Final Fantasy: Mobius review

I’ve not been shy about the reviews this year, and it’s been since another Final Fantasy game came out (Record Keeper) that I reviewed a smartphone game. If you’re curious about how that’s gone for me, I quit earlier this year when RNGesus forsook me, no longer content to prop up a freeloader.

The day before that very review, Geoff previewed Mobius. His article ended thusly:

“It will be best for everyone if it’s a quality product and if its microtransactions aren’t too severe, despite the chances of both happening being very small.”

And Geoff played the odds pretty well. In practice, Mobius is stuck in the odd position of both trying too hard and not hard enough.

As you may or may not have read back when it was in development, what sets Mobius apart from other Final Fantasy mobile games was that it was supposed to have as close to console production values as feasible on smartphone hardware.

And it wasn’t just talk, either. With series vets Yoshinori Kitase and Kazushige Nojima leading development, Squareenix was serious about making a AAA smartphone game.

However, the medium lead to all sorts of problems. I’m not talking about technical limitations; I’m talking about game design. Instead of being a great-looking handheld Square-Enix game with a heavy dose of microtransactions (a la Theaterhythm), it was a great-looking smartphone game in which you spend stamina to perform repetitive actions, grind everything that can increase your character’s attributes in battle, and occasionally watch a short cutscene.

The story of Mobius is a prequel to the original Final Fantasy. In a world identical to the game’s (it’s inconsistent whether this takes place in the same world or some parallel pocked dimension), inhabited by countless warriors, all of whom look like the Warrior of Light. Apparently, all of them have the potential to become the hero of legend, but only one will rise to that level. That one, of course, is YOU, player!

Your Warrior of Light clone isn’t a silent protagonist, but you’ll wish he were. While he dutifully marches towards destiny, he complains about not being interested in it the whole way. As much as he’d rather drag his feet and go do his own thing, he easily caves to the pressure of the various people who think this guy is the real deal. You’ll attract the company of a fairy and a moogle along they way and constantly run into Princess Sarah of Cornelia (no relation to Star Fox), the Cornelian knight Garland and a disembodied voice that starts you on the quest. You talk to them all often, but they only ever have two things to say: the next thing you must to do and that you can trust any of the others. “War and Peace,” this ain’t.

While the majority of Chapter 1 is story-heavy, but it eases up considerably once everybody has been introduced and the basics of the gameplay and the quest have been covered.

The remaining two aspects of this game are managing cards (because everything is cards these days. It seemed so novel in Baten Kaitos, but turned ridiculous around Metal Gear Ac!d) and the battles. These two will endlessly feed into each other.

Cards are your class, levels, equipment, abilities, and loot all in one. It’s rather elegant in its efficiency. It’s also the major source of monetization; you can spend real money on fake money in order to buy new cards or improve existing cards.

Each card is based on a monster and has a number of attributes. First is the card’s level. You character’s level is the total of the levels of all the cards he has equipped (up to four, for now). Your cards gain experience points in battle and by merging similar cards (for a price).

Each card is also an ability. We’ll get into abilities more when I go over the battle, but for now know that each ability matches the element of the card (Earth, Fire, Air, Water, Light, Dark and Heart — a healing and support category). For the most part, abilities fall into “attack one monster,” or “attack a tight grouping of monsters” or “attack all monsters.” Abilities have a chance to get stronger when you combine cards with the same ability.

Elements also come into play on each cards loot table. After each battle, the “elements” listed on each card you had equipped form your base loot. These element items can then be used to improve your Class cards. You have a chance to improve a card’s loot table by — you guessed it — combining cards.

Some cards also have an affinity for certain classes.

A brief primer on class cards: You’ll soon get three in the beginning of the game. Other, more powerful classes can be bought. Each class can only equip abilities of three specific elements (though the support element is unrestricted) and have certain strong and weak points.

You’ll switch classes often, as each spot on the map triggers a battle with an enemy force that could have far different elemental weakness than the space before. The game is kind enough to tip you off to what elemental attacks might be useful before starting a battle, and in time enough to re-equip, to boot. Score another one for the nice list.

As Geoff surmised, the battles draw some inspiration from Final Fantasy XII. While most of the enemies you face in CHapter 1 are pretty week, before too long you’ll be needed to stagger an enemy by hitting with abilities until its defences drop, leaving it temporarily vulnerable to all attacks (and making the elements they are weak to all the more potent.

But you can’t just use abilities willy-nilly. Your regular attacks build up a stockpile elements, and each ability costs a certain number and type of them. So long as you don’t run out of elements, you can spam your abilities (support and healing abilities additionally have a cooldown, making them trickier to plan). However, you have to be careful not to get stuck building up too many elements of a type not very useful.

To that end, the game has what it calls the Element Drive system. Instead of spending elements on abilities, you can use them to provide a defensive buff against that element. It also greatly reduces the chance of that same element spawning from your attacks for a few turns.

Success in battle depends on managing your element supply so you can fully exploit enemies whose defenses you’ve broken while keeping yourself protected. Failure is just as often the result of poor planning as it its being just plain to weak for the fight.

The battle AI is pretty good, though. It’s not the greatest at managing the cooldowns of support abilities, but for the most part it’ll fight as good as you, if not better. So good, in fact, I let it do the grinding for me when I hit a difficulty plateau in Chapter 2.

But after several days of grinding, I had not increased my power enough to be able to continue the story without cashing in every in-game currency imaginable to keep going. There is definately a wall in this game, and only the most dedicated or most lucky will overcome it without handing over some cash.

In the end, it’s easy to see why Mobius will catch players’ attention. But keeping that attention doesn’t appear to be its strong suit. Consider this a curiosity, more potential than anything. A better base game under all this dazzle could be amazing.