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Ghost Sync (Android, Played on Odin Pro)
Lily is an amnesiac girl trained to fight Savarians (monsters who, in this world, are spirts corrupted by “black aura” in addition to the usual red and blue auras), and she meets up with Bernard, an amnesiac ghost who can possess monsters. They’re joined by a foreign girl who might secretly be royalty, and a helpful fairy obsessed with terrible food. It turns out that the battle to seal away the dragon of the earth-depths 100 years ago was a lot closer to any of these characters than they realize.
In cutscenes, Bernard appears as a human ghost and a monster dog; though in battle he’s whatever enemy you last used the “possess” command on. The translators/localizers clearly had a good time with this one; there are entire comedic bits revolving around terrible cooking and ridiculous foods and that actually work pretty well. The fact that the only male party member is a ghost possessing a dog (and therefore can only talk to the lead character) gets this one away from the “harem anime” problem that occurs a lot. One of the first things you do in this game is join the adventurer’s guild (so there are story guild missions, sidequest guild missions you have to grind, sidequests from townsfolk, rewards for killing X number of every enemy, and rewards for achievements), and honestly that’s starting to get a little old, but I was relieved to see that Maidam Curie was nowhere to be seen. Also, while you can still do guild sidequests through the whole game, they stop being plot-relevant halfway through and you can safely ignore the massive grinding required to reach S-rank (though that does unlock the best armor).
It’s another game that’s using the more standard EXE-Create engine and systems that we’ve come to recognize. (Grid-based battles with four elements of spells that any character can learn; rocks and chests and large/fast/metal monsters; a gatcha system for weapons that you can stack together for bonuses; etc.) This one has a proper world map, at least. I’ll give them credit that they embraced “numbers go up” and gave you a LOT of reasons to fight random battles and revisit areas, but you don’t have to be obsessive about grinding if you just do everything as it comes.
The dungeons are decent—many of them get pretty maze-like, especially with different elevations where the paths snake over and under each other. There’s a forced-movement area, an ice-slide area, an area with switches to add and remove bridges, and a lot of key-and-lock bits. (No damage floors or block puzzles, though.) They also do the “teleporters in the beginning, middle and end” thing, though there aren’t any minibosses, just a character-beat cutscene in the middle of each dungeon. (You can also quick-exit most dungeons and fast-travel most of the time on the world map.)
This is another game where the Premium version doesn’t give you a lot of free IAP currency (you get a small amount to start and one point every few battles) so I used it sparingly to buy Storeroom keys, which gave equipment that I enhanced and used until the endgame when it was finally severely outclassed. There’s a postgame dungeon and “Happy Ending” that are relatively straightforward to get; then a whole bunch of bonus islands and arena areas in case you feel like grinding to level 400 and 100% completing. (Which is also completely unnecessary; I got the main ending at level 120 and better ending at level 150.)
SPOILERS: Hokay, so: The guild leader is actually the now-evil Brave Hero Bart, whose evil plan was to revive the dragon and merge with it. But he was being manipulated by the guild second-in-command, who is actually an ancient evil named Sharl who came from another dimension, the source of Black Aura. The entire plot happened because the Sky People who controlled gold aura got greedy and tapped the black aura dimension. They got turned into dragons and sealed in the earth-depths, and the gold aura was left with the royal family of Gwen’s kingdom. Meanwhile, Lupy the fairy is secretly Lily’s teacher Corona, who had worked with Bart to seal the dragon 100 years earlier. Lily is actually Princess Aoi, who Gwen had been searching for, who was injured fighting Sharl and lost her memory. Bernard is actually the original dragon, freed from Sharl’s influence (and his body) and in a ghost-form that looks like Bart. In the normal ending, Bernard holds the merged Sharl-Bart-Dragon form while the party seals them all away. In the Happy ending, they’re able to send Sharl and Bart back to the Black Aura dimension and Bernard gets Bart’s original body, so he and Lily can travel the world purifying Savarians together.
Overall: I ended up really enjoying this one. The plot is complicated with enough twists and turns that I wanted to follow it to get all the details, and the goofy character bits were a bit talky but they were fun.
In cutscenes, Bernard appears as a human ghost and a monster dog; though in battle he’s whatever enemy you last used the “possess” command on. The translators/localizers clearly had a good time with this one; there are entire comedic bits revolving around terrible cooking and ridiculous foods and that actually work pretty well. The fact that the only male party member is a ghost possessing a dog (and therefore can only talk to the lead character) gets this one away from the “harem anime” problem that occurs a lot. One of the first things you do in this game is join the adventurer’s guild (so there are story guild missions, sidequest guild missions you have to grind, sidequests from townsfolk, rewards for killing X number of every enemy, and rewards for achievements), and honestly that’s starting to get a little old, but I was relieved to see that Maidam Curie was nowhere to be seen. Also, while you can still do guild sidequests through the whole game, they stop being plot-relevant halfway through and you can safely ignore the massive grinding required to reach S-rank (though that does unlock the best armor).
It’s another game that’s using the more standard EXE-Create engine and systems that we’ve come to recognize. (Grid-based battles with four elements of spells that any character can learn; rocks and chests and large/fast/metal monsters; a gatcha system for weapons that you can stack together for bonuses; etc.) This one has a proper world map, at least. I’ll give them credit that they embraced “numbers go up” and gave you a LOT of reasons to fight random battles and revisit areas, but you don’t have to be obsessive about grinding if you just do everything as it comes.
The dungeons are decent—many of them get pretty maze-like, especially with different elevations where the paths snake over and under each other. There’s a forced-movement area, an ice-slide area, an area with switches to add and remove bridges, and a lot of key-and-lock bits. (No damage floors or block puzzles, though.) They also do the “teleporters in the beginning, middle and end” thing, though there aren’t any minibosses, just a character-beat cutscene in the middle of each dungeon. (You can also quick-exit most dungeons and fast-travel most of the time on the world map.)
This is another game where the Premium version doesn’t give you a lot of free IAP currency (you get a small amount to start and one point every few battles) so I used it sparingly to buy Storeroom keys, which gave equipment that I enhanced and used until the endgame when it was finally severely outclassed. There’s a postgame dungeon and “Happy Ending” that are relatively straightforward to get; then a whole bunch of bonus islands and arena areas in case you feel like grinding to level 400 and 100% completing. (Which is also completely unnecessary; I got the main ending at level 120 and better ending at level 150.)
SPOILERS: Hokay, so: The guild leader is actually the now-evil Brave Hero Bart, whose evil plan was to revive the dragon and merge with it. But he was being manipulated by the guild second-in-command, who is actually an ancient evil named Sharl who came from another dimension, the source of Black Aura. The entire plot happened because the Sky People who controlled gold aura got greedy and tapped the black aura dimension. They got turned into dragons and sealed in the earth-depths, and the gold aura was left with the royal family of Gwen’s kingdom. Meanwhile, Lupy the fairy is secretly Lily’s teacher Corona, who had worked with Bart to seal the dragon 100 years earlier. Lily is actually Princess Aoi, who Gwen had been searching for, who was injured fighting Sharl and lost her memory. Bernard is actually the original dragon, freed from Sharl’s influence (and his body) and in a ghost-form that looks like Bart. In the normal ending, Bernard holds the merged Sharl-Bart-Dragon form while the party seals them all away. In the Happy ending, they’re able to send Sharl and Bart back to the Black Aura dimension and Bernard gets Bart’s original body, so he and Lily can travel the world purifying Savarians together.
Overall: I ended up really enjoying this one. The plot is complicated with enough twists and turns that I wanted to follow it to get all the details, and the goofy character bits were a bit talky but they were fun.