Are Games on Phones Even Real Games?
I’ve been on bit of a phone game binge lately. I want to talk about a few of them for a bit and twitter isn’t enough for all these words gushing out of my head about these monsters so here we go!
This is what the first page of my “Games” folder looks like, it’s where I keep the games I tend to jump into near daily.
As you can see, I have a soft spot for animefaceicon crap. I’m going to focus on Clash Royale, Galaxy of Heroes, Fire Emblem Heroes, and Sword Art Online Memory Defrag.
So first up, let me get my love affair with Clash Royale out of the way. When it launched I played it constantly, it was so much fun! Competitive tower defense? How unique! Eventually I hit a wall. I stopped winning matches, and I mean like, ever. I made it to Arena 4: P.E.K.K.A’s Playhouse and started losing so frequently that I fell back into Arena 3. So I finally quit and uninstalled it for the sake of my blood pressure.
It has been about a year since and I decided to download it again, and here I was still in Arena 3. However, it was fun again. I was winning most of my matches, I was unlocking my chests, it was all going good. I’m gonna start re-thinking my teams and keep on plowing through the chests, but I suspect it’ll get easy, and it’ll finally have a good grasp on how to effectively play my team, I’ll rank up in the arena and then get smacked around again and my phone will end up across the room.
I’m going to reevaluate my team a little and see if there’s anything to beef up or switch around.
One of the best things about this game is the variety of units and the different ways you can play it. My main team, pictures above is mostly aggressive, with units who mostly just charge forward. Recently I battled someone who used a team of mostly unit producing buildings, and I was really impressed with it.
It was a different way to play I didn’t quite think about.
In other adventures since I’ve reinstalled it, I received an invite to a clan, some clan based in India, I’ve forgotten the name. Anyway, a player joined after me, won three times in friendly matches, then proclaimed “Why are Indian Players so weak? I’m from Bangladesh, we are best players”. Then he was kicked from the clan. It was an interesting 15 minutes.
Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes
I’m not sure if I play this out of commitment or because I actually still enjoy it. I’ve been playing it daily for like 2 or 3 years now. I can’t even remember how long it’s been. Ive sunk a lot of time and money into it. This game is like 25% why I won’t switch away from iPhone, because the game won’t transfer between Android and iOS.
GoH is one of those “collect em all” games. You know the type. The basic premise is that people in cantina’s all over the galaxy play this game with all these different heroes, kinda like that chess thing Chewie and C3-P0 played in A New Hope. Heroes can be acquired in few different ways, a gacha pull, collecting their shards, buying them when they are featured. They all have a star ranking from 1 to 7, and using their shards, you can raise this ranking up to seven stars. It’s a long process.
Crystals are the paid currency in this, which can be used to pull gachas, reset timers, buy rare gear, etc. The game gives you a healthy amount of crystals just from logging in and playing a few of the basic daily tasks. Almost too many. I’ve got my routine down so efficiently with this game that I haven’t bought crystals or put any money into the game in over a year. I usually focus on getting a specific character and getting them to 7 star, so logging in every couple of hours, doing a few of the daily tasks and whatever I need to do to get the character shards, then log out. It hardly feels like playing any more, it’s just doing these tasks to fill up these bars. I doubt I’ll stop, it’s just a routine at this point.
They’ve recently added ships to the mix, but I’ve hardly looked at them. There’s an event going on now which adds Darth Nihilus shards, which is pretty rad. One thing the game is pretty good about is it’s character variety. Spanning most of the vast Star Wars universe with characters both popular and obscure, from KOTOR, Clone Wars, and so on. Even URoRRuR’R’R is in there.
There are three Tusken Raider units in here, and sadly he’s the only named one.
Oh and I nearly forgot! They showed R2-D2 as a playable character at E3 a couple years ago on during EA’s Star Wars montage and he’s nowhere to be seen in game yet.
You’ve probably heard too much about this one recently. Like Star Wars, one of the easiest ways to add appeal to a gacha game is to make the pulls things you recognize. Fire Emblem was kind of a no brainer here with it’s mass amount of characters that people got way too attached to in their respective game. The only real issue I have with the game personally is that the stamina costs are way too high. I know Orbs refresh your stamina and that's how the game makes money, but it’s not quite “I can play this for 10-15 minutes on my lunch break” and more “Oh, dang I’ve played two maps and my stamina is gone”.
My pulls have been pretty good, better than my girlfriend, who hasn’t pulled a single 5 star in like 5 or 6 different five character pulls. The poor girl says she’s done every time but is still playing everytime I look over.
I’ve managed to pull 4 Five Star heroes, enough for a team, even if it’s not a perfectly balanced one.
#TakumiBlessed. Ideally I’d like to get a green 5 star character, but I’m at the point where it’ll be a while before I can earn enough free orbs to do another pull and of course there's no guarantee, and the cost for ranking a 4 star to 5 is almost a little too excessive.
Truly though, I really just want a Hector because I hear he’s just as unstoppable as Takumi.
Sword Art Online: Memory Defrag
Ah SAO. I enjoyed the anime in the same way my girlfriend enjoys Law and Order: SVU. I know it’s not quality television, but it’s easy to watch and have fun doing so. At least I hope she’s aware SVU is awful. Anyways, this game is another “collect em all” with a gacha pull system and characters of various star ranking. I saved for a while and did an eleven character pull and managed to assemble a team of waifus in no time.
Which brings up an annoyance, the party has a cost, so stronger characters have a higher cost. That’s why Asuna and Lisbeth are 4 star and Silica is only 2, when I have a few more 4 and 3 star characters I’d rather be using. Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle does this too, another one I’ve been playing, and while I get why they do it, to keep the game from being too easy for people who just throw money at it, particularly in the multiplayer parts, I still dislike it when I’m mostly a solo player. Like the edgelord himself, Kirito.
What kept me interested in it for more than the first few minutes, is the menus. Weird, I know, but good menus can go a long way, and his game has snappy, quick menus that match the aesthetic designs from the anime. I’m probably hung up on this because I installed it the same day I installed Tales of Link and that game needs polish really bad. The menus are unresponsive and laggy, and the battles are just disappointing to look at. A shame because I like the combat in ToL a lot. SAO has combat that plays out by just tapping on the side of the screen the enemy is on, but it has a parry system to it as well, which keeps it interesting rather than just tapping on a screen mindlessly. Tap and hold to guard, swipe up as the enemy attacks, then switch to a different character to do a special move and a bunch of critical hits. It’s flashy and satisfying to do.
In conclusion, My phone game habits tend to fall into a few major categories: Anime Gacha and screaming at Clash Royale. I didn't talk about some of the games in my folder, such as Crash Fever, which was having a Hatsune Miku crossover event, and like SAO has very snappy menus with a nice Summer Wars/Our War Game kind of aesthetic to it. I don’t see myself sticking to it now that the Miku event is over. Love Live is still the same game it was when it launched all those years ago, and while I don’t play it often, I log in every day and save love up the free Love Gems until I hit 50 and then do the pull. Drift Girls had like a billion updates to download and I keep telling myself I’ll do it one day. These are just a few, but if you look back at my games folder, you’ll notice it’s 4 pages.
Basically what I’m saying is that I spend a lot of time charging my phone.
