In the olden days, a game would come out and that would be that. There were no patches or updates, and the only playtesting that went on happened during development, by a relatively small group of dedicated professional playtesters. Thank …
In the olden days, a game would come out and that would be that. There were no patches or updates, and the only playtesting that went on happened during development, by a relatively small group of dedicated professional playtesters.
Thank God we don’t have to live like that any more. Final Blade may only just have arrived in the west, but it’s been out for a couple of years in South Korea and Taiwan, where countless playtesters have been helping to refine its familiar gacha RPG gameplay.
That means it doesn’t really do much wrong. It looks great, boasts a fun plot full of twists and turns and well-rounded characters, and moves along at the right pace. But equally, if you’ve played enough strategy RPGs on mobile to last you a lifetime this one won’t change your mind.
You play as Black Prince, a heroic dude with a party of warriors. At the beginning of the campaign you encounter an impossibly tough enemy, and your fellow warriors scatter, leaving you to summon them back into the fold along with countless others. Summoning costs sapphires, which you earn in battle and through a variety of other means. There are more than 300 heroes in total to collect.
Final Blade earns points with its hero design. The characters are 2D, impressively animated, and full of detail.
The Adventure single-player campaign is divided up into chapters, each containing ten stages, two of them containing boss fights. Before each fight you can determine your party and its formation, even nominating a leader, and during battles you can deploy individual hero skills and a single-use Ultimate – a super-powerful special move.
You can choose how involved you want to be in terms of tactics and battlefield actions, auto-deploying your party and setting them up to fight and unleash their skills automatically too. You can even recruit a fairy to automatically harvest your fallen enemies’ souls for extra loot, though this will cost you real cash money once you’ve burned through your free tickets.
On top of that, you can repeat stages automatically using sweep tickets, a repeat stage option, and even ‘continue battle’, which sends your party out to complete the next battle, and the next after that, and so on until you die, run out of rice, or reach the end of that chapter, saving you from the grind of combat if you’d rather avoid it.
This is particularly handy in the early stages, when each battle is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
That said, battles are fun to watch, thanks to the slick 2.5D graphics, diverse array of imaginative characters, and spectacular effects. Final Blade is a more polished and stylish affair than most of its rivals.
As you make your way through the campaign and level up you’ll unlock new aspects of the game, such as training, duels, dungeons, raid bosses, exploration, clans, and more, and you can create separate formations for each of these areas.
Plus there are missions, log-in and playing time rewards, countless items to level-up or sell, and of course the huge cast of heroes to manage. You can not only level these up but evolve them too, allowing you to home in on your favourites and refine them to a fine point of indestructible deadliness.
In addition you can enhance heroes by consuming others. Once you have two units at max strength, you can combine them to randomly create a rarer hero.
With the many ways you can upgrade, enhance, combine, and evolve your heroes, along with the equipment you can equip them with, all of which can be upgraded and enhanced too, there’s plenty to tinker with in Final Blade.
However, what we like about it most is the degree to which you can engage the autopilot if you like. In a genre characterized by impossibly detailed in-game economies and complex systems, there’s room for a slightly more laidback experience.
If you’re looking for an engaging story, charming visuals, and the opportunity to take a relatively hands-off approach, Final Blade will suit you. Check it out on the App Store and Google Play now.
