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Wednesday 14 January 2015

Final Fantasy Record Keeper

Another smartphone game which I am playing now is Final Fantasy Record Keeper.
As usual, it's only on the Japanese app store.
You can sign up for an account by registering a local address.
The official site is http://ffrk.jp/



So why this over FF Agito and the FFVII bike game?
Firstly, it's less repetitive. The above two titles were very very repetitive.
Literally, I had to play the same thing over and over and over again and I hated that.

This game brings you back to a very old game playing style that has all the mobile app game elements to it. It also hardsells nostalgia and that is very hard to resist for a guy with a long history with the title Final Fantasy. To make things even for all the titles, they pixelized everyone, throw in music from every title, put in monsters and bosses from the titles that when you look at them and if you played the respective titles, you would recognize in an instant and would probably have a mini flashback of somesort. The FFVIII parts hit me very hard as that was the first FF title I played. It was very exciting to see some of the boss fights like Ifreet from the first cave.



The game element is simple.
You have a party of 5 characters, each can be equipped with an offensive item, a defensive item, a carry item and 2 abilities.
Each character has its own set of what he can be equipped with exception to the main character who is a swiss army knife but has bad stats. A jack of all trades but a master of none is a very appropriate saying for him.
I can have a white mage with a rod, a cloak, an amulet with Cure and Cura. Etc.

Each character has a limit break ability but is usually crappy. They are all unusually crappy for a limit break by the way.
Some items have limit break skills in them that are either character specific or universal and these limit break skills are much better in terms of damage/effect.
You get these from the gacha mechanism (sadly).

Items can be leveled up using a gold color ingot for weapons, a purple color ingot for defensive items and other items. You can evolve them with 2x the same item at max level to unlock a higher level range.

You can also level up characters with Grow Eggs that feed Exp.

I came into the game late (3 months past its release) and they recently introduced a way to break past the original lvl 50 limit (to lvl 65) with a memory crystal which could be a specific stage reward or from an event stage reward (limited release essentially). Thankfully, with this new upgrade to the game, they are re-releasing the older limited characters which I have already missed so I think I can get all the characters in due time. (Yay!) The memory crystal also unlocks ability materia that can give your characters and edge in the game and these materia can be equipped unto any other character that has the memory crystal unlocked.

Anyway, the basic story line is like this:
Something is stealing away the memories of the FF games so the main character is sent to go into these memories to help preserve them.

You get to find some characters who will become usable as you go along and hopefully you'd be able to make your FF dream team.

When playing, I'd direct you to the wiki which can be interpreted using Google Chrome's rikaikun add-on if you need. It tells you what you need to know to plan your team or to beat the bosses.
Certain criteria unlock a better score so that you can get a reward for the master grade (very important) or you could just try it again after you see what the criteria is which is usually not dying to the boss or using the boss' weakness.

Also, if you put my invite code of eDSS6 into the menu -> friend invite ID, you get a mythril crystal that you need to play gacha with.
(I'd get one too as with all social games.)

I'm now training my team to unlock some ability materia while I figure out how I want to do my dream team.