Initial Thoughts - Final Fantasy: Record Keeper
I have a secret to admit: I play a wide variety of those little F2P mobile games. Particularly, those time-gated “stamina” based games which vaguely resemble RPGs. I haven’t played them a lot lately because I use a four-and-a-half-year old iPod Touch as my primary interface. I’ve known about BlueStacks as an Android emulator for sometime for such games, I’ve just never bothered.
And then came Final Fantasy: Record Keeper.
I had previously played the rather lackluster Facebook Final Fantasy game, Knights of the Crystal, and attempted to play both Imaginary Range and All the Bravest. I will admit that Imaginary Range was pretty good as a mini-game and storytelling device but I’d rather not get into the mess that was All the Bravest.
That made me, perhaps, a little reticent to try Record Keeper. After all, the track record for mobile games for Final Fantasy wasn’t the greatest and I wasn’t too sure about what exactly Record Keeper was supposed to be. I’d barely been following along with it at all, in fact.
So when I installed it via BlueStacks this morning, I was somewhat surprised to see it played like a lot of other pseudo-RPGs I played in the past on my iOS device. The main difference from any I’ve played in the past being that, during combat sequences, your party defaults to being under your control; where most games of this particular sort I’ve played have always selected combat choices for you, Record Keeper allows you to give individual party members commands and select who they’re going to attack (it also features an “auto attack” option, useful for quickly clearing waves without repeated manual input).
My party after burning through the initial allotment of stamina.
At this point, I haven’t played it a whole lot – just enough to burn through my initial stamina allotment plus a bit that’s built up during battles. I’ve got one of the random relics that you can purchase with the in-game mythril currency and I’ve got a few characters from across various games. But at this point, I’m not playing it for the simplistic battle system.
I’m playing it for the music. The game “relives” moments from the Final Fantasy series by visiting the records of various worlds – and accompanies them with some beautiful versions of a number of major themes from throughout the games.
I figure I’ll keep playing this for awhile and that I’d give something a little more in-depth after a lot more playing. If anything, it can run on the side of my screen while I’m doing other things, just waiting for the occasional input.
In fact, I was still playing while I wrote this. Oh gods… someone help me.
Oh, and if you sign up to play within the first week, you’ll find a nice little bonus waiting for you: Warrior and Tidus will be available to add to your party right out of the gate. I’m unclear as to how long this particular promotion lasts, but I’ve been lead to believe it’s for the first week of the game’s North American release – so you should have a couple days yet (the game released on March 26th in the US and EU).
Initial Thoughts – Final Fantasy: Record Keeper was originally published on Stream on a Blog!
