I really wanted to play a handheld platformer, but I didn't have any to play, so I decided to chew up some time with some lengthy RPGs until I get enough budget to add some platformers to my collection. The first one that I decided to play was a Final Fantasy game released for the 3DS in 2016 (in North America), Final Fantasy Explorers.
The game is essentially, as far as I can tell from reviews, a pretty shameless ripoff of the Monster Hunter series, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to play it. I don't have any Monster Hunter games, but was thinking about getting Monster Hunter: World for PS4, but wanted to cut my teeth on a similar game I'd actually played before forking over the cash for a newer game. Plus, I just really like Final Fantasy.
For those like me who were unaware, the basic Monster Hunter framework is that of an action RPG, except for the wrinkle that your character doesn't develop according to traditional RPG mechanics. The path towards greatness in Monster Hunter is that killing enemies while doing quests yields you lots of materials which you must combine to create new weapons and armor, or upgrade your current weapons and armor. This gives the game a certain grindy nature to it that definitely feels like a classic Square/Enix RPG, but also allows you to customize the type of character you want to be by forcing you to spend your limited materials to advance your character in the desired direction. So if you want to develop your character to be like mine, a damage dealing Monk, then you'll need to spend your materials to craft knuckles to improve his power, and not worry as much about his armor until it becomes a grave danger to your existence. Your strength is measured in equipment level, rather than in level, which is definitely different than most RPGs which have a persistent measure of strength with armor layered on top of it. In Monster Hunter, all you are is your equipment, so you had best choose wisely!
I'm not sure about all of the differences between Final Fantasy Explorers and the Monster Hunter series, although I sure there must be some. The most obvious differences are in setting and recurring characters, and Final Fantasy Explorers certainly delivers plenty of fan service for long standing fans of the series like myself. You'll encounter chocobos, cactuars, iron giants, lamias, and plenty of other standard enemies from the series throughout your journey through your new world. Your main quest revolves around better learning to harness power from the crystals to fully explore your world (shocker). The main bosses in the game are your classic summons from the series, including Ifrit, Ramuh, Shiva, Bahamut, and Alexander. You can equip magicite from other worlds to temporarily become classic Final Fantasy characters, including Cloud, Squall, Yuna, Cecil, and Aeris (don't start with that Aerith nonsense). All of these elements put a shiny Final Fantasy veneer onto the game that will definitely make it a good entrance point to the genre for the Final Fantasy fan.
The character progression felt a bit stilted to me. It was pretty rare that I failed to complete a mission on the first try, making it far less important to me to be continually upgrading my equipment. If you did happen to die, you'd be penalized by losing 5 minutes off of your mission timer, which meant very little, as each mission lasted nearly a half hour. I barely bothered trying to avoid or heal damage throughout, as I could just put out as much damage as possible, die, come back to life with full health, rinse, and repeat. Keep in mind that this is a game that is intended to be played online with friends, so the fact that I was able to clear out the entire main quest without any help and with very little damage mitigation is a sign that the game was just too easy. Perhaps even more damaging, even when you finally got a new item or skill, or seriously upgraded your old ones, the difference would be very slight, which definitely discouraged the player to engage with the process of developing their character gradually. The basic process for me was to clear out every mission of a certain star level, then blow all of my materials to take a huge leap forward for the next level of difficulty, which was frankly a bit boring, as each star level features from between 5 to 20 missions, each of which will take you at least 15 minutes. It felt needlessly grindy in this, as the rewards for completion weren't very impactful, and by the time you'd get to the next difficulty level, all of the gear you'd been building for was now very outdated by the newer released items (which were then unattainable because they required higher level loot).
The controls of the game were fine, but they were definitely not ideal. A game like this really needed a good camera control mechanism, and this game had a pretty poor one. Despite being playable on the New 3DS, which has a control stick/nub that would be ideal for this kind of game (I believe it's usable on the newest Monster Hunter on the 3DS), this feature is completely unused in Final Fantasy Explorers. You do have a button to lock the camera behind you, and also to lock on to a nearby target, but this lock on button only will lock on to the biggest enemy nearby, which gets annoying for me, as I like to focus on picking off the weaklings and then turning my attention to the big guys after that. In order to link onto the smaller enemies, you had to use the touchscreen, which was beyond irritating. The actual combat mechanics themselves were fun, though, featuring a Diablo-esque flow in which you burn all of your resources casting your abilities, and then fill your meter back up with basic attacks, only to burn it all again in a flurry of damage.
The music and sound was frankly unremarkable. I literally have no remarks.
This game was shiny, fun, and not terribly impressive. From what I've heard, most of the Monster Hunter games are better versions of this, and I enjoyed it enough to dip my toes into the Monster Hunter water if I find a good deal out there in the wild, but I'm not exactly rushing into it. But it wasn't bad by any stretch, just an average game in a sea of action RPGs. For fans of Final Fantasy, it will definitely amuse you for several hours, and you may enjoy it enough to put in the 20 hours necessary to complete the main story. But I can't see people, other than the most hardcore fans of the genre, putting in the hours and hours necessarily to do all of the end game tasks that come with the game, unless you also had a few friends who wanted to play along with you. I'll give it a 7.8/10.
My next game will be yet another time burning RPG, and will be an especially trick teaser!
-TRO
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