Final Fantasy: Record Keeper (2014)

This ended service last week and surprising to me, I'm a little in my feels about it.

I have a weird relationship with Gacha games. When you don't really have many friends, the daily task and familiarity and comfort of these can sometimes becomes a stand-in, but also, you know, crippling gambling addiction. I mainly played this one and Brave Frontier. Brave Frontier went on for what felt like forever and I got sick of it pretty quickly in the last stretch, which can be expected with almost a whole year of no new content, and years after the Japanese BF server shut down. Gumi ran kind of a crappy game, but at least they gave plenty of time for people to wrap up unfinished business and whatever else they wanted.

Record Keeper was a complete surprise though. The game was going quite strong, making a sizable profit in its JP server, doing a lot less but still not too shabby, in NA. There's at least six months of new stuff on the horizon, with new play modes and abilities and what not, indicating a further continuance of content still to come, in Japan.

Well, for no reason other than ostensibly not making enough money off of doing almost nothing, DeNA decided to pull the plug for NA. I was mad because I had just made a sizeable purchase, and they certainly had no qualms waiting to pull the plug until right after a "fest" with good pulls. Plus, they were giving us three months, and I had SO. MUCH. LEFT. TO. DO. I like taking my time, building resources and characters slowly and with thought, planning out what I'd need where. And then, bam, all that planning down the drain. I probably also missed my window to get any refunds. :(

So yeah. Ephemeral game services suck. I would love if they released a standalone version of like this FFD2, but the chances are probably slimmer than nothing. I feel shitty about the money, but also the whole situation. I wound up pretty apathetic about the whole thing, and didn't do much to clear out what I had left. In the last couple days, I beat a few things I had put off, lost a few of the harder ones with arbitrary insta-kill mechanics, and now it's gone.

On the other hand, OH MY GOD I'M FINALLY FREE.

At first, the game requiring me to go through FFIV in the beginning irked me. (FFX was an option, but even if I don't care for that much less than FFIV, I need Blind for one of the boss conditions...and I don't have the candy to make Blind yet...)

But now I'm at Fabul Castle, where the boss of the dungeon is Kain.

*cracks knuckles* Now I'm excited!

It's probably in part because of joining right around Christmas and getting a ton of free goodies, but thus far Record Keeper has been way too easy. I haven't gotten that far, but all I end up doing is having Tyro and Cloud spam basic attacks for nearly a thousand damage each, all without needing to think about upgrading abilities or equipment.

I'm intrigued, but I do wish it opened up faster. I just want Josef, Edward, Cloud, Lightning, and Ramza wrecking everything together. Why you make me wait?!

I'm not sure who was playing it but I caught a glimpse of Final Fantasy Record Keeper on a website somewheres (this one) and looked it up, installed it on my phone and my bluestacks clients. A pretty fun re-living of all the final fantasies. I think I'm mostly hooked just because I like the sound track. Brings back memories!

The pan forward animation in between minor battles is a really small but nice detail, lol

Just finished all of the new content added on the 21st. The dungeons were all pretty easy cause my characters are super over-leveled from the EXP weekly dungeon. However, there was one dungeon that required me to change things up, because there was no way to master the fight without hitting the enemies weakness since its a single fight. Here's a tip for you when you reach the Final Fantasy VI dungeon - Mobliz.

First, you'll want want to farm 5 lesser black orbs and 8 lesser dark orbs. You'll use these to create Bio.

Equip it to Rydia or your Black Mage and it's all but an assured victory.

Enjoy your Mastery!