Mobius Final Fantasy

I've gotten into a relatively new mobile game called Mobius Final Fantasy and I highly recommend it. It has very high quality graphics and a pretty novel interface, although the story is a bit lacking, at least at first, but they just released the second part of Chapter 3 and that's apparently only halfway through, so I'm giving it some more time to develop. The game starts off with you answering the call of your name from an unseen voice. Many others are also answering the call, the problem is, you don't know if they're wrong or you are because you are an amnesiac. Soon you meet Garland who is no help either except to suggest you help a moogle who then tells you that you may be the Warrior of Light of prophecy. At this point your options are either to follow the moogle and his prophecy or die in obscurity with the others, so you follow the moogle. You are then led around the world of Paramecia seeking Princess Sarah Cornelia who will help you fulfill your destiny of fighting Chaos and saving the world.

One minor flaw with the plot is that the game mainly consists of fighting a series of battles against monsters with less variety than the the Heartless in Kingdom Hearts. The story will bring distinct and memorable bosses, but most of the random encounters are simply facing the various "Dust" minions of Chaos, which seem to represent the three classes and the four/five elements available in the game, so the fights get repetitive. Fortunately, just about every stop along the way also features a cutscene that furthers the story, some even have voice overs that make it more real, and some areas even have a walkabout area where you get to explore a little instead of just fighting, though they do tend to be disappointingly short. This may turn out to be a good story when it's done, but expect that while you wait for the best part of the story you'll be wading through the same repetitive crap you get with every other mobile game, just with way better graphics.

As for the interface, the gameplay seems daunting during the tutorial, but once you get the hang of it it's pretty simple. Tapping the screen will have you attack an enemy, you can use target view to select your target which can be strategic once you understand the element system. When you attack, you get orbs of one of four out of five elements, determined by your job. The five elements are fire, water, air, earth and life, each job can draw life and three of the other four and those three form the element drive. By default you can use the element drive to heal with life orbs or raise defense for any of your three elements. You can also use orbs to activate abilities determined by the cards in your deck. You make your deck with four cards plus a rental card from another player. Your card pool will form most of your strategy for the game and you get the cards in two ways, the ability shop and battle drops which correspond to the monsters you fight. A word of advice, just pick your favorite abilities from the ability shop and build them up. Ability shop cards cost ability tickets, but you get more of them during regular gameplay than you'd think so just splurge to make your dream deck. Battle drops provide the same abilities as ability shop cards, but the difference is that battle drops start with the lesser version of the ability and you have to augment the cards to three star rating to get the full version, while ability shop cards come at three star and can be upgraded to four star, which battle drops can not. All of that means you should just invest in you favorite abilities from the shop to make them the best you can. Once you get the hang of that, the game is pretty easy to manage, but I've found that cornering the abilities makes the game even more interesting because there is still some strategy, and having the abilities and using them properly become two different things. There are also job cards and building them up requires skillseeds which are provided by the ability cards so you have to have the right cards to get the right seeds if you want to get the most out of your job, but don't worry, if your favorite cards from the shop don't get the right seeds, battle drop cards will fill the void and fix that problem until you get caught up.

Overall, I'd give it a 9 out of 10, the biggest drawback is that the game is so big, loading up the game takes three screens and a few minutes just to start and don't even think about doing this on anything but wi-fi, data networks will kill you, and you device will get hot from processing. Once you get over the drawbacks it it is definitely worth it and deserves its accolades for best looking mobile game.Seriously, it looks like PS4 graphics, PS2 at least, if you're a fan of recent Final Fantasy games, this is for you, like they say on the load screen, when you can't be home to play FFXV, play Mobius on the go.