Final Fantasy and Pokemon had a baby | First Impressions - Evertale
Evertale would probably be an accurate game to show as an example if somebody asked the question, What If Pokemon and Final Fantasy had a child and released it on mobile platforms?
Evertale is a JRPG turn-based combat game that draws heavy inspiration from the Pokemon series of video games, by featuring monster and character collecting aspects, packaged in a gacha gaming manner.
The game features a proper narratively-driven progression that one would expect in a JRPG game. Nothing too fancy, the players control the main character Finn, a special young warrior that was caught in a nightmarish event called The Pandemonium — where monsters go berserk and come to terrorize the land of Erden. This has only occurred once every 100 years, but there is a big new problem: the last Pandemonium only happened only 18 years ago. It’s up to the player to form a ragtag team of monsters and characters to stop The Pandemonium once and for all.
The gameplay premise revolves around capturing and training monsters and cute waifu characters to form a powerful team that can take on various demons and monsters in the game. Over 200 monsters and characters — all unique and have their own moves, attacks, strengths, and artwork — can be collected. Players can evolve these monsters and level up these characters to create a team that best suits their playstyle and strategy.
As for the combat mechanics, it has a turn-based combat system with a welcome change to how the turns work. Each move or attack has a certain weight to it (called TU), and this will affect character placement for the next turn.
Each character and monster has their own set of skills and attacks, but some skills do overlap with each other, sometimes even giving way to some character skill combos with the right lineup. The actual combat is surprisingly strategic and well balanced, and the battle momentum can easily swing to any side at any time, depending on your turn-by-turn decision making.
Players can assign and build their own party lineup, up to four at a time with four more reinforcements in reserve that can substitute for any downed characters, who are effectively incapacitated for the rest of the battle. HP is reset for every battle instance, so no survival elements to worry about.
The game is very forgiving when it comes to defeat, as it allows players to instantly replay the battle and not really return you to a previous checkpoint or save point. In fact, Evertale doesn’t even have a traditional save system. It functions like an online-game where progress is automatically saved, they even have servers that you can log in and other live service game modes like Arena and Alliances. Which brings us to Evertale’s next element: Gacha gaming.
While the game is technically a premium game, it’s so cheap or even sometimes free that it effectively is a F2P/P2W game. Players can use in-game currency called Soul Stones or real money to purchase summoning tickets. These tickets allow players to summon monsters, characters, and weapons, with each ticket providing a chance to obtain a random drop of a certain rarity.
Evertale is easy to pick up and so far I’m liking the first few bits of the game. A promising title with innovative gameplay mechanics, compelling story, and a weird identity crisis, torn between being a premium game and a gacha one.
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