Leaving behind my fears of moving from opinions to hyperbole, I have to say that FFRK represents one pillar of mobile gaming that is turning this side of my review section into a runaway train of 1/5s and 2/5s. Around the Final Fantasy nostalgia core, around the microtransactions, the energy timers, the roulettes to buy stuff, the fusion and the weird impenetrable systems designed to make money might have been an okay game only if the designers hadn't chosen to make this game excessively reliant on online.
And I don't mean that it only connects to a server when you boot it up and checks for a connection sometimes, it does that all the time, between each screen of the game. You're going to see the "now loading" screen behind your eyelids if you play this excuse for a game too long. Trying to change your equipment or to go fight a battle or to do anything is stopped by having to wait for who knows what reason. Maybe fighting piracy or validating everything server side, but aren't better ways to do that? Can't you handle the UI in a more fluid way and do the networking in the background? Do you REALLY need to 'load' every single time? And no matter what the game actually is, no matter it's flaws and merits, I'm never going to play it again simply because it was quite impossible to play.
But for the sake of thoroughness, let's go through the core concept of the game; You're a Record Keeper and you have to navigate through all the Final Fantasy games and fight emblematic battles from these classics. The mist dragon in FF4, the scorpion robot in FF7, and so forth. To do so, you have a part of memorable final fantasy characters, like Cloud, or the White Mage. You can equip gear and skills. You can craft these things as well using money and random drops from the battles. Spells can be used a limited number of times - instead of having a MP system - and the game plays with the ATB mechanics I enjoy.
Of course, being a free to play product, it's hard to really assess how the balance 'works'. Am I going to blaze through the first few fights without caring about my strategy but then hit a wall that might require me to grind for some time or pay money to get over it? Do I need to craft new weapon and fuse them? At which rate? I couldn't even tell if the energy system was fair - because I didn't play the game enough for me to run out of stamina. This should've been a great product - especially for me, being nostalgic for old FF games, but nope.
Skip this one, folks!
