“Don’t be lured in by the brand- Final Fantasy All the Bravest has no gameplay and is nothing more than a cash grab” (IGN review)
“Final Fantasy All the Bravest is fucking disgusting” (Past Destructoid writer Jim Sterling in his review)
“Me? I’m with Kefka” Mike Fahey: Final Fantasy: All the Bravest on Kotaku
Dear, oh dear. This is one bad egg. Originally I was going to review a different but equally greedy mobile game known as Evoker, for the Hall of Infamy. When I discovered that the game had fallen off the face of the earth I had to pick something else. It was either Final Fantasy All the Bravest or Dungeon Keeper Mobile and....I really could not be bothered to wait for days on end to carve out a 4 by 4 room. Final Fantasy All the Bravest shall become the benchmark for all cash vampires reviewed on Imaginative Ramblings. It will also become the representative of the worst non-games on mobile. Let’s get this over with.
Final Fantasy All the Bravest may have a story, there is a text dump at the start of the game but that is kind of it. Even then the story is nonexistent. This might not have been so bad if the game play was fun (“game play” ha, ha) but that is not going to happen. It is mostly an excuse to go to iconic locations and milk that nostalgia until it all turns into money. It is so disgustingly insidious the way it pokes the player with memories of better games and how FFATB (that is what I am calling Final Fantasy All the Bravest from now on) will totally match up to the likes of Final Fantasy 7. Well the joke was on Bit Groove and Square Enix because I have never played any of the Final Fantasy games as a kid so it does not affect me! The bosses themselves warble the same dribble that amounts to “I am evil...I say evil things....prepare to die....evvvviillll” There is no story and the dialogue is lazy guff, moving on.
The “gameplay” requires you to rub your screen to make the pretty nostalgia pixel sprites do their single attack before going out of action for a few seconds. That is it. There is no party management, item management, skill or anything. It is possibility the laziest bit of non gameplay I have experienced yet, you cannot target any particular foe nor can you block any attacks. All you can do is slide your hand across the screen until everything dies or you die. Enemies themselves have massive health bars and each member dies within one hit. So the game is difficult not in the sense of skill or anything that requires effort but rather a sinister attempt to feed on your impatience to either make you pay for a max of $1,97 for a golden hourglass that will revive your party or make you wait for anything up to an hour. So if you enjoyed the simulating experience of slapping your screen and you just cannot wait the hour then you will have to pay up. Every three hours you unlock a mode called fever which allows a free few seconds of rubbing without any hits. It is spectacularly stupid and feels as rewarding as eating water soaked wood. There is no skill, just the gall to ask you to pay for more zero skill play and pretty lighting.
As there is no gameplay I suppose I should talk about the other microtransactions, it is the real reason for FFATB existing after all. You can get sprites of your favourite FF characters for a small fee. The trouble with this is that a sprite is chosen randomly from a pool of 39. If you did not get the one you wanted then you just have to spin it again. Doesn’t that sound fun? Don’t you love the prospect of gambling with the vague reward of nostalgia? It is sickening to see Square Enix trying to commit day light robbery while banking on the emotions of people trying to reconnect with the past. You can also pay for iconic background to rub the screen and not have any gameplay. It is so cynical and exploitative of fans.
It is disgusting.
I am going to be going out on a limb here, I do not think FFATB looks good, the backgrounds themselves are flat and lifeless, the sprites themselves underwhelm and do not the eye and animation is limited to a few frames for the heroes while enemies are just static sprites. I would even say that the game is ugly, a lazy and cynical try to score points from an aging fan base with big beer goggles and fat wallets.
The game runs fine. That is one of the very few good things I can say about it. It never crashed or suffered glitches.
FFATB is a cash vampire in its most pure form. A non-game that only wants you to keep paying forever hoping that seeing a pixel sprite of Cloud will fill the void of satisfaction you would normally get from a real game. FFATB is a ghost of a game, an illusion that keeps asking for money and giving you nothing of actual worth. It is a digital parasite.