3/26/15

This may be a bit long, so my apologies. I like Record Keeper on the surface. It's a great game for nostalgic reasons and does what a mobile game should do: sucks you back in. Final Fantasy Record Keeper is about restoring realms of the final fantasy universe and tackles the story fairly well. I think it is elegantly handled considering the mobile platform. It is fun and brings you into realms that you love to fight enemies and bosses. Being able to slowly create your dream team is pretty cool as well.

However, I am not having as much fun with it as some other are. The battle system is quick and dungeons go by in a matter of minutes which is great for a mobile game. It is not so great if strategy and interesting battles are what you like about final Fantasy. I feel like I am mowing everything down and the boss battles feel incredibly anti-climactic.

I find that mages are less than useful except for healing. They have a limited amount of uses for their spells. Your black mage starts off with two (you can only equip two abilities) abilities with a grand total of 4 uses. A dungeon is typically 3+ levels with 3+ rounds per each level. A minimum of 2 monsters are in each round which makes at least 6 enemies. 4 uses for black magic just doesn't cut it. It's not as if you can heal it either, you have to wait for an Ether to drop to restore your uses. My black mages didn't start putting out serious damage until I honed my Fire and upgraded to Blizzara. The limited ability slot and the limited uses did force you to really plan a strategy but I felt that I just had my mages either hit or defend until the boss where they would use all of their power. I can get around that because I'm a melee centered fight style.

Speaking of the battle system, I did find the "phone a friend" thing pretty interesting. I started fairly late so I was able to pull Lv. 50 characters into battle and just obliterate the boss. As great as that is for quick leveling, I feel it also removes the weight of the bosses you would feel if you played the series.

While growing your dream team is a cool idea, I feel that it is just a nostalgic tribute which is okay I guess. They really just feel like blank slates with them wearing your favorite character's meat suit around...which is a gross thought. They don't have their iconic weapons because they are considered rare weapons.

Which brings me to the Rare Weapon Draw! I actually love this and it has tempted me to buy stuff just to get more draws. My first draw was the Blitz Sword from Final Fantasy VIII which allowed me to decimate everything. I like getting rare weapons and remembering when I got them in the series. It's probably my favorite part of the game. However, you are encumbered with so much gear after dungeons you feel like you are drowning. I'm a big fan of Borderlands and lots of loot, but this...this is too much.

The equipment is all up-gradable...for a fee (a hefty one sometimes). At first I found it really interesting, but it soon became busy work to just clear space in my inventory. I was blowing thousands of gil just bastardizing one piece of equipment with another. I did it so many times that I'm sure the original weapon was no longer evident. Soon I said screw it and started selling the equipment so I could hone my abilities or create some whenever I got enough gil.

The abilities are interesting, but I feel as if there are so many that I get paralysis looking at all of them. However, the abilities take so many damn orbs to create that it's hard to keep up. I'm on Lv. 25 and my Black Mage still has the Fire spell that he started with. I just have absolutely no ambition to grind on this game. The loading screens take so much time and going into a realm is a chore. Not too mention everytime I go to a dungeon it uses stamina. I would rather use the stamina to go to new dungeons and realms instead of revisiting old dungeons I have no interest in. This is weird because I typically have no problem grinding until I've put every beast onto the endangered species list. I just find grinding in this game to be...frankly worthless.

I want to continue to play, but the interface is so slow and clunky that it feels like I'm navigating channels on cable. There's always ads being displayed to me about events. There is so much going on the home screen it is claustrophobia inducing. I don't think they could cram anything else onto the screen. The battle screen is nice however. The backgrounds and enemies remind of the older NES games which were beautiful in their own right.

Overall...I want to like this game...but I can't. I will keep playing to see if changes my opinion, but I doubt it. I commend Square for taking on the challenge, but I feel as if they tried to put too much Final Fantasy into a mobile game. To me it doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game, it doesn't have the magic I was hoping it would have. Instead I feel it is a marketing ploy to get people to buy the series. Some may call that clever, but I find it cheap. I know this is mostly negative, but I do think it is fun for the first ten minutes, but after that, things feel more like chores than a game.