It’s often the case with mobile stores that great indies get swept under the rug in the wave of freemium efforts from AAA developers trying to break the market or the latest release from the big-boys of the mobile space. Fairy Knights is one of those games that’s managed to fall through the cracks for many, but manages to be a creative entry into the Puzzle-based RPG scene.
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After three relatively solid entries into the Onimusha series of adventure/horror titles (arguably Action RPGs with their levelling system for weapons) that closed off a tight trilogy in 2003, Capcom started to experiment with the IP. This gave us smash-clone ‘Onimusha: Blade Warriors’, ‘Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams’ the fourth entry into the series, and ‘Onimusha Tactics’ a fully-fledged tactical RPG for the Game Boy Advance.
Famously the last game to be translated and released for the Sega Saturn, the CLAMP property ‘Magic Knights Rayearth’ also saw release on the SNES in the form of a more traditional JRPG.
After the lack-lustre showing from Nintendo on the mobile market to date (that is in terms of gameplay quality rather than sales), success the gaming giant has seen fit to bring another of their big IPs to the scene in an effort to continue their relentless assault on gamers wallets.
Young Adult fiction has become considerably more acceptable to adults over the last few years, with the line often blurring between adult and teen fiction and authors writing stories based on their own merits instead of pandering down to children. One of the best authors leading this charge is Rick Riordan, a man who many have termed the ‘Myth Master’ and it’s a title he’s earned. With two high-budget film adaptions of his first two novels in the Percy Jackson series, it was inevitable that there would be a at least one video game tie-in.
Pokemon GO started life as a well thought out and genuinely funny April fool’s joke on the part of Google, in which it suggested that they’d partnered with Nintendo and Game Freak to bring a plugin to Google Maps that allowed people to travel to locations and capture Pokemon onto their mobiles from their natural habitats. It’s been quite a while since that video did the rounds, and now Niantic Inc, makers of ‘Ingress’, have attempted to bring that video into reality.
Nintendo test the water of Freemium games and mobile gaming in general with the release of Pokemon Shuffle (Mobile) a game which saw release onto the 3Ds’ virtual store not too long ago. Following on from the variable quality in the official app for the ‘Pokemon Trading Card Game’, it looks like the first of Nintendo’s big franchises has arrived.
Many people believe the the pinnacle of roleplaying on Nintendo’s Wii was Xenoblade Chronicles, but there’s a little title from Mistwalker Studios that makes a compelling case against it. The Last Story may perhaps be the greatest return to form from Sakaguchi since Final Fantasy IX.
The second title in the Final Fantasy series is often considered something of an ugly-duckling when compared to the other titles in the series. This is largely because of the shift from a conventional levelling system into something altogether more complicated, but with hindsight it makes just as many leaps forward as it does steps back.
The original Final Fantasy title was a major success for the floundering Squaresoft and went from being one man’s swan-song to the head of a major franchise. Does it hold up today however in a marketplace frequented by ever more inventive and technical entries into the genre? Reviewed under the standards of a modern RPG release for mobile, how does it fair?
My Boxed Universe 