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chuckroYou live on a floating continent that's about to fall to the demon-infested world below. A princess and her stuck-up bodyguard hire you, a low-class treasure hunter, to find the magic stones that can save the world. Hmm...this actually sounds really familiar.
Another Magitec game; from the same developers as Chrome Wolf, Covenant of Solitude and others. The graphics are better than the last few (to the point where the world map actually causes slowdown on my tablet, which is bizarre), and you've only got a three-person party (with each character getting a monster partner they can summon for boss battles), but it's basically the same setup.
You learn skills by performing normal attacks on certain enemies and getting lucky; and the type of enemy you're fighting determines the skill you're likely to get. You can pay in-game for clues as to which enemies drop which skills, or you can just auto-battle everything and get what you get. It's basically a melding of blue magic and the SaGa skill system, but I found that I picked up plenty of useful skills without really trying.
Everything is mission-based, and there are only 12 in total. There don't seem to be sidequests, besides the two bonus IAP dungeons. Because of that, the game only runs about 10 hours.
All the standard dungeons are here: The one with damage floors (that a cheap consumable lets you ignore), the one with sliding ice, the one with one-way floating platforms, the one with cliffs you need to jump down, and the ones where you need to go totally out of your way to unlock a door. That is to say, there aren't really any puzzles and most of the dungeons are linear space-filling paths. (Most of them also offer you a quick way back to the entrance, but you're teleported out automatically after beating the boss and there are no sidequests or reasons to return, there isn't much point to that.)
The numbers inflation is really low—just gaining a level or improving your equipment won't suddenly make battles easy. It's a gradual process. There are three missions in the later game that you can do in any order, and while the first one will be a bit harder and the last a bit easier, you can't just glide through any of them. Heck, using IAP to buy a top-end weapon only makes that character a mildly more effective fighter.
I appreciate that, while you have to visit every corner of the map over the course of the game, they actually have an excuse that this isn't the whole world. Shelterra is one small set of floating islands, and the surface land beneath them was protected by the Guardian System, but otherwise the world is overrun by Odium. It's never made clear what exactly Odium consists of, but it's a perfectly good excuse for why you never leave the small map.
It occurs to me that even the plot twists are fairly cookie-cutter: The benevolent sage turns out to be evil, but in the end we learn he was doing evil due to a combination of well-meaning atrocity (he was trying to make humanity immortal by forcing them to adapt to Odium) and mommy issues. Everything wraps up nicely; there's only one ending.
Overall: Short and by-the-numbers KEMCO/Megitek jrpg; the challenge level was reasonable and it didn't outstay its welcome. Not bad, but nothing amazing.
Another Magitec game; from the same developers as Chrome Wolf, Covenant of Solitude and others. The graphics are better than the last few (to the point where the world map actually causes slowdown on my tablet, which is bizarre), and you've only got a three-person party (with each character getting a monster partner they can summon for boss battles), but it's basically the same setup.
You learn skills by performing normal attacks on certain enemies and getting lucky; and the type of enemy you're fighting determines the skill you're likely to get. You can pay in-game for clues as to which enemies drop which skills, or you can just auto-battle everything and get what you get. It's basically a melding of blue magic and the SaGa skill system, but I found that I picked up plenty of useful skills without really trying.
Everything is mission-based, and there are only 12 in total. There don't seem to be sidequests, besides the two bonus IAP dungeons. Because of that, the game only runs about 10 hours.
All the standard dungeons are here: The one with damage floors (that a cheap consumable lets you ignore), the one with sliding ice, the one with one-way floating platforms, the one with cliffs you need to jump down, and the ones where you need to go totally out of your way to unlock a door. That is to say, there aren't really any puzzles and most of the dungeons are linear space-filling paths. (Most of them also offer you a quick way back to the entrance, but you're teleported out automatically after beating the boss and there are no sidequests or reasons to return, there isn't much point to that.)
The numbers inflation is really low—just gaining a level or improving your equipment won't suddenly make battles easy. It's a gradual process. There are three missions in the later game that you can do in any order, and while the first one will be a bit harder and the last a bit easier, you can't just glide through any of them. Heck, using IAP to buy a top-end weapon only makes that character a mildly more effective fighter.
I appreciate that, while you have to visit every corner of the map over the course of the game, they actually have an excuse that this isn't the whole world. Shelterra is one small set of floating islands, and the surface land beneath them was protected by the Guardian System, but otherwise the world is overrun by Odium. It's never made clear what exactly Odium consists of, but it's a perfectly good excuse for why you never leave the small map.
It occurs to me that even the plot twists are fairly cookie-cutter: The benevolent sage turns out to be evil, but in the end we learn he was doing evil due to a combination of well-meaning atrocity (he was trying to make humanity immortal by forcing them to adapt to Odium) and mommy issues. Everything wraps up nicely; there's only one ending.
Overall: Short and by-the-numbers KEMCO/Megitek jrpg; the challenge level was reasonable and it didn't outstay its welcome. Not bad, but nothing amazing.
