I played for a few days and then quit. The core mechanic is good, and I would have happily bought a $10 game based around it, but everything is rigidly geared around endless grinding, miniscule drop rates, and real-money purchases.
While there does seem to be some grind (looming ever nearer as I progress down the story line), I’m actually surprised at how little they seem to want real-money purchases. There doesn’t seem to be any way to acquire the level-up items via real money transactions, and that seems to be one of the prime barriers to progression.
I don’t really read it as grind, since I mostly treat the battles like Bejeweled or a crossword puzzle. Yes, they’re same-y little puzzles, but they’re just there to kill time. I don’t expect that much variation.
I suspect there’s eventually difficulty walls you really need to grind to level past that I haven’t hit yet though, and replaying literally the same battles doesn’t seem very appealing.
I also never felt the need to give them money, but that’s because I don’t have a lot of time to play. Spending money gets me energy that I can only convert to either more characters or more stamina==more playtime. But then I still have to spend time to play to level characters up.
I guess it’s not like other F2P games where paying money gets you the 1-push win button. There is no such thing here.
The XP curve here is such that the characters will fall behind if you only play new story levels. You must either repeat them, or wait for the Metal levels to open up (several hours a day) to gain much more XP (maybe 10x normal).
(If they start selling Metal Tickets, then this becomes pay to level up. Well, maybe not…you still have to play the metal levels…)
Yeah, I should clarify that I never felt any need to give them money, and never had a hard time progressing through the part of the campaign that I played. But the systems left a bad taste in my mouth.
-Here’s a couple named characters with interesting abilities. Now fill out the rest of your party with generic, boring scrubs unless you pay up.
-Want to advance your characters? Story missions give minimal experience and loot, so arrange your calendar around the specific one-hour windows that the metal/item zones are open, then grind those missions over and over.
-Here’s a special limited-time event dungeon with a new character to recruit! But the drop rate is so low that you can run through it a half-dozen times and wind up with nothing.
I was playing this solidly for a few weeks, but the soft launch of gems of war changed that.
I’m on Chapter 23. Was sailing through the story content until Chapter 16, struggled through to Chapter 21, but had to take a week off to grind for materials and experience at level 21-7 (boss could one-shot my whole team). Now my guys are all on their third jobs and level 50-60. Makes things a lot easier. Also was fortunate enough to roll an SS-rank mage who can nuke pretty much the whole screen.
Game is okay. At some point there will be content where you have to carefully manage buffs and debuffs and stuff to win, but until you unlock all your abilities and/or make it a bit farther it’s really just about lining stuff up, trying to do as much damage as possible, and healing (and then force-closing the app and retrying if you mess up). Controls feel really floaty at times (but fine at other times - not sure why).
It didn’t take me long at all to get more than enough for a full team of named characters with interesting abilities. You get one free roll a week, a few from story missions, quite a bit of energy from your first ten days of playing, and every now and then they’ll send a bit in the mail. I never bothered leveling up the generic, boring scrubs at all.
-Want to advance your characters? Story missions give minimal experience and loot, so arrange your calendar around the specific one-hour windows that the metal/item zones are open, then grind those missions over and over.
There actually are missions that give decent experience and loot (15-9, 20-1, a couple earlier), but either way it’s going to be a grind, yes.
-Here’s a special limited-time event dungeon with a new character to recruit! But the drop rate is so low that you can run through it a half-dozen times and wind up with nothing.
If you’re at all serious about the game, you kinda have to use the Save/Load method to farm drops (which is dumb, yes) - make a backup of your save file on Floor 9, kill dragon on Floor 10, if you don’t get drop quit the game, restore backup, and try again. Got Bahamut on my first try, but it took about 9 kills to get the second stage evolution material.
Edit: Also, the skill system is totally broken since each character’s “Skill Boost %” is additive. So once you get to 70%, all your skills will fire every turn. I imagine that will change in the near future.
Yeah, that part was probably my luck, as my first few rolls got me three copies each of the same two characters, which gave them level and skill bonuses but left open gaps in the party composition. Though since the generic characters are mostly unnecessary and useless, it does beg the question of why have them there at all, or for that matter why have gold if that’s all you can get with it.
“You can partially mitigate bad design with save-scum exploits!” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement in my book :)
Yeah, there are a lot of weird design choices in the game. There are two or three good characters you can get from the gold pact tavern thing (and a couple monsters that have niche use - you could make a decent wyvern team if you really wanted), but burying them under a mountain of useless crap you have to dig through first makes me not want to bother. And people think the save-scum exploits will get patched out, but either it’s difficult to do so or Mistwalker is okay with them for now.
I’ll probably beat the Story content and then put it aside for a while until it gets fleshed out a little more.
tl;dr Android version downloaded more than IOS; more popular in specific countries than others.
Apparently TerraBattleForum.com recently split out separate foreign language sections. The top languages, unsurprisingly, are French and Spanish. (Japanese is very small, although I assume Japanese players have their own Japanese language forums).
I’m surprised so many people are throwing money at the game already. I’ve never felt a need, but maybe I was slightly lucky on rolls. You should be able to beat the game with whatever you end up getting and then there just isn’t any more difficult content to need to create an optimal party for. Maybe some day, but not yet. I guess if you were really into the game it might be worth paying for stamina refreshes.
In other news, I’m on Chapter 29 and have pretty much been rolling since stopping to grind up some jobs and levels after failing on 21-7. Might need to grind up one more character for debuff removal for 31-10, but getting there shouldn’t be too bad.