Thursday, July 14, 2016

Final Fantasy Brave Exvious Review


Hey what’s up everyone?  Chukkaque here and welcome to another game review.  Final Fantasy Brave Exvious was released on June 30th for Android and iOS devices as a free to download app with in app purchases.  Per usual I will be going over a variety of topics pertaining to this title.  Those topics include:

  1. Pricing
  2. Controls
  3. Story
  4. Music
  5. Graphics
  6. Is this a Pay to Win?
  7. Overall Thoughts
  8. Final Grade

Please note I was playing this on my Samsung S7 Edge.

Pricing: 7/10

First off this is a FREE app.  Yup that’s right.  You can download a Final Fantasy title for free from the app story.  Inside it there are in app purchases that can range from $0.99USD to $75 USD.  Are they worth it?  That depends if you’re someone who is okay with “paying to play a phone game”.  I purchased the starter bundle for $3.99.  It came with 1,000 lapis, a couple summon tickets.  To me paying a couple bucks to support the developer isn’t a big deal.  They have other bundles that range from helping boost levels on your characters to giving you in game items such as gold and crystal armor, if I remember correctly.  But from what I saw you could probably finish this campaign without any purchases, so that’s good.  The bundles are relatively good for their prices.  I personally would like to see a bigger “savings” if I were to buy a higher bundle.

Controls: 7/10

The controls for the most part are okay.  You can choose whether you want to slide your thumb anywhere on the screen and get a virtual joystick.  You can move in 8 directions.  You also have the option of tapping to move, which can be toggled on and off.  I wasn’t a big fan of how it moved.  It felt a little clunky and more often than not the character would move diagonally when I wanted to go straight.  I think this game would benefit greatly from controller support, and I’d probably enjoy it a lot more if it did.

In battle you need to swipe right use abilities, left to use items, down to guard, and it defaults to attack.  But if you queued a different action and wanted attack again you could just swipe up.  Overall it’s pretty good.  The touch screen can be sensitive and more often than not I went to swipe and the unit thinks I’m sending it to attack.  Because if you just tap the unit, it does its action.

There’s an auto battle function where everyone physically attacks which is nice when you’re in low level areas, but if would be better if it would remember that it’s in auto battle so you didn’t have to press it for every encounter you go into.

There is also a repeat button to repeat actions.  Great when using abilities over attacks, but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to utilize this since you would need to change abilities or magic up pretty frequently.

Otherwise the overall menu system works great.  No problems there.

Story: 7/10

The story starts out really lack luster to me.  It sort of gets you going in the first 10 minutes, but after that it takes a good while to pick up again.  I wasn’t finding myself enjoying the story again until after maybe 10 hours.  They make a lot of pointless conversation in between stages.  To me I found in boring and filler, but again around that 8-10 hour mark I started enjoying it a little more.

Summons take a FFV/FFVIII approach to where you need to find and conquer them in order to use them.  I actually enjoyed that a lot.  In fact, I would’ve missed one esper altogether if I didn’t make sure to talk to everyone in a certain town.

The quest system is interesting.  Thankfully you can pick up as many quests as you like.  Or I think anyway, I never encounter a limit issue.  Some quests are interesting, others are boring.  Some require you to grind our hard to find items in past locations which can be really difficult.  A lot of enemies drop a lot of items.  So it can be tough to remember who drops what and where, especially if you’re one of those folks who has to do everything.

The game uses in game energy.  But until you hit Rank 4 everything is free.  After that you can essentially do 3-4 stages before having to wait to fill back up.  Every time you level up your energy goes up +1 and it refills the entire gauge.

As you progress through the story you open up locked side things you can do from the main menu.  But for the sake of spoilers I won’t mention them.  But they are definitely really cool!  I spent a lot of my time side tracked by those additional items than I did in the story.

Music: N/A

Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to the soundtrack much to dang near at all when playing this title.  So I can’t really comment on the soundtrack, sorry about that!

Graphics: 8/10

So the sprites look great, the world looks really nice.  Bright and vibrant colors, good animations.  They have a lot of characters too and they have casting, standing, attacking, preparing to attack, weak, victory, and dead animations.  My only issues are that it seems the sprites move at 20 FPS especially in combat.  Not sure why they are not fully animated to 30 or 60.  When I entered big maps the game would drop frames like crazy and be almost unplayable.  But I did notice after an update it appeared to resolve most of that issue.  So I bumped the score up a little because they appeared to have solved that problem.

Pay to win?: 8/10

Thankfully this game does not feel like a pay to win app.  I honestly felt that I could likely play this entire game as a normal Final Fantasy title.  I’d have to grind at some points since the difficulty would pick up, and there were a lot of ways to get lapis and summon tickets to expand your party.  The only downside is that there is a limit on items, materials, characters, and friends.  Items, equipment, and characters I felt was okay the way it was.  But I probably spent 500 lapis expanding my materials so I wouldn’t have to spend, sell, or trash them.  I didn’t bother expanding my friends though, 20 was good enough.

Overall thoughts: Hours: 15-20ish

In general, I think Final Fantasy Brave Exvious was a pretty dang good game, especially for a mobile title!  The story started strong, got a little weak, but it started to pick up again.  To me I felt like the story was going to go in a fantastic direction and keep me interested until the end!  The only reason it didn’t was for the sake of time in my real life.  The combat system was a refreshing twist from the mobile series previous titles of Record Keeper, All the Brave, and Airship brigade.  I didn’t feel like I had to fork over cash to enjoy the content, I only did to support the developer and because I felt it was a good deal.  I liked the amount of original characters the game had as well as the amount of old characters you could summon into the game!  The story didn’t stand out as anything new to me since many Final Fantasy titles, and stories, play up the general feel for this title.  Doesn’t make it a bad story, I just felt I’ve seen it enough at this point.

Final Grade:

If you’re a fan of phone RPGs or games such as Summoner’s War, then you’ll like enjoy this title too.  8/10

If you’re not big into phone games but enjoy RPG’s you’ll get annoyed by the energy restrictions, but in general I think you’ll enjoy it.  7/10

If you’ve never played a game like this before I think it might be a bit overwhelming for some folks.  Granted you slowly unlock the optional content and the gameplay is easy enough it could easily lose its audience, especially a brand new player due to how slow and uninteresting the beginning can be.  7/10.

If you’re a Final Fantasy fan looking for another great title in the series this game actually does okay.  It’s not the worst, it’s not the best, but it’s certainly pretty good.  7/10.

Thanks for reading my review, hope you guys enjoyed it.  If there’s anything you’d like to see me review, feel free to drop a comment down below and let me know what you guys think of Final Fantasy Brave Exvious!

As always I’ll see you guys in the next review.  See ya!

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