Final Fantasy Explorers (3DS)
Jan. 16th, 2020 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroCrystals make the world go ‘round, and the island of Amostra is full of them. You are one of the explorers who has come to this island, and you set out from the rural town of Libertas to hunt for monsters and treasure.
A little bit Crystal Chronicles, a little bit MMO, and (I’m lead to believe) a lot of Monster Hunter. You're an explorer looking for crystals on this mostly-uncharted island, which means obeying the guild’s rules but needing to map everything yourself. Basically, you take a lot of quests that involve killing progressively stronger monsters and collecting increasing amounts of loot. Most of that loot is vendortrash you use to craft and upgrade your equipment, but some is Crystal Points you use to switch jobs and learn/upgrade many skills.
Oddly, there aren’t rpg leveling mechanics—you don’t gain experience, and your only stat improvements come from equipment. You can improve your skills, but only through an arcane process that involves using skills enough to randomly trigger a Crystal Surge, then using skills during that surge to trigger a Mutation, which you can then buy as a new permanent skill and hope to further mutate. Clearly you’re supposed to play a long time a stack a lot of mutations on your skills and upgrades on your equipment, because (for example) +50 HP doesn’t mean much when your base HP is around 4,000.
The combat system, incidentally, is a 3D action/beat-em-up style vaguely similar to the Warriors series, but you access your special moves with the trigger buttons and they each have a cooldown timer. Your normal attack is basically only for quickly recharging the AP meter (used for special attacks), and even then that’s only during boss battles. Random enemies don’t come thickly enough to wear you down.
This is clearly intended for team play (presumably via online connection), and the game itself ramps difficulty to assume you’re playing with a group by the later two-star quests (out of ten!). You can recruit/create monster companions (who, oddly enough, do gain traditional levels) who have lousy AI and are very fragile, but they’re good for distracting boss monsters while you run off to chug potions. But really, the difficulty ramp once you start fighting the classic summoned monsters (Ifrit being the first) is an indication that you can’t just beat up everything on your own anymore. Honestly, despite there only being three listed “tutorial” quests, I think everything before Ifrit is kinda warm-up weaksauce to get you ready for the intended meat of the game: Bringing a party of four up against classic Final Fantasy giant monsters.
Overall: This game is intended for multiplayer co-op; you’re intended to grind a lot, then gather your friends (or internet strangers) for big tactical battles against boss monsters. I’m not particularly interested in that and don’t have an interested posse; so I’m done after the introductory stages.
A little bit Crystal Chronicles, a little bit MMO, and (I’m lead to believe) a lot of Monster Hunter. You're an explorer looking for crystals on this mostly-uncharted island, which means obeying the guild’s rules but needing to map everything yourself. Basically, you take a lot of quests that involve killing progressively stronger monsters and collecting increasing amounts of loot. Most of that loot is vendortrash you use to craft and upgrade your equipment, but some is Crystal Points you use to switch jobs and learn/upgrade many skills.
Oddly, there aren’t rpg leveling mechanics—you don’t gain experience, and your only stat improvements come from equipment. You can improve your skills, but only through an arcane process that involves using skills enough to randomly trigger a Crystal Surge, then using skills during that surge to trigger a Mutation, which you can then buy as a new permanent skill and hope to further mutate. Clearly you’re supposed to play a long time a stack a lot of mutations on your skills and upgrades on your equipment, because (for example) +50 HP doesn’t mean much when your base HP is around 4,000.
The combat system, incidentally, is a 3D action/beat-em-up style vaguely similar to the Warriors series, but you access your special moves with the trigger buttons and they each have a cooldown timer. Your normal attack is basically only for quickly recharging the AP meter (used for special attacks), and even then that’s only during boss battles. Random enemies don’t come thickly enough to wear you down.
This is clearly intended for team play (presumably via online connection), and the game itself ramps difficulty to assume you’re playing with a group by the later two-star quests (out of ten!). You can recruit/create monster companions (who, oddly enough, do gain traditional levels) who have lousy AI and are very fragile, but they’re good for distracting boss monsters while you run off to chug potions. But really, the difficulty ramp once you start fighting the classic summoned monsters (Ifrit being the first) is an indication that you can’t just beat up everything on your own anymore. Honestly, despite there only being three listed “tutorial” quests, I think everything before Ifrit is kinda warm-up weaksauce to get you ready for the intended meat of the game: Bringing a party of four up against classic Final Fantasy giant monsters.
Overall: This game is intended for multiplayer co-op; you’re intended to grind a lot, then gather your friends (or internet strangers) for big tactical battles against boss monsters. I’m not particularly interested in that and don’t have an interested posse; so I’m done after the introductory stages.
