Final Fantasy Record Keeper

Final Fantasy Record Keeper

I don't play a ton of iPhone games. Sure, I've spent thousands of hours on hundreds of games, but mostly that was the past. Lately I have enough free time to sit at my desktop to play "real games". When I'm out and need to be entertained by my phone, I'm more likely to catch up on news or something.

Puzzles and Dragons

FFRK is quite similar to Puzzles and Dragons, which I played for a bit. In the end I quit Puzzles and Dragons because I didn't like the puzzling part. FFRK uses the typical Final Fantasy tactical combat, which isn't especially deep but doesn't bother me too much.

Too Much Initial Grinding

I haven't totally given up on FFRK because I feel like I haven't given it a real chance. The problem is the initial grind. I've done over 100 dungeons and they are almost always too easy. I hit "autoplay" and wait for the boss encounter. For the boss I use the friend Soul Break to kill the boss. No decisions or anything. Just an annoying process. 

The boards talk about interesting strategies and tough encounters. I'm sure that's true but I might not have the patience to get there. You are pretty much forced to clear the initial dungeons to improve your max stamina and pick up magicka. But clearing hundreds of dungeons on auto-play isn't fun.

Even worse, it takes a fair amount of attention even to do the auto-play. There are a lot of loading screens and a lot of "push to continue" buttons. Worst of all, there is a "start" button followed by a long load followed by combat. However combat isn't paused and doesn't default to auto-play, so if you put the phone down for 45 seconds you might end up dead. If they simply paused combat before it started I would be able to grind these dungeons while doing something else. Instead I have to spend 10 seconds staring at a loading screen before each encounter. Multiply this by 3 encounters per dungeon and 500 dungeons and that 15000 seconds staring at a load screen. That's over 4 hours staring at a load screen.

Recommendations

Because the grind is so bad I don't know who to recommend this game to. I suppose a big fan of Final Fantasy would enjoy unlocking all of the characters more than I do. Also, it revisits the stories of all the Final Fantasy games so that might entertain someone who has played more than I have.