of the game as it meant if I failed a dialogue option and then had to redo the entire stage, have Takt walk to that character again just to fix my mistake to get a bit more friend points. This probably won’t be as much of a problem in the full release since you’ll be able to skip dialogue, but it’s kind of a chore when the last bit of dialogue you need to redo is the last one, and you have to run all the way back just to get it.
Overall Takt Op Symphony’s story is pretty engaging and I like the time it takes to introduce these new Musicarts, as that’s something the anime didn’t have a lot of time for, especially with so many new characters. The game also has plenty of ways to let you get to know them through minigames and activities, but we’ll get into that a little later because aside from this game’s story, Takt Op Symphony is…
▍One of the Best Looking Mobile Games So Far
Takt Op. Symphony’s presentation is stellar across all fronts. If there’s a presentation style you can think of, it’s there. Live-2D animated characters, 2D animation, 3D environments, incredible arrangements of classic tracks, and so much more.
I wasn’t expecting so many art styles and modes of presentation in this game, typically you’d expect the game to stick to one kind of presentation style throughout the entire playthrough except for the few rare cutscenes, but Takt Op. Symphony loves to pepper in short bursts of cutscenes whenever epic moments happen, and the live-2D animations help to bring more life into the characters during dialogue, rather than have static JPEGs with moving lips. It seems the developer went above and beyond to help cement this game as a sequel to the anime by also making it as visually appealing as possible.
That’s not to say it only looks good outside of combat because the game manages to look fairly nice when fighting too. Characters and enemies are usually presented in 2.5D, with your characters being 2D sprites but the backgrounds, effects, and sometimes enemies being 3D models ready to battle, using dynamic camera angle changes and effects to sell the game’s action. Certain attacks have a lot of weight to them and the sound design when it comes to these moves is also top-notch, with each character’s moves appropriately matching the score they’re based on.
And of course, the game’s music is spectacular. Expect beautiful arrangements of classic orchestral tracks that manage to retain their elegance and make them even more hype tracks for combat, especially when it comes to the special versions of a character’s track that plays when you execute their Peak Performance, which changes the stage’s battle track to that character’s music until you use another one.
▼Destiny, Twinkle Star, and Walkure’s Peak Performances!
All of this while it’s also running on a fairly dated phone from 2017. The game defaulted to low settings and while it couldn’t maintain a steady 30fps throughout my sessions, the game rarely ever stuttered and maintained a steady framerate even during the character’s peak performance, letting me so its entirety without any skips. This is nice considering this phone can barely handle looking at Noble Phantasms from FGO.
Takt Op. Symphony in general just looks great and presents its world beautifully, though in its current state, the UI still needs some work. Text overlaps each other poorly and many functions are accessible through multiple screens and transitions which can take some time to get to for simple upgrades.
▍Simple, Yet Tactical Combat
■ Combat
Takt Op’s combat is fairly easy to pick up. Each character has a number of actions they can perform, whether it’s their basic attack, or two skills that come in the forms of various attacks, buffs, debuffs, timed effects, healing, and more. Combat is turn-based and whoever moves first is determined by their speed stat.
Each “turn” ends when every unit that was alive when the turn started has acted so taking care of an enemy quickly will make sure the enemy basically loses out on a turn, as enemies that join in to replace a fallen one don’t get to move until the next turn. As you fight and use a character’s skills, you can build up charges of their Peak Performance, letting you unleash their super ability with various effects. Even regular skills look stunning with flashy effects that complement the character, and the game has a fast-forward mode to make things go more quickly.
The Peak Performance system is a bit of a change of pace. in most games, each character builds up their own super meter which they can then unleash onto enemies. In Takt Op. Symphony though whenever a character uses a skill, they build up a tone based on the color of their ability, and when enough of those tones are gathered, they can spend these tones to use their Peak Performance as these are shared amongst the group. Tones are visible at the top of the screen between moves.
This means team composition based on the Tones you’ve collected is also deciding factor. For instance, Erlking’s Peak Performance requires 5 blue tones, and luckily all of her own actions are colored blue, so at most you need to attack her 5 times to use her peak performance. However, Destiny needs 3 red tones and 1 blue tone and also has a blue skill, so she can help build up to her own peak performance or help Erlking build up to hers. Regardless, whichever peak performance you use, means the other one won’t be able to use theirs right away since they share the same color.
▼ To use Twinkle Star’s Peak Performance, you need at least 2 Blue and Green Tones
▼ Erlking Meanwhile Needs 5 Blue Tones, and both of her skills build Blue Tones
Outside of combat, Takt Op uses stamina as a way to gatekeep levels, as your characters’ max level can’t exceed your own. Thankfully the game lets you sweep completed stages up to 30 times a day, with bonus rewards for the first 2 times you clear a level. The game also caps your progress in the story with Battle simulations, and special stages with mini puzzles and difficult encounters that you need to complete first to prove your strength, and these can be pretty fun too.
■ Tea Times and Minigames
Takt Op. also has a couple of minigames and activities you can do with the Musicarts to help boost your friendship level with them and get some currency to do so.
You can send invitations to talk to them and learn a bit more about themselves, send gifts, or even play Mutarot, this world’s version of the Old Maid card game. While it’s kind of fun playing Old Maid with the girls and seeing how their reaction shifts when you’re winning or losing, it’s kind of a toss-up if you end up with the Old Maid card first since it’s really just a game of chance, though win or lose you’ll still get the same rewards of Consonance.
Consonance is coins that you can use to purchase Tea Break gifts and ingredients to make Tea and other drinks. Using that you can then invite Musicarts out on Tea Time, talking to them and learning more about their perspective on the world, while also strengthening your bond with them.
Tea times are pretty short and to get to them you have to play a brief minigame akin to Cooking Mama to make tea. While it was nice to learn more about the Musicarts, I didn’t particularly like the Make a Drink minigame, as the controls for the minigame always felt off, and the game doesn’t really have proper feedback to help you know how quickly you should stir it, what ingredients to add, etc, so it feels like trial and error. Luckily though these are completely optional and you should treat these more as fun pastimes rather than mandatory goals.
■ Everything kind of… Takes too long.
While the game’s presentation, minigames, gameplay and all that is great, I feel like Takt Op Symphony just takes too long to play, and not in the way you might think.
Completing daily tasks and getting characters leveled up (at least during the early portions) didn’t take too long and while enemies and bosses can be higher leveled than you, it never really felt like a challenge I couldn’t overcome, and it was welcoming to be near the edge of losing just to eke out a close win. The problem I really have comes down to how long it takes to go to places or get stuff started from its interface.
Most of the functions Takt Op are accessible in its 3D world, from the characters, gacha screen, commissioned battles, daily missions, tea time, and everything else. This means every time you want to check your dailies or go do something, you have to click on the menu, click on the function, then watch Takt slowly run to the destination, every, single, time.
This doesn’t sound like that much of a deal, but very quickly you’ll realize that this equates to unskippable loading screens whenever you want to do just about anything. A similar thing also happens when you’re trying to upgrade a character’s abilities, as upgrading aspects of a character requires going through multiple UI screens, each with its own transition making it longer than necessary. It also doesn’t help that each skill and character trait has its own screen.
This kind of thing could be fixed by speeding up many of the screen transitions and making Takt walk faster between sections, but as it is now it definitely becomes something you won’t really notice too much at the beginning, but over time starts to become a little annoying.
▍Put Takt Op. Symphony On Your Playlist
Takt Op. Symphony is one of the better-looking games to have come out this past year, and for something based on an original anime, it’s definitely a surprise to see so much effort being put in. The game’s stellar visual presentation, great music, and fun combat make for a delightfully enjoyable mobile RPG package, and one that holds a lot of promise.
Takt Op certainly isn’t without flaws as there are some aspects of its interface that can definitely drag down the experience for extended play sessions, but since this is still an early beta Takt Op. Symphony still has a lot of time to improve on its systems, and be a mobile RPG that can stand on its own for quite some time in this wave of recent game shutdowns.
If you’re a fan of the Takt Op. anime series, definitely hold on to your ticket to experience this game as soon as it’s ready.
