Final Fantasy: All the Bravest (Android)

First thing you must do if you're planning to play this game, set your expectations low and you will have fun.  The best part of this game has to be the throwbacks to the past of Final Fantasy.  This game is like a celebration of the history of the franchise, from the familiar music to the monsters and bosses.  Some of the more iconic bosses make appearances and it's pretty sweet when you recognise them (same goes with the music.  The graphics (pixel sprites) also brings back nostalgia.  The game has a world map of sorts but it's really more of a level select screen rather than a free roaming map, this means that the game is super linear.

Onto the battle system, which is the meat of this game (and of most Final Fantasy games).  This is one of the more negatively received aspects of the game (the other are the in-app purchases).  The battle system is super basic, tap on a character and it attacks.  It's easy but it also gets boring fast, the only thing that is positive is the large number of characters in your party that you use to fight.  It's cool (at least in the beginning) to slide our finger across the characters and you see ten to thirty of them attack at once dealing 100's to 1000's of damage at each hit.  Sadly, it doesn't get any deeper and you get through all battles by sliding your finger up and down.  At least it's visually spectacular, but it gets really busy towards the end of the game where you have a party of 30+ characters.  Especially due to the huge amount of effects happening, with accompanying sound effects, you can't enjoy the amazing battle music, which is a huge shame. The game has all these animations, designs and actions that feel like a classic Final Fantasy game but the simplistic battle system does a horrendous job of making this game fun and captivating.  There was a lot of potential for this kind of throwback game but the execution is seriously lacking.

So while normal battles are fine, the boss battles are not as there are difficulty spikes (basically, all enemies in this game are damage sponges, with bosses being extremely so), decimating your party and if your whole party goes (each party member dies in one hit, hence the large amount of characters at any one time) you either have to use an item to revive them all (you get nine of them for free but then after you use them all, you have to start purchasing them with real money, you actually earn the in-game money 'gil' but it's for show and can't use it to buy anything...) or you wait three minutes for each character to revive which is pretty disappointing as it feels like a major money grabber (on a full 40 character party, it'll take 2 hours for your whole team to revive).  Okay, so the ability to wait it out (e.g. turn off your phone and do other stuff for a few hours) and then come back right where you left off (i.e. you don't have to beat enemies in one go) makes the game much easier than you'd want but at the cost of artificially extending the game time.  There is no real penalty for getting your party wiped out other than the inconvenience of time (this breaks the flow of the game though because if you wanted to play a long session, you either wait it out and keep attacking once your party revives or return to the map and grind up a few levels).

The last dungeon is designed to wipe out your party and force you to wait or use in-app purchases.  Good thing is that you can circumvent this by rigging the time on your phone.  Fast forward it to a few hours ahead and voila, your party is revived.  One thing to note is that the game seems to remember the dates and times when it got refreshed, so if you set your time back to the correct one, you might not get the three-hourly bonus as the game thinks the 'last' time you got it was in the 'future'.  A lot of the game's mechanics are also randomized.  This randomness in the statistics and battle mechanics dull you after a while.  You can't choose which enemy to attack, you can't choose the makeup of your party and you can't buy specific weapons (instead, in classic RPG style, all weapons are randomized drops... which provide cumulative stat increases, you don't get to equip them at all).  All you have in control of is shifting your finger up and down and watching the characters attack (while it is pretty with all the battle effects flying about, it can only do so much before you get bored).

If you're going into this hoping for some sort of story, you will be disappointed.  There is literally no story here, only a prologue which is one small screen of text when you launch the game and when it ends.  It is one battle strung after another and the only explanation is that all the heroes from different eras joined forces to defeat these monsters.  I'm not going to cover the in-app purchases that much, the less said about them, the better.  On Android, the game is free so it's easier to stomach.  So, you can buy hourglasses to revive your party (but you never will have to buy this due to the workaround mentioned earlier), buy extra characters (chosen at random) and buy additional dungeons (which are just more battles).  They're not exactly value for money considering that they don't add anything new to the base game.  One of the more addictive areas of the game is trying to complete it 100%, collecting all weapons and encountering all monsters (and an achievement system of sorts in which you earn up to three stars for things such as maximum damage done in 'fever' mode, party size and gil earned).  Overall, the game is quite short, clocking in at around two hours if you use the time rigging trick.  If you can get over the fact that it's a simple battle system designed to pass the time and not invoke any serious thoughts, this can be some mindless fun (even if just for the visual spectacle itself).  That said, the final boss was a real drag...

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