I’ve been having a sporadic go at Final Fantasy Record Keeper on mobile recently. I sort of like it, but I also sort of think it’s rubbish. It’s hard to say which opinion carries the greater weight at the moment.
For the unfamiliar, Record Keeper is a Final Fantasy fanservice game in that it allows you, as an original (and rather dull) character created specifically for the game, to venture into the worlds of most of the mainline Final Fantasy games from I-XIV and engage in some of the iconic battles from the series. Major plot beats are presented as “dungeons” in which you have to complete several different stages concluding with a boss fight against a boss from that point in the original game, complete with its original attack patterns.
As you progress through the game, you unlock various characters from Final Fantasy history, and you’re encouraged to swap them around and experiment with different party combinations, as a character running a dungeon from their “own” game gets significant bonuses. You can then get equipment — again, sourced from all the various games — and give them to characters to power them up and make them stronger, as well as crafting “ability orbs” that allow them to cast spells and skills that deal more damage or have special effects.
There’s actually quite a lot to it, but the fact that it’s a free-to-play mobile game means that it’s riddled with irritating features. Firstly and perhaps most significantly is the fact that it’s entirely dependent on being online, with painfully sluggish menus and lengthy load times, even when the game has cached its data. Worse, if your network connection flakes out while you’re playing, the whole game freezes until connectivity is restored, even if you’re in the middle of battle.
Then there’s the social features, which actually weren’t in the game when it originally launched. As is usually the case in mobile games of this type, you have the opportunity to “borrow” another player’s showcase character when you run a dungeon, and make use of their special ability a limited number of times during the dungeon. A nice idea, for sure, but completely unbalanced; most other players are well above my current level and consequently inflict one-hit kills on bosses, making strategic play unnecessary. It would perhaps be better if you were matched with players who were of a similar level or amount of progress through the game to you.
Free-to-play also means gacha, and in this case that comes in the form of the “relics”, the equipment you give to your characters. Rather than purchasing these from a shop, you “draw” them, either one crap one for free per day or a chance at better ones if you spend money or use the rarer “Mythril” currency you acquire through playing. Relics can be levelled up and upgraded in rarity independently of characters, so the main metagame comes from collecting and fusing these items together to form a powerful (overpowered?) party to challenge the content in the game.
There’s a lot to dislike about Final Fantasy Record Keeper, but a lot to like, too; the developers are clearly very much in love with Final Fantasy as a whole, incorporating authentic graphics, sound, music and animations into the game. The fact that the boss fights make use of authentic attack patterns — even from less “conventional” Final Fantasies such as XIV — is a really nice touch for longstanding fans of the series, and the Relic and Ability systems provide plenty of scope for customising and upgrading characters.
It’s a nice idea, in other words; I’m just not sure that a free-to-play mobile game was quite the optimal way to do this. Still, it’s significantly better than many other mobile games I’ve fiddled with in the past, so I’ll give it a chance for a bit longer and see if it holds my interest.
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