i wouldn’t want to further incite rage by posting a link to my game but I’ll PM and share some screens / demo with ya! it’s a pixel art narrative type light RPG adventure loosely based on some of the events in my life
Over all I guess it’s a double edged sword, for me, a person who dictates their own schedule, I like being able to pick up and grind as I see fit, for someone who works a 9/5, that might put them at a progression disadvantage as oppose to someone like me- but still, there’s other things these companies do, like start you off charging 2 stamina for a mission, and then like 40 energy for hard mode, and then trying to sell you refills for like 2 bucks for an additional 10 minutes of play. I’ve pretty much determined that no matter how much I like a game, in fact, the more that I like it, the worse it will end with an energy system, which is either me not being able to play it as much as I want OR actually paying for the refills.
Just FYI, this game is made by Rayark, Inc, which is a many-years-old, many, many multi-millions selling Tawainese outfit. They mostly make rhythm games–their recent Cytus II is, IMO, the greatest mobile game of all time–but have occasional forays into other genres like this one. I’ve been interested to try Sdorica since it released last week–it was on a notification list for me, but I haven’t had a chance to install it–so it’s good to see a review of it by a normal person.
Wanted to play this but despite it’s high quality and general praise a lot of reviews made note of its shortness vs the price tag so maybe if I see it on sale!
actually I also remember folks saying it was relatively easy and then the last boss completely spikes to holy heck in difficulty… hate getting blindsided like that in games
I’ve been playing cytus 2 a bit as well. I’m not sure how I feel about the musical aesthetic, but the rhythm mechanics seem pretty solid, and we’ll implemented for a touchscreen.
I’ve considered picking up Voez, since it seems the music may be a little more my style.
Well, this thread has been a roller coaster for me. I was looking forward to the promised bold new art style, then disappointed by the yet-another-mobile game that was offered in the thread, and then intrigued by the indie game that TacoPizzaCats is working on. Show off your indie game, cat! The people demand it. That’s way more interesting to me than another slick mobile skinner box.
Stardock makes the kind of old school games that people mostly play around these parts. There isn’t mush discussion about F2P energy timer mobile games on QT3.
Note: That is just my passive observation and not a judgment on anyone or this thread.
So, I tried this out over the weekend because I’m kind of interested in the F2P landscape. It’s…fine.
From a F2P perspective, it seems like one of the less-bad ones, in that it’s more grindy than gacha-y. There are a fixed number of characters, and it seems like the “rarity” tiers are all available through evolution of the characters. So, you need to get rare materials for upgrading them, but you don’t need to draw the Ultra-Rare character in the first place. Also, there are random gachas, but as noted above there isn’t an energy mechanic, so you’re able to grind more or less as much as you want (sort of, some of the daily challenges do have daily attempt limits). I think that you can buy additional attempts there, but the majority of the missions aren’t energy limited, so I’ll give them some credit there.
The core mechanic is the the bottom has a ~20 x 2 grid with tiles of 3 different colors, and you select groups of tiles to “pop” them and make the characters on the top half of the screen do attacks. Blocks of 1, 2, or 4 each have a different attack for each character (the block color determines which character attacks). There’s like 20+ different characters, so you have a lot of possible combinations. It works well enough, and there’s a bit of a strategy layer to it with managing grid vs. doing the attacks you want to use, but it’s also kind of boring. The fights aren’t really dynamic, so most of the challenge seems to be identifying what attacks the enemy does, and then selecting characters that mitigate or exploit that. There isn’t quite enough to do with the grid within each battle to make it interesting really, and at the end of the day it’s clear that you’re really more stat-limited by the upgrade grind than really being capable of any interesting upset with the combat mechanics.
Stylistically, it reminds me more of an Atelier game than anything else. Lots of demi-humans and spunky girl-mages, and some fairly run-of-the-mill political kingdom intrigue. The translation is good, and some of the characters are somewhat charming, but none of them are interesting enough for me to actually care about them. Some of the paper-doll-y animation reminds me a little of Vanillaware’s stuff, but the art is far less detailed, so its only a superficial comparison.
Been playing most of the day and that’s not my impression at all. I’ve pulled off some crazy last stands I didn’t think would be possible on some of the challenge quests. However, I think team composition has a lot to do with that, though, because you want to create opportunities to chain abilities if you can so you accomplish more than one thing with a move.
@tacopizzacats how far have you gotten? I was working on getting to level 25 so I could summon on the event banner, primarily with an eye toward Yamitsuki. Then I pulled Fatima from a ticket and am thinking of just holding on to the crystals for now.
It’s possible I haven’t engaged the mechanics enough and that there’s more there. My impression was that there isn’t much that you can do to actually affect disrupt the opponent’s turns, but as you say, maybe that’s something that becomes more obvious with some of the other characters.
I got to area 3 or so, maybe I’ll give it another spin.
Have you done any of the venture quests yet? They pretty much force you to figure out certain mechanics, particularly the T3 group (that’s as far as I’ve gotten)
I actually think that, though the mechanics are simple, there’s significant depth here. It reminds me of games like Puzzle Quest or Slay the Spire in that regard.
Yeah, I jut did a bunch of those, and there are some neat puzzle-type situations in there that you don’t see in the story line quests. It definitely seems that some of the more interesting interactions are gated behind later characters, though.
Dances With Heroes, which you can only do once a day, is also an interesting way to try out some of the higher rank characters and has some puzzly scenarios. A little while ago, I actually got myself into a fail state. Fortunately, you can restart as many times as you like until you beat the scenario.
I’m really having a great time with this. It’s a shame that most people around here are dismissive of gacha games. Tbh, I was too at first, and with good reason. But like everything else, f2p mobile gaming is maturing and there are some very fine titles out there now.
On top of that, the gameplay here is actually unlike anything I’ve played before. Anyone who is a puzzle rpg fan should give this a download and see if they like it.
I’ll also chime in here and say it sounds like you might have missed the 3 character specific event quests they were running, where there were 3 characters who needed to use their specifics actions to clear the quests, most of them required you to interact with the other characters as well. I BELIEVE you can still do these quests if you own the character and look at them in your roster if they have had their scenario released although you don’t get the event rewards- but character minerals to help evolve them.
Be warned though around the late 40’s a lot of stuff will start getting level locked and you’ll need to grind a bit to get to the top, leveling can’t really be advanced by any means so it’s not a pay to win feature although you can buy a treasure map that gives you an extra quest every day for a month that gives you 1500XP and some other stuff daily, but it takes over 9000 to level for me at 49 so it’s really more of a drop in the bucket big picture kind of thing than anything else.
I’ve played this enough now that I amend my previous statements. It’s pretty good, and there is enough going on with the mechanics once you start getting some of the later character abilities that strategy does matter. Making success build largely on party composition isn’t my personal favorite approach, but it’s a reasonable choice.
But, I still bristle a little at the gnawing sense that these games are wasting my time on purpose. If this was a standard 3DS / Vita game, I would probably have happily paid $30 for it and played it. I’ve certainly played worse portable games for longer. (The internet-connectivity doesn’t help, since my commute goes through some cell dead zones, but that’s relatively minor). But the knowledge that they can and will eventually want to monetize me hangs over my head at all times. Experience tells me that the grind will eventually stretch out to the point that I’ll no longer be willing to suffer it, even if it hasn’t gotten there yet.
Overall though, so far this seems about as user-friendly as a gacha-based game can be. I just wish I could pay $X and unlock everything and be done with it.
