[Coda]

I'm a little bit surprised that there's not a thread for this yet. I know at least Espy plays.

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is an interesting little free-to-play RPG. Mechanically it's a little bit more simple than your typical Final Fantasy game (there are only six stats; for comparison, FF6 has 12), and the game isn't FINISHED (by my reckoning less than 1/4 of the game's content has been released to date), but there's still a lot to do.

The graphical style is reminiscent of Final Fantasy 6, minus the limitations imposed by the SNES hardware. The music is the same fantastic quality that you would expect from a Final Fantasy game. And while the story isn't especially original (so far it feels like a cross between FF4 and FF5) the characters are entertaining and deeper than they appear at first glance.

The gameplay itself is mostly FF6 with some traits from FF7 with modern mobile RPG elements added in. Characters unlock abilities as they level up and gain skills and stats from their equipped espers like in FF6, but you have limit breaks and can also equip ability materia like in FF7. Instead of the active-time battles system that started in FF4, it alternates between the player's turn and the enemies' turn. There's an interesting combo mechanic based on the timing of the attack animations and the elementalities of the attacks. And the "Auto" battle command is nice for dealing with routine enemies.

Aside from the living human party members you get as part of the plot, the available party members are "visions" summoned up from the deceased heroes of the past. These are randomly rolled for using in-game currency (you can buy currency but you can get enough through normal gameplay) with about half the available selection being newly created for the game and the other half being drawn from past Final Fantasy games. And then like other mobile RPGs, the characters can be powered up by fusing them with other visions (though they also level up through normal gameplay) and the characters can be awakened when they reach maximum level, resetting them to level 1 and unlocking new abilities and increasing their maximum stats.

There are also some ridiculously unnecessary grinding mechanics -- and when I say "unnecessary" I mean that you can completely ignore it and it won't affect gameplay significantly. Limit breaks can level up, but it takes several hundred uses to do it and the only benefit is about a 10% damage increase per level. (And they're limit breaks, so you have to charge them up before you can use them. I've managed to get Krile's limit break up maybe halfway through the first level...) Similarly, espers can be leveled up and awakened, but getting them leveled up to awaken them requires gathering tons of magicite (which is rare) and you can unlock enough skills to make the esper worthwhile within the first ten levels, so it's not really necessary. There's a colosseum that lets you fight monsters for rewards, but it it's a ridiculous grind of literally thousands of fights to get through it all. And there's a "Trust" mechanic that rewards you with an equippable item or ability materia when you reach 100% for a given vision, but improving Trust requires either fusing the vision with a duplicate (5% bonus) or rarely getting a random 0.1% bonus when completing an area. Some of the abilities are powerful, but...

That brings me to the last downside of the game in my opinion: There's so much opportunity to power up and so many side quests and daily quests and rewards, but the content simply isn't hard enough to NEED any of it. (You can even buy equipment that's stronger than anything you can get through normal gameplay even right at the beginning, but if you did it would just remove ALL of the challenge.) I'm not even grinding the game that intently; I'm just running the daily quests every day, and my characters are nowhere close to the power level of the ally characters I can pick from my friend list, and the last boss released so far was still disappointingly easy -- one of my characters SURVIVED the boss's scripted "kill the party" attack that leads into a cut scene (it went into the cut scene anyway). I mean, I did have to actually TRY in that fight instead of just auto-battling through it, but I never felt like I was at risk of dying.

Overall though, I find the game to be worthwhile to play, but spending money on it isn't necessary. The downsides are largely ignorable, and the graphics and music make it a fantastic experience.