Released on iOS and Android just in time for most fans to be distracted by Episode Prompto, Final Fantasy 15: A New Empire is a generic multiplayer kingdom-builder with FF15 assets laid over top. Hooray.
Noctis doing his best “Come play with me, my lord.”
The free-to-play mobile game starts off promisingly enough.
Those are definitely Final Fantasy 15 characters right there. I see Prompto and Gladiolus and Noctis and Ignis. It all checks out so far.
But then you get into the game and…
… oh wait, that’s just an ad. Then you get into the game and…
… sorry. Then you get into the game, and it’s immediately apparent that this is the same sort of multiplayer kingdom-building strategy game folks have been playing on mobile and Facebook for years.
Noctis plays the role of tour guide, walking the player through the initial moments. Buildings must be upgraded with resources to build more buildings to produce more resources.
Noctis also stars as the player character’s hero in the game, using his resources and battle skills to slice the odd enemy until his resources run out. Additional characters are on the way. I assume they’re just waiting on the clip art.
Seriously couldn’t find a shot of Gladio for this?
It all sounds very vague, but that’s because it is. The game gets you started on upgrading buildings and doing research to unlock new troops and armaments, but doesn’t really tell you what to do with any of that stuff. I clicked on prompts and upgraded buildings for a good hour and still have no idea what I am supposed to be accomplishing.
It has something to do with all of the empires on the overland screen. There are resources to gather here and Final Fantasy monsters to commit resources towards attacking. For a game developed by something called Epic Action LLC, there’s not a whole lot of action here.
If you’re the type of casual strategy gamer that looks at a screen like the one below and starts salivating, here you go.
There is a series of text-based tutorials buried in the game’s maze of menus, but I was just so tickled by the use of random game quotes at the beginning of some of the entries that I couldn’t go on.
Thanks, Prompto.
Maybe I am being too hard on Final Fantasy: A New Empire. The people in the random guild I joined seem to be enjoying themselves somehow, so certainly there’s an audience for generic crap painted over with licensed characters. Maybe if I give the game a little more time I’ll…
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7 responses to “Bad New Final Fantasy 15 Mobile Game Now Available”
Not even new was available since 1st April
Thanks. Was sure I’d already seen ads for this for ages. Glad to know I wasn’t going crazy.
Maybe it is newly available in the US? It wouldn’t be the first mobile game to soft launch in Australia before the US, to get a smaller English speaking audience to help shake out the bugs.
So its like every other mobile game of the genre…..? Being pissy about this one title in particular because of the Final Fantasy tie in is just childish.
Why not create an article of relevance or import about the mobile games problem as a whole, or using this as an example of a bad game create a list of game like this which manage to not be obnoxious instead of focusing solely on creating a new article with a title clearly designed as click bait?
I’ve had half a mind to grab this for the last THREE MONTHS it has been out. Kotaku sure took it’s time to review this for me. I’m going to get it.
It’s exactly the same engine and mechanics as Game of War and Mobile Strike (made by the same people), with only the thinnest veneer of FFXV.
This thing really repulses me. They have literally dozens of different ads that they spam in other games (their marketing and advertising budget is infamously huge) and each of them is misleading in a different way. Some make the game look like it plays like FF. The most common make it look like an interactive tower defence game. Others make it look like a shooter and so on. All of them have a minuscule disclaimer saying that the ad is a “gameplay dramatisation”.
In reality, it’s just a tapper literally engineered to encourage addictive behaviour and that thanks to its time-management exploitative mechanics make it so you not only have to keep spending, you actually have to continuously /increase/ your spending just to maintain the short-term reward fixes that you got used to in the first, free days. And these people are making like literal bandits with that garbage, re-skinning it from time to time to grab new demographics. It seriously makes me sick to my stomach.
Probably still better than the main game though.