Final Fantasy All the Bravest

Square’s newest mobile release may leave fans all but satisfied  If you’re a fan of RPGs, chances are you’re definitely a fan of Final Fantasy. The music, the story, and the characters from each game has touched the hearts of gamers for about two decades. Square Enix has ported a few titles over to the iOS platform, which have done quite well such as Final Fantasy I and II, and Final Fantasy Tactics.

So here we have Final Fantasy All the Bravest. You take all the final fantasy classes in all the classic games such as the dark mage, white mage, archers, dragoons and you put them against all the enemies in an Active (turn-based) Time Battle with up to 30 fighters on the screen. Sounds like an awesome concept right? Well that’s where the awesomeness stops.

There’s no storyline, no character development, no leveling up and no strategy involved at all. You see an enemy on the map, you go towards it and the fight begins. You have all your fighters on the screen and you attack the enemy by tapping on the characters, which will then wait their turn on when they can attack next with the time bar on top of them fills up. If they get hit once, they will die. And if you want to revive your characters, you actually have to pay with REAL money to bring them back to life or wait to come back and play again.

Your characters also can’t use any special abilities, equip different weapons, or anything that remotely resembles what you can do in an RPG. The only real strategy involved is how fast you can tap the screen. It’s nothing but senseless “button” mashing. As you play through the game, it might seem like you are making some progress and find some stat boosting items and weapons but it’s really endless fighting and more button mashing.

The 16-bit looking graphics with some classic Final Fantasy tunes playing in the background should bring back some happy memories but it’s quite tragic to see how Square Enix managed to botch what could have been a great concept. Even if you wanted to kill some time with this game and are not looking for an RPG, you would get sick of it after 10-15 minutes of mindless repetition.

This would have been an interesting concept given the nostalgic 16-bit graphics and Final Fantasy music, but having to pay to or wait to revive your team is just not worth it. If you really want a classic Final Fantasy experience, those titles are readily available on iOS and are much more worth your time and money.

Even if you wanted to kill some time with this game and are not looking for an RPG, you would get sick of it after 10-15 minutes of mindless repetition