A premium gacha RPG game, what? | Full Review - Evertale

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.

🟩Pros

+innovative gameplay mechanics

+a balanced and challenging combat experience

+good looking visuals and character design

+bonus live service idle-game modes

🟥Cons

-paid gacha game

📝Notable points:

English localization is available, but the voice-acting is Japanese only

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 game with controls fully designed for touch screen displays, with no D-Pad like navigation nor virtual buttons to press. However, players can move the character in two different ways: via a point-and-click method or a traditional virtual analog stick.

As for the story, it has 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 story setup is divided into different Acts and Chapters and is nicely well paced. It is compelling enough to provide a good match for the gameplay to latch on and keep players interested. While the game can be played in full english text, the character dialogues are fully voiced in the japanese language.

The art style is also highly detailed for a 2D JRPG game. It's unusual, but the overworld segment packs more detail than the actual battle instance graphics. With a higher fidelity world and a more detailed chibi character design. Way different to the cardboard cut-off looking characters and subtle design of the battle graphics. As a whole visual package, the game looks good overall and feels polished.

The gameplay premise revolves travelling around an overworld map, towns, and dungeons; 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. For example, for a basic move that costs 100 TU and a special attack costs 300 TU, using a special attack will place this character much further back in the queue, way behind other characters who have used a more lower TU. On the other hand, If an enemy uses a 300TU move, you can easily squeeze in 2 or 3 100TU moves before he can attack again.

It’s initially confusing at first, but it is actually intuitive and genius in design, and I wish more turn-based games — even AAA ones — can adapt this formula. This makes it that different moves and actions have different weights, for example, healing or using basic skills, can cost less and therefore makes your characters more dynamic and flexible when it comes to decision making. While powerful moves are only used sparingly and at the right time. Resulting in an unexpected deeper tactical layer to the combat.

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 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.

Players cannot outright equip all your best fighters in an active team, as players have to balance them because of a weighing system for each character and only a limited amount of max points that players can use. The weapons also play a factor with two classifications, a main category which is a hard lock that determines which type of weapons a character can equip, and a sub categorical soft lock where each character has their own preferred weapon that when equipped, can allow for optimal battle performance.

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. Which brings us to Evertale’s next element: Gacha gaming.

While Evertale 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.

The rarity of a drop determines its strength and rarity in the game. There are different levels of rarity in Evertale, ranging from common to legendary. Legendary characters or weapons are the rarest and most powerful, and they often have unique abilities that can turn the tide of a battle.

Players can also earn summoning tickets by completing various quests, challenges, and events in the game. This provides players with a way to obtain new monsters without spending real money.

Of course, with gacha gaming, everything is left to the RNG gods, or luck. And it can lead to some frustration and disappointment especially for players who have already spent a considerable amount of money on top of buying the game. As expected, further in the game, the difficulty will increase, encouraging in-app purchases in order to progress more comfortably or face countless hours of grinding. Some powerful summons are time-limited in nature, further adding to the pressure of having to spend real money to progress.

Evertale also has other supplementary game modes such as the Tower of Trial where the players’ party from the main story is picked up and is used for increasingly difficult battles with corresponding rewards. Other game modes range from Arena mode where players can pit their party against others, to an alliance system with clan wars with live service and MMORPG elements.

In these alternative game modes, the gameplay switches to a more traditional idle game where players don’t need to control anything and just let the battle play itself out, being entirely dependent on the party composition, level, and items.

Conclusion:

Evertale is a noteworthy mobile game that offers innovative gameplay mechanics as far as JRPGs go. The game's art design, story, and gameplay all come together to create a captivating gaming experience. However, they didn’t go all in with the premium model and went for a gacha game model, ultimately hurting the overall experience as a narratively-driven JPRG.