It’s been far too long since ‘Arc the Lad: End of Darkness’ effectively brought the franchise to a screeching halt on the PlayStation 2 in 2005, and although the Arc series as a whole has never brought the kind of mass acclaim that other venerable RPG franchises have, it’s been time wasted for those who got to experience its other entries. Now, a mere 16 years later for those in the west, the series is seeing an attempted resurgence on mobile.
The first sequel to smash-success Kingdom Hearts wasn’t Kingdom Hearts 2, as many gamers were expecting. In fact that game was some time away from release when the Game Boy Advance received an ambitious bridging chapter in Sora’s story called Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.
It’s a miracle that we actually managed to review Suikoden IV in time for the ‘Summer of Suikoden’ fan-led event that’s currently pulling together to celebrate the series legacy and to try and convince Konami to release the remaining games onto PlayStation Network (or perhaps reopen the series for new instalments), what with the release of the game on digital services in Europe being plagued with an error that meant that the game wouldn’t load and after being pulled from PSN a complete delete and reload of the reissued game was necessary. Luckily we were able to pull our PlayStation 2 out of retirement and boot up the original disc to get the game going instead.
Heroes of Atlan isn’t a new game on the mobile scene, but it’s one of those titles that’s built on solid gameplay and continues to draw in new players whilst holding a firm grip on the game charts.
Super Quest is a light RPG experience that doesn’t really fall into any single category perfectly but best fits the Clicker (or Tapper) model. Designed around giving players a constant goal that’s visible just ahead of them and short, sharp bursts of play.
Most Card based RPGs are light on the RPG and heavy on the card game mechanics. Lost Portal bucks the trend in this regard by providing the player with a meaty RPG experience and world to explore.
Starting life as a short-lived premium purchase on the iStore, Mighty Match relaunched under the ‘Playmium’ model being championed by Gigataur and for the moment remains the only entry in their inventive ‘free to play forever’ scheme to include RPG mechanics.
The original Mine Quest from Tapps Games was a small but somewhat addictive little hybrid of Clicker and RPG that was something of a guilty pleasure. It wasn’t a very long game, but it somehow managed to squeeze a whole lot of exploration into a tiny file size. Its sequel seeks to outdo the original in every way but expanding on the experience exponentially.
When a game has a title like ‘Super Awesome RPG’ then it’s already setting certain expectations. You’re looking for a game that’s self aware, fast paced and possibly a little bit 90s, but more importantly it’s a statement that needs to be lived up to. Is Super Awesome RPG super awesome?
The Tales series of JRPGs consists of 16 main-line entries at the time of this review, reaching from ‘Tales of Phantasia’ on the SNES all of the way to ‘Tales of Berseira’ on the PlayStation 4. Tales of Link is the series first serious foray into mobile gaming, and in the spirit of the ‘Tales of the World’ series it’s bringing the full heritage of its line to bear on this initial world-wide outing.
