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 Final Fantasy Explorers is a new(ish) Action RPG from Square Enix for the Nintendo 3DS. Originally released in Japan in December of 2014, the US and EU regions got it at the end of January 2016. Explorers gets compared to Monster Hunter a lot, because it revolves around doing repeatable quests to grind up loot material to make new equipment, but this is a mistake. This game is much more similar to a Phantasy Star Online title in how it plays. A party of up to four players, or one player and a band of captured monsters, ventures out into the world to fight various monsters, or a specific world boss, using MMO-like mechanics involving selecting skills from a menu that operate on cooldown timers. The game lacks experience point progression, but your progression is still a little more compex than just buying new tiers of equipment. Forms of Progression, or "What Am I Doing Here?" Gameplay Loop Pick a mission in town, go to a location, fight a bunch of things, maybe fight a field boss or Eidolon, get a pile of loot, go back to town. It's a very cyclical game that's ultimately tied to progressing your character into an endgame build that you, ideally, enjoy playing and that also looks cool. Jobs Final Fantasy Explorers uses a variant of the staple "Job System", and has a total of 21 jobs, including the starting "job", Freelancer. These jobs mostly fall into different areas of the MMORPG "Holy Trinity" of Tank, Healer/Support, and Damage, but there is some crossover between categories. Early in the game, you have access to Freelancer, Knight, Monk, Ranger, White Mage, and Black Mage. Over time, the other jobs become available after completing certain quests or fulfilling certain game conditions. Dark Knight, for example, becomes available after slaying a total of 500 enemies. Your Job determines the following things: your base stats, what weapon types you can equip, and both your Passive and Unique Ablities. The rest of your Abilities come from either the weapon type you have equipped, or a variety of Magic. Once you have access to 5-Star quests several hours in, you will also begin to get "Mastery" quests for any Job you've done at least 10 quests with. Completing this quest gives you access to additional weapons for your Job, and typically dual wielding, and adds a special set of equipment schematics for that class to the Workshop. Abilities You learn Abilities, which are your spells and special weapon skills, from the Central Crystal back in town. The Abilities have some crossover, but every Job has one category of Ability that is their "main" category. Abilities from outside that category require a double investment of "Load", which is a simple number indicating how "expensive" and typically powerful a skill is. So, a White Mage and a Black Mage could both learn Cure, but it would cost the Black Mage twice as many Load Points. A Dark Knight can use both swords and Axes, but Sword Abilities cost double. That system sounds like it's simplistic, but that's where the Mutation System comes into play. Mutations are one of the forms of ongoing progression in Final Fantasy Explorers. You can have very different builds based on how you choose to mutate your Abilities. When you use a Crystal Surge, which provides you with a limited list of randomly-chosen Surges to choose from (such as various elemental affinities, or different buff effects), some of your equipped Abilities may turn yellow. When you use them under the Crystal Surge's influence, they acquire a "mutation". Your Barrier spell may gain the ability to also cast Haste on you, for example, or your Wind spell may also now deal Light-type damage. Each time this happens, the mutated Ability will get saved to a list of "Custom Ablities" at the Central Crystal. By purchasing and equipping these Custom Abilities, you can then gain the opportunity to mutate them even more in future Crystal Surges. So, after a few missions, you may have gone from a simple Blizzard to a Blizzard3 that does extra Ice damage, builds up more Resonance, and has a small chance to inflict Blind. There are only a few of caveats that I know of: multiple types of elemental damage mutations do not stack- the game will just pick one of them to use at random; there are some diminishing returns on stacking multiple levels of the same mutation, but you are still encouraged to stack them; any given ability can only have up to 8 distinct types of mutations, with 16 levels amongst them; some mutations, such as Multi-Hit, have a hard stack limit (2, in Multi-Hit's case). The base Abilities have a bit of a tier system to them, especially in the Magics. You have to reach 5* missions and/or buy the lower-grade versions of spells in order to unlock the next tier (Cure->Cura->Curaga, etc). Sometimes you just have to buy an Ability to unlock a different one. In Time Magic, you have to buy Slow to unlock Gravity. Equipment Your equipment has two different types of progression. Among other things, all modifiers to your character's stats, such as Strength, Magic, Evasion, and so on, come from your equipment. Equipment comprises Weapon(s), Shields, Head, Torso, Legs, and Accessory. The various weapon classes all have their own lines of increasingly powerful schematics; this is also the case for armor types, which come in Light, Medium, and Heavy varieties for your Mage/Rogue/Warrior types respectively. Accessories all have their own miscellaneous effects that typically buff a specific stat. Besides ordering new tiers of weapons and armor, you may also spend materials to upgrade your existing pieces. For example, you might not have even found the material you need to buy the next tier of weapon for your class, but you're likely sitting on enough other materials to upgrade your current weapon's stats into that range. I skipped the Wind Rod on my Black Mage by just upgrading my Fire Rod to have the same stats, for example. There are also a bunch of cosplay weapons and armors, like the Sephiroth or Squall costumes, that have okay stats and require you to grind special materials to construct. You have to fight like 10 Shiva Eidolons to make the Sephiroth gear, to name one. Crystal Surges and Magicite, or I thought you said Lightning would be here You have a number in the upper-left corner of your screen called "Resonance". This number goes up every time an Ability of yours either damages/debuffs an enemy, or heals/buffs an ally. It constantly goes down at a fairly slow rate. Any time while your Resonance is at 100 or higher, effectively every minute or two in this state, you'll get an alert on your screen telling you that a Crystal Surge is available if you hold L+R. Whenever this message pops up, that means your Crystal Surge list has refreshed. When you are gunning for specific Mutations, as mentioned above, you may opt to not activate a Surge and wait for it to refresh again. Another reason you might not activate a surge is so you can create a Magicite. Magicite, like in FFVI, is the crystallized essence of an Eidolon. In Final Fantasy Explorers, there is a type of World Boss called an "Eidolon", which are the various Summon monsters from the main franchise. These are typically found in specific places for each of them, at the end of a short dungeon type of area. When you have an Eidolon at about 5% or less HP, your next Crystal Surge refresh will contain a special Surge called "Encase." Use this within melee range of the Eidolon to instantly defeat it and gain its Magicite. Equipping a Magicite does two things: First, it boosts your stats in specific ways for each Eidolon. Ramuh and Shiva are good for the various mages, Dryad is good for Rangers, and so on. Second, it gives you access to a special mode called "Trance". There is another meter right under your resonance, a half-circle that fills with a little more green each time land a hit, much like Resonance, only it doesn't slowly drain on you. When this meter fills, you can tap an icon on your touchscreen to enter Trance. While Trancing, your abilities and stats are all buffed, your HP and AP both get refilled, and your next Crystal Surge refresh will contain a Trance Surge, which is typically your Magicite Eidolon's big, area attack. These are super good and will easily take out like 1/3 of an Eidolon's HP. Where is Lightning? I love Fabula Nova Crytallis There is another type of Magicite, Hero Magicite. You get these as special gifts after completing various background objectives. Each Hero Magicite is based on a character from a mainline Final Fantasy game, such as Lightning, Cloud, Aeris, Squall, or Terra. Like the Eidolon Magicite, these give you stat buffs specific to that character. However, using Trance with one of these equipped will temporarily transform you INTO that character, and your Crystal Surge will be one of their Limit Breaks or other signature moves. How important is the MMO stuff? The game is set up to allow for the MMO trinity in your party. If you're playing with 3 other humans, your mileage may vary depending on the difficulty of the content you're tackling. For a lot of the early to middle stuff, you could probably do just fine with like 4 Black Mages as long as nobody stands in the fire. There's a benefit to having a tank, though, because then your damage dealers won't have to pay as much attention to not standing in the fire. The later-game Eidolons hit a lot harder, too, so it's good to have somebody around to buff and/or heal the party. Party composition isn't as rigid as a true traditional MMO, it can make your life a little easier if everybody at least knows what the heck they are doing. deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Feb 16, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 20:28
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:27 |
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Reserved for Job System 
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Feb 16, 2016 20:29
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Moldy Taxes posted:I bought this game at launch and promptly got slammed with a bunch of coursework, so I haven't gotten far at all. I got to the quest where you have to capture an Eidolon in a crystal. That Encase surge is super finnicky, too. Like, you have to be right on top of the Eidolon for it to work. I was fighting Phoenix last night, and I had my Encase whiff because, I'm pretty sure, Phoenix was airborne at the time. It was still close enough for me to hit with Blizzara.
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Feb 17, 2016 20:23
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Txn posted:Going to buy this tomorrow so I have a few questions. How long does it take to unlock the Blue Mage, and how annoying it is to learn Blue Magic? A few hours if you're diligent. It unlocks after you defeat 750 total enemies. You unlock monster spells by seeing a monster perform the move, and then killing it. You have to buy and equip the spell at the Central Crystal like any other Ability afterwards, if I'm not mistaken. Once you learn it, you can mutate it with Crystal Surges like any other Ability.
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Feb 18, 2016 17:49
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elf help book posted:OP please post a pic of Lightning.  Cool & Interesting Protagonist, Eclair "Lightning" Farron
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Feb 19, 2016 13:41
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Sprite141 posted:I'm actually enjoying the single player quite a bit. Being a mage makes you kinda squishy, and you can't really abuse skill canceling mechanics as you're doing a magic, not punching poo poo. The skill cancelling mechanic is still there for mages, but the mechanical combos aren't as interesting. Mostly you just get a damage boost out of the Link mutation when you trigger it.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:07
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Saxophone posted:Is this a game that would heavily benefit from having the New 3ds? I've read that some of the monster Hunter games are pretty hard to control with just the one stick so I thought I'd ask. Nah, it came out in Japan in 2014. I hardly ever use the stick, and there's like MMO style target lock-on.
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Apr 5, 2016 20:32
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