Can Squeenix bring back a mobile gacha game… without the gacha?
I played Final Fantasy Brave Exvius… a lot. I have lots of screenshots. I can prove I played it. I even loaded up some of those desktop Android emulators so I could play it on my PC. I put a lot of money into it, too — probably the last gacha game that I did that for.
And I cannot prove it to you in this blog. It is bizarre. I stopped blogging in February of 2016. Almost immediately after, I loaded FFBE on my phone and started playing it, like this was my main game for years. And then eventually the gacha got too bad and the only purpose of the game seemed to make you pay them ungodly sums of money in order to pull the one character you absolutely needed for the latest content that was built around you having this one character, fully powered up.
All gacha games end this way, and so I quit… just before I started blogging again. So no, I can’t link back to my posts about FFBE.
But trust me, I played.
For those who aren’t familiar with Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, it was a gacha game. It is (or was) a new Final Fantasy story, dealing with finding and saving the four crystals that protect the world, and the plot eventually gets very more complicated and requiring ever more powerful heroes to meet the dangers. And the best thing was that it was a challenge, in the game, to beat every boss with a single hit. You had to set these things up while remaining alive, and then perform timed combos — you had to hit the attacks two seconds or so from the previous one to get multipliers — and BOOM.
It was really fun. The Reddit sub for FFBE was full of theorycrafters thinking of new combos, trying to take on all the content with level 1 characters, all sorts of things. But the game got too expensive to play and the international version died several years ago, and then a couple of years back, the Japanese edition followed it.
To the end, there were people playing the Japanese version illicitly — not in Japan — up to a couple years ago, when Square-Enix finally convinced the last players that they had given them enough money and shut down the game.
Anyway, don’t need to go on about that. Game is dead and gone.
Final Fantasy Resonance aims to strip out the gacha element of FFBE, and most of the 2000+ “visions” you could summon in FFBE, and leave you with just 26 Visions — the protagonists of all sixteen Final Fantasy games (Shantotto and Y’shtola from the two MMOs) plus ten others from the vast FF catalog. Instead of joining your team directly, they become essentially Magicite and power up your main characters. So the game enables synergies between the characters you know from the FF series and these new characters — Rain the tank, Lasswell the samurai etc.
How’s it going to go? I guess I will find out in November, as I pre-ordered it for the Switsh 2 immediately.
I put so much money into FFBE. Really, the $60 of the console version will be a final drop in the bucket.
50/50 they decide to start adding paid expansions that add more and more powerful Visions that are required to beat the new challenges 🙂
But we’ll see.
