[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.

[Coda]

So... I make that post after being like three weeks into the game, and I finally come across a fight in the colosseum that's hard enough to make me have to strategize. XD The Mahadeva is a lot harder when you're down a party member (no ally leaders in the colosseum) and it does a TON of damage and throws around blindness attacks.

Switched Lasswell into more defensively-oriented armor (he had been wearing +atk armor) and equipped blindness-protection accessories, and Rydia STILL died before the battle was finally over.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

I have it downloaded on my phone, but I haven't even loaded it up yet. In your estimation, Coda, if I have a 3-year-old/~$500 account on Brave Frontier, am I missing much if I skip this one? I don't really know if I have the motivation or attention span or disposable income for another of these games. I'm finding the FF nostalgia strangely ineffective in convincing me to play it.

[Coda]

I haven't played Brave Frontier to be able to compare them. Third-party comments I've seen suggest the game feels more like Final Fantasy than Brave Frontier, especially in terms of the combat system.

It's hard to tell how much nostalgia plays into my own opinion, because my opinion consistently has been that FF6 was the peak of the series and I find it difficult to associate the more recent games with my mental concept of "Final Fantasy." So is it nostalgia, or is it just a style of game that I like better? Not sure how I could answer that objectively.

I wouldn't worry about disposable income, though. I've put a grand total of $6 into the game so far -- $5 to pick up the starter bundle (that turned out to be relatively unnecessary) and $1 to make the "new items" bubble go away because I'm compulsive >.>; As I said, the game's difficulty curve to date is such that you really don't NEED the in-app purchases.

As for attention span... The story parts are paced well in terms of timing (though the story itself feels like it drags a bit in the desert area) and the grindy stuff I mentioned is completely optional and just running the daily quests is enough to keep your party at a reasonable level. (In fact, the gameplay might be more satisfying if you DON'T grind.)

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Hmm, okay. When it was in development I remember everyone thinking it was just going to be BF with FF characters (same developer), but I guess it must have evolved in production.

And it's weird, I feel the same way about 6 being the peak and the new games drifting from the identity of the series, I just for whatever reason am not finding the prospect of collecting the various characters I grew up with all that exciting. Couldn't tell you why.

I might end up giving it a try, though some of those "unnecessary" mechanics you mentioned are a little off-putting. I'd worry about them becoming more relevant in the future; one of the reasons I stuck with BF for so long is because I find it to be the most fair ftp rpg out there by far, in terms of paywalls.

But, I'm fully prepared to believe Exvius is a good game at it's core, we'll see if I can't get interested in it.

[Coda]

If you think BF was fair then I would definitely assert that FFBE is extremely fair. As I said, the game appears to be balanced around the non-IAP playstyle.

The idea of collecting characters is almost entirely cosmetic. My party started with Rain and Lasswell, the core characters you always get, and then I got Biggs, Wedge, and Magitek Armor Terra from the new-player promotion, then normal gameplay got me enough Lapis to roll a few rare summons and I got Krile and Rydia (who replaced Biggs and Wedge) and that's been my party ever since. I've rolled a couple more times just from daily bonus summon tickets so I got Golbez (one of the top-tier summons) but I haven't used him, and I've been rolling the friend-point summons pretty heavily because the points roll in fairly quickly and some of the stuff that drops there is good enough for gameplay but not fantastic.

The Japanese version of the game is a few months ahead of the global version and it seems that the grindy stuff is only going to be necessary if you want to compete in the PvP colosseum where every benefit you can get counts. And that's completely optional.

[Espy]

So far there haven't been many balancing issues, IMO. That's one of the main things keeping me from going back to Brave.

EDIT: Coda, you still run with Rain and Lass? My party's Rydia, Cyan, Vivi, Vaan, and Maria. I might replace Vivi with Golbez if I get him to 5*; Vivi caps at 4.

[Coda]

They're actually pretty good. ExviusWiki gives Lasswell a 7.0 on a scale that puts Chizuru at 8.5, and Rain a 6.5. I'm more surprised you haven't commented on my use of Magitek Armor Terra, who actually IS underpowered.

Lasswell has REALLY high ATK as long as you don't have Chizuru hogging the Murasame (and I don't have Chizuru), and he has three ability slots (one of which I have filled with ATK+10%). Tranquility makes for a great bread-and-butter attack and Fingersnap is situationally very useful. Once Ramuh comes out later this week I'm going to put him on Rydia so I can move Ifrit to Lasswell for Raging Fist and even more ATK bonuses. His weakness is that that's the ONLY thing he's good at (he's annoyingly squishy for a heavy-armor user...) but considering that this game's mechanics end up with ATK generally being the most important stat that's not THAT awful.

Rain is a poor man's Cecil, especially if you give him Golem. High HP, high DEF, Cover, Counter, Power Break, and if you add in Golem even higher HP and DEF as well as Provoke. He's also got good enough SPR to throw Cure around with reasonable effectiveness in a pinch. His only real weakness is that he doesn't excel in any one thing.

I really ought to put Mental Break on one of the two (probably Rain) for the purposes of helping out against high-DEF enemies.

[Espy]

My brain can't handle logistics right now, but damn, I'm still waiting to draw Cecil and Kain.

[Coda]

I'm not especially impressed by Kain. He's a defensively-oriented character with a crap movepool. :(

[Espy]

Well, for the nostalgia factor.

[Coda]

Oh, that's totally fine then. Krile earned herself a spot on my team for exactly that reason, and that was before I found out that she's actually one of the best options I could have picked.

[Coda]

I wasn't specifically TRYING to, but I've got my main team all max-awakened and max-leveled now. I also finished the storyline for Kolobos and I am once again waiting for more content. ^^()

But I've started working on leveling up some new characters. I've got Golbez, Tellah, Sabin, Edgar, Galuf, and Zidane in progress; Golbez and Sabin have hit max level but I'm out of Sacred Crystals to awaken them.

I'm also out of Farplane Souls trying to make Void Vessels. GOOD GRIEF, where are you supposed to get enough mats to make the Rod of Gravity? I've only ever seen ONE demon heart EVER and these things need EIGHTY!

EDIT: Oh geez, they only drop from Demons Unleashed?!

[Coda]

Well, I finally swapped out someone on my main team -- Tellah turned out to do everything Rydia could do, and do it better.

I really need to get a Vaan or a Warrior of Light. Full Break is, like, the ONLY way to get through these bosses in the current event...

[Rihee]

I use to play but my phone crapped out on me and so I lost all my data x.x I thought I did the transfer thing but nope. Guess I did it wrong. It wouldn't take so i'm starting all over. I haven't played it as much since because I was pretty upset that I lost all my people XD

[Coda]

If you connected your account to Facebook then logging in should be the only thing you need to do.