Final Fantasy Dimensions 2 (Android)
Aug. 1st, 2019 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroTo quote the wiki: “The game follows a young man named Morrow, who desires to become a famous adventurer. His life is forever changed when a meteorite falls near his home of Navos Village and meets a mysterious girl named Aemo. What lies ahead is an adventure that takes Morrow and his companions through time and space in order to save the world from beings attacking the fabric of history.”
This game occupies a very odd niche: It’s a jrpg without half the jrpg tropes; and/or it’s a gatcha tapper without the lootboxes/collectables. What it has are cutscenes and grinding. Each area is just a rush of 4-5 battles that you go into fully healed, and you can generally autobattle your way through them. Attacking charges up your summons and the different characters have different elemental attacks, but that doesn’t actually seem to matter much. Equipping different accessories enables different summons and allows you characters to grind/learn new skills. (Other equipment is extremely rudimentary.)
There are no dungeons or exploration; the world map is tap-to-travel and the towns are menus. There are side-quests (for grinding) and extra unlockable quests (that usually couple a character-development cutscene with another string of battles).
Apparently what happened here was that the game was originally a free-to-play, IAP-driven game in Japan, but it was rebranded and re-released as a premium game with those elements removed. The thing is, that puts into stark relief that without those elements…there isn’t much to actually keep your interest in the game. The battles don’t really have much strategy or challenge, which I’m generally okay with for random battles if they’re just breaking up puzzles, character development, exploration, finding secrets, and/or boss battles that do require strategy. Or failing all that, I can be pulled in for a while with lootboxes (though not for that long; It’s not like Final Fantasy Brave Exvius was able to hold my attention for very long despite still having gatcha elements).
Which makes it a bit of a shame that the story seems fairly interesting; I just don’t have the interest in letting the game run through 40 hours of battles in order to read the cutscenes. Perhaps someone will do a Let’s Play.
Overall: This wasn’t much of a game and then they cut out all the addictive gambling elements; I’d love to read the story in LP format but I’m not willing to sit through boring autobattles to do it.
This game occupies a very odd niche: It’s a jrpg without half the jrpg tropes; and/or it’s a gatcha tapper without the lootboxes/collectables. What it has are cutscenes and grinding. Each area is just a rush of 4-5 battles that you go into fully healed, and you can generally autobattle your way through them. Attacking charges up your summons and the different characters have different elemental attacks, but that doesn’t actually seem to matter much. Equipping different accessories enables different summons and allows you characters to grind/learn new skills. (Other equipment is extremely rudimentary.)
There are no dungeons or exploration; the world map is tap-to-travel and the towns are menus. There are side-quests (for grinding) and extra unlockable quests (that usually couple a character-development cutscene with another string of battles).
Apparently what happened here was that the game was originally a free-to-play, IAP-driven game in Japan, but it was rebranded and re-released as a premium game with those elements removed. The thing is, that puts into stark relief that without those elements…there isn’t much to actually keep your interest in the game. The battles don’t really have much strategy or challenge, which I’m generally okay with for random battles if they’re just breaking up puzzles, character development, exploration, finding secrets, and/or boss battles that do require strategy. Or failing all that, I can be pulled in for a while with lootboxes (though not for that long; It’s not like Final Fantasy Brave Exvius was able to hold my attention for very long despite still having gatcha elements).
Which makes it a bit of a shame that the story seems fairly interesting; I just don’t have the interest in letting the game run through 40 hours of battles in order to read the cutscenes. Perhaps someone will do a Let’s Play.
Overall: This wasn’t much of a game and then they cut out all the addictive gambling elements; I’d love to read the story in LP format but I’m not willing to sit through boring autobattles to do it.
