The darkness of the overworld just makes it hard to see rather than providing any feel of forboding. The worlds feel way too empty and repetitive. Certainly, there’s a lot of game to play here, but part of that is because it takes so long to do anything! Even just being able to run around in the levels would help a lot! All this slowness also makes character progression and deck building feel so tedious that any change is incremental at best.Īlso, the whole aesthetic of the game feels less less stylistically ethereal, and more bland and soulless. I have no real qualms with the combat speed as is, but if it were faster I wouldn’t complain either. I feel like this game is permanently going at half the speed it needs to go at. The worlds generally feel like they’re a few levels too long, and it’s annoying to get to the end of a world, find out that you’re just too weak to succeed without blowing through all your orbs to revive (and not being able to revive right at the boss at the end of a world is unacceptable), and have to go back and grind to get more and better spells, or find better items, or buy better items, or whatever needs to be done.
As such, the random encounters wind up feeling like they happen more often than they should, making fun battles feel more like a hindrance than the entertainment that they should be. The protagonist moves at a crawl through the world. Essentially, you don’t know what to exepct when walking through a world, though the overworlds are fixed. The game takes place in different elemental overworlds with individual multi-level worlds to go into, that are randomly generated each time.
If you have an MFi controller, Phantom Rift supports it and feels like the best way to play this game, though touch controls are absolutely fine.īut oh how the non-battle portions of Phantom Rift annoy me. iPad players might want to go into the options and move the spells to the left or right side, they work a lot better for quick activation in combat. The controls use swipes to move around, taps to fire the basic weapon, which doesn’t do much damage, mostly just to chip away at enemies when there’s no spells to use, and then tapping on the spell icons to use them. This is how randomness should be used in a game – it winds up being a test of the player’s skill to adapt to the luck of the draw at any given time, and to form strategies, one spell draw at a time. The combat is always so dynamic, based on the decks and the enemies that pop up. Building a deck of spells to unleash with proper timing in combat feels so much better than building a deck of cards, I say.Įverything that relates to combat in Phantom Rift is a joy to play. And hey, having an awesome deck that fits your fighting style is quite pleasing. The game can definitely be played without additional purchases beyond the $2.99 price, but the IAP packs just make it possible to get more powerful spells early on. Spells are earned by defeating enemies, collecting them in chests, or buying packs – either in-game or through IAP. Doing all this against bosses? Even better. There’s nothing more satisfying than using a spell to pull an enemy within range of your long sword spell to take them out right as the battle starts – and winning quickly nets you more spirit orbs, which can be used in the overworld to heal, reveal a level map, or to buy new items. In battle, you move from square to square, dodging attacks, and trying to time the right moment to use those spells to do the most damage. These spells cost mana to equip, and are single-use abilities, that can attack enemies, heal, put up plants that can protect you and hit enemies, and more. You have a pool of mana that recharges over time, and every so often, you draw from 5 spells, coming from a deck of 30 spells. The combat takes place on a 6-by-3 grid, with you controlling your custom character on the left side, and the enemies on the right side. Not so much in the combat, but in the overworld that governs getting from fight to fight, and managing the character and deck: it’s just too slow to get anywhere in this game, both figuratively and literally. But where Phantom Rift falls apart is not respecting that speed.
#Joy pony game changelog series#
Certainly, paying homage to Mega Man is something Phantom Rift isn’t doing, but the series itself is paying homage to boasted a unique combat system that took the best aspects of card games and mixed it with fast-paced real-time combat. I am quite fond of the Mega Man Battle Network series because of, well, everything about it. I wanted to give it my unabashed affection.
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