Final Fantasy: All The Bravest

An anonymous user left a cryptic comment on a recent post with a link to a youtube video. It didn't look like typical spambot spam so I went and checked it out. It turns out to be a trailer for a new Final Fantasy game that looks to be completely ludicrous.

 

The name is Final Fantasy: All The Bravest, or FF:ATB. ATB also being the acronym for the Active Time Battle system introduced in Final Fantasy IV where your characters got to take actions when their individual turns were ready instead of everyone getting one action per round. From the video I don't think that's a coincidence. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but this game looks to be more in line with Progress Quest than with an actual game since it seems like you don't make choices in combat and instead your characters just attack when their turn is ready. Which is probably a good thing since in some of the clips your party has FOURTY characters. 40! There's a clip at the end where the party was 40 dragoons, all jumping in a sequence. WHAT?!? This seems simultaneously awesome and mind blowingly stupid. Just like Progress Quest!

I took a quick search for information on Google and found some very cynical reviews. It sounds like your characters actually attack when their bar fills up and when you tap them on your iPod's touch screen, so it's a frantic screen mashing game. Ok, sounds reasonable. It is also, apparently a complete cash hog. It sounds like Square Enix took a page out of Zynga's playbook. First you pay $4 for the game. Then you can get iconic FF characters to join your party, but only if you pay a dollar first. And you get one of 35 at random. So while I really want Squall, I'm probably shelling out $18 to get him. Or maybe the full $35 if I'm unlucky. Then there are different iconic worlds to play in, but only if you pay $4 each. Oh, and in combat when the enemy attacks he knocks a guy out and you get to rez one character every 3 minutes. Or you can pay $3 to full rez your party 20 times.

Commenters who like the game point out that your party always rezzes to full at the start of a fight and you can run from any fight at any time. So really you only need to pay to rez your team if you really want to burn a boss down RIGHT NOW. If it actually works like that then it doesn't seem so bad. I don't know what you get when you buy extra worlds but that could be something worth paying extra for. Paying for a random iconic character seems super sketchy but if you think of it like a CCG then it's only pretty sketchy.

I donno. I don't have an iOS device so I couldn't play it even if I wanted to. I think if it has a good selection of FF music that I'd probably enjoy tooling around with it but would get bitter that I couldn't use Squall and would get frustrated with the potential 'pay to remove timers' aspect. That said, I think when I get to the end of the line I will have to borrow an iPod from someone to give this a spin. Even with all the bad points it seems tailor made for me so I'd have to give it a try.