The original GTA: Vice City is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve played it on everything, and own almost every version of it including multiple regional variants like the PS2 Japanese release I got a few months ago. I adored it when I played it years ago, and loved revisiting it on iPhone through its 10th anniversary edition. I still get chills with that trailer. I love the game so much that I even bought that awful PS2 on PS4 version they released when Sony was trying to get developers to bring PS2 classics to PS4 with trophy support. So when the trilogy was announced to get a remake, I was excited but nervous.

The collection hit PC and consoles including Nintendo Switch back in 2021, and it wasn’t great. Read my review of the trilogy on Switch here. Since then, the games have improved, but many issues still remain. For the mobile release, I didn’t expect much, but this release surprised me. When I launched GTA: Vice City – Definitive on Netflix and finished the 1.27GB download in-game, I thought I was imagining things, but the actual game looked different. I played a bit more and wondered why it looked better than I remembered from my time with the Definitive version on Xbox and Switch. I booted up those versions and forgot the lighting was different there. Then I noticed GTA: Vice City – Definitive has a new Classic Lighting option which looks so much nicer. GTA: Vice City – Definitive now felt like GTA: Vice City. I was ecstatic to have the vibe back, but there were some issues I noticed.

Without looking into the game’s settings, I was surprised at how blurry it looked on iPhone 15 Pro. I checked the options and found a setting for the resolution. I turned it up to max, and it looked a lot nicer. For some reason, this doesn’t save and you need to turn it up manually each time you boot up the game. Barring that, the game seems capped to 30fps which is disappointing. I hope both of these can be fixed in future updates. The graphics tab is where you can enable or disable Classic Lighting. I recommend trying both options if you’re familiar with GTA: Vice City. Once you manually fix the resolution, GTA: Vice City – Definitive looks excellent with fullscreen support on all iOS devices I tested it on.

On the control side, GTA: Vice City – Definitive includes the new modern control options, and I tested it with both touch and controller. I used my DualSense controller, but the game seems to only have Xbox button prompts. The touchscreen controls work well, and the game is responsive enough. There are camera sensitivity options, movement options to play with modern or classic controls, and more here. I was glad to see a haptic feedback option here.

Since these are a huge part of the experience for me after I finish the story, I wanted to highlight how GTA: Vice City – Definitive includes cheat codes. You can either use a controller and input the controller cheats with button combinations, or go into accessibility and input the PC cheat codes. Both work.

Yes, I know I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the port and features, but GTA: Vice City itself is incredible. I don’t care what you use to play it, but it is one of the all-time greats, and right up there with GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II as Rockstar Games’ best. The story is amazing, dialogue memorable, radio stations despite cuts are still excellent, and it has gameplay that remains fun even today thanks to control enhancements.

I don’t own GTA: Vice City – Definitive on Steam to test on Steam Deck, but GTA: Vice City – Definitive on Netflix and iOS is massively better than the Switch version. Not only does the Classic Lighting option drastically help, but the game loads much quicker on iOS compared to Switch while looking a lot better. The Xbox Series X version runs at a higher resolution with 60fps support though, but I still don’t see myself going back to that until we get the mobile improvements. Speaking of improvements, I’ve been noticing little things like some models being better on mobile, animation improvements, and more.

The only real issues GTA: Vice City – Definitive has on mobile now are the frame rate cap, resolution not saving for some reason on iPhone 15 Pro or iPad Pro on the Netflix version, and the few issues I have with the game like the one super annoying mission that remains the only annoyance in GTA: Vice City itself. While this game (and the trilogy in general) deserved better, I think we are finally at the stage where the Definitive part of the name is actually applicable. This mobile version of GTA: Vice City – Definitive is great, and can be even better with a few updates. The screenshot below shows the Classic Lighting (right) versus the PC and console lighting (left):

While I’d say the original mobile release on modern iPhones and iPads is the best version of GTA: Vice City even now, GTA: Vice City – Definitive complements it nicely and is something I see myself dipping into for years to come, just like the original. GTA: Vice City – Definitive is worth buying, but I think this is the first actual killer app Netflix has to get people onboard its games initiative. Having the original GTA: Vice City would have been enough, but this release is actually better than the PC and console versions in almost every way. I don’t even think I’ll go back to those versions without the Classic Lighting option. The original game is a timeless classic, and my favorite GTA game, so I’m glad we now have a great version of the remake on mobile alongside the original which is still available.

There’s a lot of talk about the legal status of Quintet’s library among fans of that developer that burned so brightly and briefly. Is it the case that Square Enix doesn’t want to rerelease the games? Or is it the case that Square Enix can’t? At least as it pertains to the original ActRaiser, that question was answered rather decisively a week ago. During one of Nintendo’s Direct presentations, some familiar music began to play. Wow, a remake of the original ActRaiser, and it’s out today? And not just on Nintendo Switch, but on pretty much everything including iOS? Neat. Very, very neat.

That was just the start of the Actraiser Renaissance ($9.99) roller coaster ride. Almost immediately after the initial excitement, people began to criticize its visuals. It has the look of a 2.5D PlayStation Portable game, nowhere near fully modern but also a far cry from the original game’s attractive pixel art. Ah, but Yuzo Koshiro was brought back to make new arrangements of the soundtrack, and they are as incredible as you would expect. But wait, who’s the developer? Sonic Powered? The airport and rail sim people? And wait, they changed some things? Why? Add in some slightly choppy scrolling in the action stages and some mixed feelings about the expanded simulation segments, and the first reports about this remake weren’t great. More bad luck, it seemed.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you Actraiser Renaissance is perfect. That choppy scrolling is certainly there, though better in the mobile version than in some others. I don’t think the game looks terrible, but it certainly isn’t going to impress many with its chosen art style. It’s certainly a much longer game, with some extensive changes to many of its systems, and for those who liked the snappy pace and simplicity of the original ActRaiser those could be deal-breaking. Specific to the mobile version, those playing without a controller are likely going to find the action stages a bit less enjoyable than they are with button controls. At least we have controller support in this release. Thank you for that, Square Enix.

So yes, not perfect. But I will say this, having played through the entire game two times on two different platforms in the last week: it’s a lot better than I would have expected. If you can set aside your ideas of how a remake of ActRaiser ought to be, I think you’ll find Actraiser Renaissance to be a bold, excellent take on the original game’s concept. This is a remake, but it’s not trying to be strictly faithful to every aspect of the original. It feels like the halfway point between a remake and a sequel, and in the latter respect I think it’s considerably more fascinating than the actual sequel.

ActRaiser was always an odd duck. You play as The Master, who is essentially the deity of the world. You’ve been asleep for a long time, and an evil force named Tanzra has taken hold of the world in that period. Humanity barely clings on against the monsters that roam the land. Now that you’re awake, you need to give the people a helping hand. Although you spend most of the game up in your Sky Palace, you can send your angel assistant to act as a liaison between you and your followers to help guide them and answer their prayers. You can also use your powers to generate miracles like rain, thunder, and more. And when it’s time to get a bit more hands-on with Tanzra’s legions, you can send your consciousness to a warrior statue that is quite capable of taking down even the biggest of beasts.

You could either consider it a side-scrolling action game with simulation segments between the stages, or a simulation game with side-scrolling action segments that pop up now and then. I wouldn’t argue much with either interpretation. That unique blend made the game stand out in a big way, even if neither side of the equation was best-in-class. It did both things well enough, and stylishly enough, that the game sat a brilliant, singular whole. But putting on the critical specs, you could say that the action scenes were a bit stiff and featured bosses that were too easy to cheese with magic. You could say that the simulation segments were a little too simplified for their own good. There was room to build on this game.

Actraiser Renaissance takes advantage of that space to grow. The action scenes have a better flow to them and are more exciting to play thanks to improved enemy behaviors and an expanded set of moves for The Master. Boss battles in particular are far more interesting. The stages are redesigned and expanded, and you’ll be engaging in brief action bits during the simulation segments as well when sealing enemy lairs. I don’t dislike the chunky and deliberate nature of the original game, and it can be fun to obliterate bosses with ease by spamming magic, but I’m also a big fan of the approach Renaissance has taken.

The simulation segments see far more extensive changes. There’s a lot more story, for one thing. They’re a lot longer as well. While the broad strokes are the same, one major new system has been added in that completely changes the nature of these portions of the game. You’ll still get occasional attacks from monsters spawning from the lairs that you’ll have to shoot down with your angelic assistant. But on top of that, you will sometimes have to defend from full-on invasions. During these segments, your angel can’t use its weapon. Instead, you have to build defenses as best as you can beforehand, direct the town’s hero character to fend off foes, and use your miracles when and where you can to help turn the tides. Oh yes, it’s tower defense, friends. And there’s a lot of it.

Most of the other changes in the simulation sections feed into that new system. Certain buildings will generate certain resources, and you’ll need them to build and upgrade towers, keep your heroes healed, regenerate SP so you can use more miracles, and place palisades. At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about all of this. I’m not a huge fan of tower defense games, so seeing this kind of gameplay take such a prominent stage in a remake of a game that had nothing of the sort felt odd. But in the end, I think it works. Thematically it makes sense that these towns would be getting attacked by Tanzra’s hordes. From a story standpoint, it helps weave the new heroes into the fleshed out tale. And in terms of gameplay, it’s a solid way to expand the complexity and value of the simulation segments. It now matters what and where your followers build. There are benefits to rebuilding with newer structures beyond simply raising the population. These are all good things, in my opinion.

I certainly can’t deny that it makes for a very different game, however. This is not the kind of remake most video game fans will be accustomed to, I think. And when such radical remakes have happened, they’ve gone wrong often enough to have people suspicious of the whole idea. But I look at what we have here in Actraiser Renaissance and I not only appreciate its value as a game, but also as an idea for how this series could move forward. I will always enjoy the original game, but I can’t imagine a brand-new, full-priced game that adheres to its specifics. I can easily imagine one that follows on from Actraiser Renaissance. One that improves on its new ideas, builds on them, and keeps on growing. The key to an ActRaiser sequel was never to subtract, but to add. And that’s what this game does, even if it’s not strictly speaking a sequel.

If you’re looking for a carbon copy of the original game with an improved presentation and nothing else of significance added, I’m afraid you may not like Actraiser Renaissance. This isn’t that kind of remake, and I personally don’t think it should have been. But if you’re fine with something with the flavor of ActRaiser, with the essence of the original but also a personality of its own, I think you will like this game. It has its flaws, particularly in its visual presentation, and some of its new ideas could use a bit more hammering out. But it, like the game it is based on, is a rather unique game that pulls you in powerfully the more time you spend with it. There isn’t a whole lot like this out there, and it’s handily better than other homages like SolSeraph. And hey, that incredible music sure doesn’t hurt.

When it rains, it pours. We don’t just get one of the games. All three Final Fantasy Legend games are included in Collection of SaGa FF Legend ($9.99), and that adds up to a whole lot of good times if you can deal with the capricious nature of the series. It’s fairly well-known at this point, but even if you didn’t realize it, the name of the app pulls back the curtain on the true nature of the Final Fantasy Legend series. These were never Final Fantasy games, not in the direct sense. No, it was Akitoshi Kawazu all along! These are in fact the genesis of the SaGa series, which has gotten a lot of love in the last few years from Square Enix. But SaGa is kind of Final Fantasy in the sense that the first two games very much follow on from the controversial Final Fantasy II.

Before we shine a light on each game, let’s talk about the app itself. It is more or less the same as what we saw on the Nintendo Switch, with similar display options and extras. You can play in portrait or landscape, with the game appearing in a smaller window with a fake console complete with working touch buttons filling out the rest of the display. The same alterations have been made to the art and scripts in places as the Switch versions, and the games allow you to speed up the gameplay without messing up the music. You can choose from a variety of skins for your fake game console, which I suppose is a nice touch. The games play well enough with touch controls, and as you can imagine modern smartphones have no problems emulating Game Boy games. Alas, no external controller support. Perhaps it will be added in later.

Let’s look at the games themselves. The first game is The Final Fantasy Legend, or Makaitoushi SaGa in Japan. It was the first handheld RPG video game in history, and was designed to be completed on a flight from Tokyo to Hawaii. As such, it can be a pretty short game if you know what you’re doing. Figuring out what you’re doing is another matter entirely, as it is full of the kind of opaque design that Akitoshi Kawazu would become famous for. Some players love this kind of thing, others hate it. You probably know which of the two you are. There isn’t much to the story beyond a novel premise, but the visual design has a lot of appeal and the soundtrack is superb.

Final Fantasy Legend II takes the basic framework of the first game and both builds on it and refines it. It has a more involved story and an overall better focus. While it still contains a myriad of bizarre mechanics, it’s a bit easier to sort out in this installment. This tends to be the favorite of most players when it comes to this trilogy, as it sands off some of the rough edges of the first game without losing its quirky charms. It’s a much longer game with a smoother difficulty curve, and while the plot isn’t going to win any awards, it’s interesting enough.

Something weird happened on the way to Final Fantasy Legend III. The team responsible for the first two got the call to make a full 16-bit console SaGa game. A relatively new team was tapped to make the final game in the Game Boy trilogy. Many of the people involved in this game would go on to work on Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Super Mario RPG. Akitoshi Kawazu had little involvement with this installment, and it shows. This is a much more conventional RPG that has a neat time travel plot. There are still some elements of the earlier games here, but I find this one tends to go over better with people that didn’t get on with the first two and worse with those who loved them. Well, it’s nice to have different flavors.

Given that even the newest of these games first released in 1991, you have to put up with some issues that RPGs were still sorting out at the time if you want to get into them. They can be grindy, but grinding without understanding the complicated systems behind the games can be nearly pointless. This is particularly the case with the first two games. You can absolutely paint yourself into a corner in the first game especially if you aren’t careful. Characters will lose a life if they die, and if they run out? Sorry, they’re gone. You can buy more lives, but that’s an expensive life to live. Well, you all probably know what you’re getting into with SaGa games by now. These are even more prototypical and built for a rather low-powered handheld, so add that into your calculations.

Still, there’s a bit of a charm to these games and it feels pretty amusing to play them on an iPhone. There are probably more broadly entertaining Square Enix RPGs you can buy on mobile, especially if you’re looking to splash out a cool twenty. But if you have cozy memories of huddling under your blanket with a flashlight or sneaking a quick bit of grinding at school, Collection of SaGa FF Legend will honor those feelings of nostalgia. If you don’t have those warm fuzzies but happen to have enjoyed the recent SaGa releases, you’ll also want to check these out. They’re not always fun, but they’re certainly interesting.

It was developing its own engine that it hoped to use in all of its future projects. It had announced multiple Final Fantasy projects, and none of them were coming together properly. Dragon Quest went handheld, and Microsoft was throwing money around for any substantial Japanese support. Square Enix had bet big on the PlayStation 3, and that was proving to be a bit worrisome. A lot of odd games came out at this time, and looking at it all from the outside you really have to wonder what was going on.

The Last Remnant was developed using Unreal Engine 3 by a team of people who had previously worked on the SaGa games. It was Square Enix’s first game using the engine, and one of the first big Japanese titles to do so. None of the documentation was available in Japanese, which caused a lot of issues. Although originally announced for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the game ultimately only hit the former. The latter version was quietly cancelled. The game didn’t sell particularly well, and there was good reason to think it would fall down the same memory hole as, say, Infinite Undiscovery.

Interestingly, the fact that the game was built on the Unreal Engine is likely why it avoided that fate. A PC version was created, and a rebuilt version using Unreal Engine 4 was launched across a variety of platforms. It’s this version that has now made its way to mobile in what is Square Enix’s biggest and most ambitious mobile port yet. Seriously, I hope you have a lot of spare room on your device. This game is massive. So hey, The Last Remnant Remastered ($19.99) must really be something, right? It got a mobile release before a lot of Final Fantasy games that would surely run on today’s devices, after all.

Well, that’s the tricky thing. The Last Remnant has a lot of good qualities. It’s a really nice-looking game. It’s certainly a full-fat RPG, with its main story taking a legitimate 60+ hours to clear and its side content adding a fair bit on top of that. It has some really interesting gameplay systems, and the story… well, the story has its moments, I suppose. If you’ve been thirsty for a big, high-budget single-player RPG to play on your mobile device, this will certainly quench that thirst.

That said, while this game wasn’t created under the direct guidance of eclectic creator Akitoshi Kawazu, it is very much his people. And that can, and does, mean certain things for its design. It has a very unusual battle system that isn’t overly well-explained and can be hard to understand if you don’t pay careful attention. There are a lot of seemingly random systems at play. Difficulty balance is all over the place. I’d say the average person is as likely to hate the game as they are to love it. It is opaque, complex, and not terribly well-paced. On top of that, you’ll have to contend with some occasionally awkward touch controls in this mobile version.

If you’re patient with it, there are rewards to reap. While it can take a while to wrap your head around its combat system, it’s quite a bit of fun once you do. You control groups rather than individuals, which gives battles a really nice sense of scale. You have to carefully consider the position of each group and the enemies, as you’ll take quite a bit of damage if you get yourself boxed in. You can do the same to the enemies, of course. Get them in a position where they can’t move without exposing their flank then send another group around to hit them from another angle, and you’ll deal heavy damage. Be mindful of this and most battles will go smoothly. Ignore it and even the simplest skirmishes can drag out.

There are a lot of other factors to take into account, many of which will be quite familiar to fans of the SaGa games. Formations are important, and which you’ll want to use will depend on which characters you’ve got grouped together. Stat gains happen somewhat randomly depending on the actions you take, but enemy strength will increase pretty consistently as your Battle Rank goes up. You can paint yourself into soft corners if you’re not careful because of this aspect. Each battle also has a meter that represents momentum, so the better you’re doing the more likely you’ll land hits and such. It’s a lot. And as mentioned, the game really does a terrible job of explaining any of this.

You also don’t have as much fine control as you may like. You give broad orders to each group based on the current situation, and each member will act as they see fit in accordance with that order. You really only have full say over protagonist Rush Sykes, and that extends to things like equipment and upgrades as well. Characters will ask you for new gear or the odd material they need to upgrade their own gear, and that’s about as much input as you get. It fits from a narrative point of view, to be sure, but some players may find all of this obfuscation quite frustrating.

Unfortunately, if you don’t get into the battle system, I’m not sure any other aspect of The Last Remnant is going to sell you on the game. The story starts with some promise but ultimately loses track of its own tail partway through. The exploration is relatively straightforward, and sidequests aren’t all that thrilling to complete. Like with most of the SaGa games, one gets the sense that the gameplay systems were designed first and the rest of the game was built around them. Those systems are very well designed, but they’re also so unconventional and complicated that you really have to put in a certain amount of effort to start having fun with them. And if you’re not willing to do that, I can’t say I blame you.

With all that in mind, it’s a bit hard to give The Last Remnant a terribly strong recommendation. I like the game well enough, but the pieces don’t fit together as well as some of the other games that Akitoshi Kawazu had a hand in. Even at its best, it doesn’t come anywhere near the sheer joy of SaGa Scarlet Grace‘s masterful gameplay. That’s a shame, because this game sure does look and sound great. If you’re willing to invest time and energy into a rather cumbersome game to find the gold within, you may enjoy The Last Remnant. But while it may not have the word ‘SaGa‘ in its name, know that it represents that brand’s typical ups and downs quite thoroughly in its essence. Proceed with caution.

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With eyes on the Pokemon prize, likely bolstered by the smash success of cross-media sensation Yo-Kai Watch, Capcom expanded the Monster Hunter universe with the release of Monster Hunter Stories ($19.99) on the Nintendo 3DS in late 2016. A more user-friendly take on the Monster Hunter setting, Monster Hunter Stories is mainly a single-player JRPG that sees players befriending the monsters instead of just skinning them to make hats out of them. Oh, you’re still doing the latter, but in a more indirect and entirely less grisly fashion. It’s bright, colorful, and features a bevy of collectible buddies to help you on your way. Alongside the game came an animated series, Amiibo figures, and other bits of merchandise. It got favorable reviews, and it looked like Capcom had another slam-dunk on its hands.

Except it didn’t. The game did alright sales-wise, but nowhere near the level of the usual Monster Hunter games. The animated series came and went. It lasted for a couple of seasons, so I suppose that’s something. The Amiibos are still sitting on the shelves of local shops, alongside unsold Waluigis and Chibi Robos. Nintendo localized the game and published it outside of Japan in 2017, where it again met with generally good reviews and relatively muted sales. A couple of months later, Capcom published a mobile version of the game in Japan, and now we’ve got a lovely little English version of the same. Will its fortunes be different this time around? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean the game isn’t pretty good in its own right. On top of that, this mobile version is decisively better than the 3DS original. Unless you really hate touch controls or really love Amiibos, there’s no reason whatsoever to choose the other version of Monster Hunter Stories.

In fact, let’s get this out of the way right away. How is this port? Well, you do lose a few things. Button controls, for one. There’s no MFi support here, so you’ll have to make do with some really well-implemented virtual controls. I’d imagine most of you can, if you’re reading this. Amiibo support is obviously out, and so is StreetPass, at least in the form that it appeared in the 3DS version. The guest appearance from The Legend of Zelda‘s Epona has also been cut, naturally. In return, you get a game that finally runs on hardware that can handle it. The resolution is higher, the draw distance is farther, and perhaps most critically, the framerate is silky-smooth. Monster Hunter Stories really pushed the 3DS to its limits, and even those using a New 3DS would run into occasional technical issues. It’s all clear here, and it’s simply wonderful to see the game reach its full potential. Another crucial addition is an auto-save feature, which marks your progress after important events or when you move to a new area. Please don’t forget to make a hard save when you can, though.

Excised cameos notwithstanding, the mobile version of Monster Hunter Stories contains every bit of content found in the original game. You’re looking at around 40 hours of gameplay to clear the main story, and you can faff about with some post-game dungeons, Poogie-collecting, and filling out your Monsterpedia for another 20 hours or more if you’re that-way inclined. Like with most big-name JRPGs, you get a lot of bang for your buck here, even if some of it feels like filler. It’s a visually rich game, perhaps one of the best-looking JRPGs you can get on iOS, and it’s packed with fully-realized areas to explore, a refreshing oasis in the mobile sea of menu-based towns and dungeons. If you’re looking for a proper (moderately) high-budget JRPG to play on your mobile device and are tired of replaying decade-plus-old Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, this is your stop. The game also holds considerable appeal for Pokemon fans who don’t mind something with perhaps a little less mechanical depth, and Monster Hunter fans who just want to enjoy the world of the games from a different perspective.

The premise sees you playing as a custom character who lives in a village where the people learn to befriend monsters, which they call Monsties, with the help of special artifacts known as Kinship Stones. As it tends to go in games like these, you’re playing a youngster who is just reaching the age where they can bond with their own Monstie and become a full-fledged Rider, taking on quests and sub-quests to serve the village’s interests. Unfortunately, at almost the exact same time, a phenomenon known as the Black Blight begins to affect the monsters of the world, turning them hyper-aggressive and even more dangerous than usual. If you’ve already guessed that it’s going to fall to you to solve this problem, congratulations! You pass the first test. Although your village remains isolated for its bizarre approach to dealing with monsters, you’re going to have to break out into the wider world to bring things to a close. Will you learn the power of friendship on the way? Yes. Yes you will. And you will like it, by golly.

It’s not the most involved of stories, but it’s engaging enough. The characters are all the basic sorts you generally see in products aimed at this young demographic, but a lively localization and the game’s eye for cinematic angles help to spice things up enough to probably keep you following along. Even if you opt to check out on the story, and I can’t blame you if you do, it’s hardly the main point of all of this. That framework is just there to give you a reason to scour the world for Monstie Eggs and try to hatch a big ol’ army of cute-ified beasts from Monster Hunter games past. In keeping with Monster Hunter tradition, you’ll also need to keep your eyes open for resource points where you can gather goodies to upgrade your gear and earn some cash.

There are also tons of sub-quests that will require you to go forth and either fetch something, kill something, or kill something and fetch what it drops. Between collecting, completing main story goals, checking off sub-quests, and just exploring the beautiful world, the game moves along at a surprisingly brisk pace most of the time. It’s nice and chewy in the way that the Pokemon games tend to be, and many of the systems stapled on from Monster Hunter proper only make it more compelling. It’s interesting how such a different game can feel so true to the brand just by paying attention to the little details, but that’s just what Monster Hunter Stories does. We’ve never seen this world so candy-colored, but it most assuredly feels like the same world.

That being said, Monster Hunter Stories biffs it a little on one of the usual ways games that aim at Pokemon do. The combat system just isn’t deep enough. It relies heavily on a rock-paper-scissors system where choosing the right type of attack greatly affects the damage you deal and take. There are lots of supporting skills and such, and at least in the beginning it’s pretty fun to learn the kinds of moves enemy monsters favor and counter appropriately. As the game winds on, however, enemy behavior gets more complex and random, leaving the whole basic attack system feeling a bit too reliant on chance. Might usually makes right even when fortune works against you, but it’s frustrating that it wasn’t more well thought-out with regards to the long game.

There are also some flashy and fun combo attacks and ride moves you can make use of, and they will generally tilt the tables in your favor if you’re having too much trouble. Even the combo attacks rely on chance, though, since they require your AI-controlled Monstie to use the same attack that you choose against the same vulnerable monster. Elements are accounted for but are actually of very little practical value in the main story compared to the core rock-paper-scissors system, making choosing your gear a lot less interesting and strategic than in the main games. You’re going to be doing a lot of battling in this game, and while it looks good and feels fun at times, too many of the things that matter are out of your control, and too many of the things under your control barely matter at all. Capcom nailed the part of Pokemon‘s appeal connected with collecting cool monsters, but missed out on giving players a reason to use all those cool monsters in truly meaningful ways.

It’s too bad, because the monster breeding in Monster Hunter Stories is really amazing. You can fuse your Monsties, choosing the genes that you want to pass on in order to create unique and sometimes ridiculously overpowered results. This system, dubbed Gene Channeling, is one of the more compelling features of the game, allowing those who opt to learn its intricacies the opportunity to create Monsties that are truly their own. Unless you plan on taking on the post-game content, it’s probably not necessary to tinker around too much with this part of the game, but I think some gameplay systems can get by even without a useful end beyond the process itself, and this may be one of them. I suspect you know yourself well enough to know if this is going to appeal to you, so I’ll just leave it there.

Capcom has gone about this mobile version in as fair a way as possible. You can try out a fairly substantial demo of the game via Monster Hunter Stories The Adventure Begins , which allows you to play the opening part of the game to see how well you take to it. After playing it, you should have a pretty good idea of whether or not the game is to your tastes. If you like what you see, you can move over to the fully-paid, premium Monster Hunter Stories ($19.99), where you can import your data from The Adventure Begins and pick up right from where you left off. How about that? There are no IAPs or any other shenanigans. Just a premium game at a very fair price, and a free demo that not only lets you try out the game but also carry over your progress to the paid app.

It’s kind of wild to think that a game launched less than a year ago in the West on the Nintendo 3DS for $40 is now available in a greatly enhanced form on mobile for half that price. I may have my nits to pick with Monster Hunter Stories, but the game is certainly quite a good JRPG all-around. It ranks fairly high even among the impressive JRPG library of the Nintendo 3DS, so in the increasingly dry traditional JRPG landscape that is today’s mobile gaming market, it’s a real blessing. It’s not as good as a mainline Pokemon release, nor will it keep you playing as long as a mainline Monster Hunter game, but I suspect fans of either looking for something to play on their phones or tablets won’t be unhappy with Monster Hunter Stories.

Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition, like the original, follows the story of Noctis, heir to the throne of the kingdom of Lucis. On the eve of peace negotiations between Lucis and the empire of Niflheim, things go terribly awry at home. Fortunately, Noctis and his three friends weren’t home at the time, leaving them free to do what is necessary to save the day. That’s basically the beginning of the story, and in true Final Fantasy fashion it soon goes in completely bizarre and occasionally nonsensical directions. The characters are strong, though, and that makes the moment-to-moment happenings of the plot more engaging than its whole.

Most of the story from the original version has made the cut here. It’s not a one-for-one re-creation, but it hits all of the important points and tells its story as coherently as it can be told. Of course, it’s all done through the filter of the game’s new visual style, which swaps out semi-realistic high-poly models for a stylistic super-deformed low-poly look. You might think that would ruin the drama of some of the darker scenes, but it works surprisingly well overall. I suppose that’s not that surprising, given the series’ roots lay in super-deformed sprites. On the whole, the story flows a lot better in this version of the game thanks to how streamlined certain aspects are.

Let’s talk about that, because it’s really the main story here. Much of the buzz of Final Fantasy 15 was focused around the massive open world that made up the first half or so of the game. You could drive around with your buddies, get in random fights, stumble on and solve side-quests that had nothing to do with anything in particular, and jam out to tunes in your car as you drove around. The same can’t be said for the Pocket Edition, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good or bad thing. The size of the world has been greatly reduced, and the flow of quests, mini-games, and sub activities have been reduced in scope to go with that. It hurts the game as a vehicle for goofing around, but it makes for a far tighter, more focused game all around. There’s still plenty to do, but you won’t (and to an extent can’t) waste as much time doing it.

The combat has also been changed from the console version. It’s still very much action-based, but instead of the original game’s ground-level view that felt like it fell somewhere between Kingdom Hearts and a proper console action game, Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition gives you a different angle and a system that works better with touch controls. Battles play out from an overhead position, allowing you to get a clear view of your characters, the monsters, and the area around you. You only have to worry about controlling Noctis, with the rest of your companions controlled by the computer in most respects.

Basic attacking is easy, as you simply need to point Noctis at a foe and he’ll start auto-attacking. Timed taps allow you to parry, use special attacks, dodge, and perform warp strikes. It’s a lot easier to play than the original version, but still turns up the challenge nicely when the bosses show up. Beating up monsters will earn you AP that you can use to unlock new abilities, combos, and stat increases for each of your characters in a simplified version of the original game’s Ascension Grid. While it’s not completely free-form the way some Final Fantasy character systems are, it does give you a certain degree of customizability that lets you shape your party as you see fit.

As far as the production values go, Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition is pretty amazing. How one feels about the new art direction is a subjective thing and the game environments have lost a lot of their luster now that the game isn’t really about exploration. At the same time, it’s incredible just how much of the original game’s atmosphere was preserved here. Certainly it doesn’t hurt that the voice acting, sound effects, and music were carried over more or less directly from the original version. But visually, it manages to convey its themes and feelings even with its hard shift in style. If the original Final Fantasy 15 didn’t exist, I think this version of the game would do just as good of a job in showing off its characters and plot.

But how much does it cost? Well, the game is divided into ten chapters. The first is free and does a decent job of letting the player know what they can expect from the full game. The next two chapters are available for $0.99 each via IAPs, while the remaining chapters sell for $3.99 each. If you want to just buy it all in one go, it will cost you $19.99. Essentially, it’s not far off from the model that Square Enix used for the original Final Fantasy Dimensions (Free). It’s not out of line with what Square Enix usually charges for their premium efforts on mobile, and I feel like it justifies that price and then some.

I think the really impressive thing about Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition is that whether you’ve played the original game or not, you’ll probably find a lot to love here. For fans of the console game, this is a quicker, abridged take on the story and characters you came to love. It’s different enough to justify an additional playthrough, but similar enough that it doesn’t lose what the console version was going for. If you’re new to the game, you’ll find a grand Final Fantasy adventure that feels tailor-made for mobile in all the right ways. It’s enjoyable to play, the pace is excellent, and even if the story gets a little iffy in places, it’s hard not to fall in love with the main cast. I still can’t believe this worked, but it did, and it did so in fantastic fashion.

Football Manager Touch 2017

For those who’ve never had the pleasure of playing this series, FMT 2018 is the slightly more accessible version of the PC game Football Manager 2018, which in turn is possibly the most detailed sports management game out there. FMT 2018 has you picking a team from any of the 130 leagues included in the game and trying your luck, be it leading that team to glory or getting sacked within 2 months. The game has a huge database that includes everything you ever needed to know about all the players from the game’s many leagues. And we’re talking details ranging from physical and mental attributes, relationships with other players and coaches, history, and so much more. All those details humanize your players, which—along with how they’ll often behave like spoiled brats—helps create the feeling that you’re indeed managing and playing against humans rather than spreadsheets.

As I always do when I play Football Manager, I picked Liverpool because it’s a good enough team to make the game fun but bad enough to make it challenging. FMT 2018 does a great job easing a player into the game by giving plenty of pop-up information and tooltips for those who need them as well as allowing players to delegate parts of managing to parts of the staff. For instance, I didn’t want to bother with the training regime of every single player, so I had my assistant coach take care of that. If I want to try and help a specific player improve, I can go into the Training screen and do all kinds of adjustments. FMT 2018, like its predecessor, manages to make the complex accessible and allows players to assume the amount of control they want over their squad, which is great because, otherwise, FMT 2018 would be inaccessible to anyone not already familiar with the franchise.

The amount of information in this game can border on overwhelming, and while the UI does a pretty good job managing it and making it accessible, it still occasionally struggles to present all that information to the player. The game has a ton of menus and submenus, and while they are usually no more than a couple of swipes away, they do sometimes make it tricky to find the information you might be looking for. It gets better as you play, but it’s still tricky. Perhaps a search bar for menus (like the Settings search bar on an iPhone) would help solve that issue. The menus, though, are colorful and pretty well-designed, especially given the herculean task that is putting all that information on screen.

What I’ve said earlier should sound familiar to anyone who’s played the previous version in the series, and while in broad strokes the issue of having to navigate all those menus remains, there are some important improvements in FMT 2018 in the Tactics and Match Day screens that make a difference in how you play. In the Tactics screen, SI has managed to present more info in what is essentially two screens turned into one. The two screens overlap and can be dragged back and forth accordingly, a UI design that I think should be used in every other menu because it makes it easier to know where information is located. So yes, this change on the Tactics screen might sound minimal, but it does make a big difference in terms of usability.

Another big change to the game is the Match Day UI, which again has been overhauled so that it shows more information on one screen. The new Match Day screen allows you to see player ratings, match stats, focus of attacks, and even recent events all on the same screen. In the past, you would have to flick through different windows to see all this info, but now it’s all there in a glance. This reduces the need to navigate various windows when watching a match unfold. Not a groundbreaking change overall but one that really helps you figure out why your team is losing 5-0 to Southampton. And the 3D match engine is more fluid than last year, although it still looks a bit dated. You won’t be playing this game for its 3D visuals, but that was never the case.

Speaking of my 5-0 loss to Southampton, the game still suffers from a tendency to have your team play great against big teams and really badly against weaker ones. I beat AC Milan 1-0 away only to get hammered by the mediocre Southampton the next week. This has been a common issue with Football Manager games since forever, and it’s not because players are complacent (you can see your players’ mood as the game’s unfolding).

And you still get a ton of injuries, which, again, is a trademark of the game but, increasingly, also a trademark of the sport. This year SI added a new Medical Center screen, which is a fun little addition that gives you much more detail on injuries. For instance, it might tell you that a specific player needs to have a lower training load to avoid injuries or other similar info. I’m not sure all this extra info does much to reduce injuries, but it should be helpful for those managers who are detail-oriented micromanagers.

FMT 2018 comes with many other little changes, like additional options when trying to sign a player (for instance, additional promises you can use to entice a hesitant star), and a revamped scouting screen, which does a better job at featuring possible transfers on the main screen and letting you give you more specific criteria to your scouts. I might sound like a broken record again, but all these little changes and addition help improve the game in small ways that, over time, add up to a better overall experience. And the fact that the game hasn’t crashed on me once is definitely a big plus given last year’s issues.

Should you buy FMT 2018 if you already own FMT 2017? That’s always a tricky question with annual releases, but I think FMT 2018‘s improvements (and, of course, updated database) justify the purchase. The UI changes really make navigating the game easier, and the new additions offer extra information to those who want to get even more involved with the lives of their fictional players. The game does come with IAPs, but—as is always the case—they are just ways to make the game easier, if you like to take the easy road, or additional challenges. At $19.99 the game might sound expensive in mobile gaming terms, but FMT 2018 is worth every penny.

Football Manager Touch 2018 is now available to download for select iPads: https://t.co/3rZ3QFIT4w #FMT18 pic.twitter.com/WjNofL30Db

— Football Manager (@FootballManager) November 23, 2017

I haven’t played 2018 yet, but the 2017 version of Football Manager Touch was one of my top games of the year, and I have no doubt this year’s version will be a great game to play. The 2017 version launched with a few too many crashes, so I hope this year’s version plays more smoothly. If you’re a soccer fan and have a tablet, you should definitely grab this game, and trust me, it’s more than worth the $19.99.

The first game, Glyph Quest (Free), used a shareware-style model, allowing you to download the initial game for free and asking you to pay to unlock the rest of it past a certain level. There was a time when this kind of model was quite successful in the App Store, but its popularity had peaked well before Glyph Quest released. Worse, the actual interesting twists of the gameplay were fixed to levels beyond the free portion on offer, meaning that the game didn’t sell itself as effectively as it should have. We Heart Dragons decided to listen to the feedback from the hardcore fans of the first game when they were deciding on a monetization model for the follow-up, Super Glyph Quest ($3.99). They opted to make it a full paid title upfront, which is another genuine uphill climb on mobile platforms, particularly for a puzzle game. Little surprise then that it also didn’t catch on.

The gloves have come off with Glyph Quest Chronicles, though the balled fists underneath are still wearing woolly mittens. We’ve got a premium currency that is used to upgrade spells or shortcut equipment upgrades. Every attempted stage requires some stamina, which can only be topped off by waiting out a timer, watching an ad, or paying some real money. The difficulty certainly feels tilted towards requiring the player to grind for experience, gold, or materials. Even without that, the stamina meter is small enough that you often can’t get through a whole set of stages without running out. The Glyph Quest games have always had some issues with their difficulty curve, but this is the first time where you can open your wallet to get around that.

But what of those mittens, then? By default, the game includes a mechanic called a loyalty card. Each time you clear a stage, you get a stamp on the card. When you fill its eight spaces up, you get a little premium currency and a partial restore to your stamina meter. Replaying previously-cleared stages still earns you a stamp, and there’s no limit to the number of times you can hand in your card. You definitely won’t fill the card in one sitting by default, but every couple of sessions or so, you’ll get to take an extra try and spend a few gems. The game also sells a few useful permanent upgrades. One such IAP doubles your gold intake, which essentially ensures you will have fair earnings without much of a need to grind. Another IAP gives you a new loyalty card that only takes six stamps, letting you earn gems and partial stamina refills that much sooner. The game even sells you a handy bundle that includes both of these IAPs for $5.99.

I suppose the problem with that is that even with that better loyalty card, you still can’t play continuously. You’ll get an extra try every now and then, but you will most assuredly run out of stamina often. Watching ads is an acceptable deal for a refill, but it does feel a little odd to have to do that when you’ve already plunked down more money than either of the first two games cost in their entirety. If you want to completely escape the stamina restrictions, you’ll need to pay for Patron Mode. By spending $19.99 in total, Patron Mode will be activated and the stamina system will be completely disabled. You can do that immediately with a single IAP, or by cumulative purchases of other IAPs. That latter bit is quite friendly, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the price was a touch high. Nevertheless, the option is there, and that’s not something many developers of free-to-play games bother to include.

I kind of hate that I’m five paragraphs into a review of a pretty fun game and all I’ve talked about so far is its monetization system. It really does color the entire experience of Glyph Quest Chronicles, though. The difficulty spikes feel more suspect. The in-game encouragement to buy items, upgrade gear, and power-up spells comes off more like a series of never-ending sales pitches as opposed to genuine advice. The fact that some critical upgrade materials are somewhat rare drops isn’t something I’m totally keen on at the best of times, but when the game allows you to pay your way past needing those materials, even I can’t help my imagination from wandering. Let me be clear that I don’t think free-to-play monetization is necessarily a bad thing. It can work, but there are just so many ways it doesn’t here.

The core gameplay is still as solid as ever. By matching numbers and combinations of different glyphs, you’ll cast a wide variety of spells to attack your enemy, heal your wounds, or throw out some buffs. While you start the game only being able to make small matches, you’ll grow in power considerably before too long. That opens up larger potential chains as well as special combination spells. You’ll eventually be able to summon powerful spirits who beef up your spells and are able to unleash a devastating attack before taking their leave. The game has some advanced techniques such as chaining and reversing for more damage, and if you pay careful attention you can even somewhat manipulate which colors of pieces appear on the board after you make a match. It’s a lot of fun, and although there aren’t any big changes to the formula this time around, a few new objectives and additions go a long way for the veteran player.

Your base of operations is a town with a number of different locations to tap on. There are pets to buy, various kinds of gear to forge, items to stockpile, and even upgrades for each individual spell. You can also check out the often-humorous descriptions of any monsters you’ve battled or spells you’ve used. Rather irritatingly, if you haven’t used a particular shop for a while, the game likes to hassle you to do so almost every time you duck your head into the town. This is probably fine in the early going when players need some guidance, but it never ends. Glyph Quest Chronicles likes to talk to the player, and it does so almost excessively. In combination with the new-found monetization, it comes off not so much as help as it does a series of desperate pleas. This time around, all of your quests are loaded up in a single menu. Rather than deal with NPCs, this works more like a checklist of achievements. Finish one off and you’ll earn some gems.

The stages themselves are more straightforward this time around too, albeit with a couple of extra twists to make things livelier. You’re working your way through a linear progression of levels, each one consisting of a number of fights against monsters. Some stages add a timer to apply some added pressure, while others decrease the number of fights by having the baddies pile up on you. You’ll frequently have to face off against powerful boss-style enemies, but don’t be too surprised to see many of them crop up again as regular foes later. As in the previous games, there’s a certain element of luck involved in your starting board layout, but once you figure out a couple of strategies, you can start manipulating how and where certain pieces appear.

Unfortunately, another similarity it shares with the previous games is the uneven difficulty. You’re going to hit difficulty spikes now and again, and that’s even assuming you know all of the little tricks to maximizing damage. The game’s bandage for this appears to be encouraging the player to buy and quaff health potions. That’s also not new, but it has never really sat right with me. It feels like a very inelegant solution to balance issues, and can create a downward spiral for players who haven’t bought the gold-doubling IAP. Grinding for coins to buy potions to properly try a stage again after failing feels bad at the best of times, but when you’ve got a stamina meter attached to it, it’s even more dreadful.

On top of that, the game also suffers from quite a few bugs. This review comes after the developer has diligently issued more than a few updates, and I’m still getting the occasional full-stop crash or lock-up. It’s frustrating enough as it is with its stamina system and random difficulty spikes, I don’t  need the game crashing mid-battle when things are going my way for once, too. The developers have been on this problem as quickly as anyone could be, so I’m sure it will be resolved in time. Still, I can’t review the future. The problems still exist in the present version, and that’s the only one I can really talk about here.

No one can say the developers of Glyph Quest Chronicles didn’t give other methods of monetization a fair try, so it’s hard to get upset at them for going in another direction this time around. Nevertheless, while the end result might be more profitable for them, the means to get there have resulted in a worse experience for the end user. I appreciate the many ways the team tried to soften the free-to-play blow, and I certainly like the many little improvements they’ve made to the mechanics, but it’s not enough to balance out the equation. There’s still a great puzzle game in here somewhere, but it’s never been harder to appreciate it.

In addition to the database update, 17.3.0 fixes a ton of bugs ranging from gameplay improvements to stability issues. It even fixes an issue with the World Footballer of the Year award, the award that none of my Liverpool players will earn any time soon. You can check all the details and fixes here.

So, as you can already tell, I think this game is terrific and an improvement over Football Manager Touch 2016, albeit in subtle ways. However, not all is rosy unfortunately. FMT 2017 is only playable on top-of-the-line tablets, yet it still crashes way too often on my iPad Air. The crashing is pretty persistent and is quite a big blemish on what is otherwise a fantastic game. Yes, there’s been an update that presumably has fixed some of those issues, but go in knowing that you’ll get numerous irritating crashes on the older high-end devices.

Football Manager games have often been called “spreadsheets" because of the sheer amount of stats and calculations going on under the hood, but calling FMT 2017 a spreadsheet does a disservice to the game and makes it sound boring when it’s anything but that. Yes, the game has a ton of stats; for instance, each of the thousands of players in the game has detailed stats ranging from how fast he can run to how good of a leader he can be. There are also ton of stats regarding a player’s performance going back years including where he played, how he performed, and much more.

However, even though the players are actually just a bunch of stats, they feel real because of how SI fleshes out their character quirks. Each player has short term and long term plans (wants to win a trophy or play in the first team) as well as positives and negatives in terms of happiness. They might think that one of their teammates is a great player and playing next to him makes them happy, or they might hate his guts and be unhappy just because they have to share a dressing room. And when a player is unhappy, his morale drops and with it his performance. I can’t count how many times I’ve had amazing players not perform because they were angry about something or other.

In my most recent season, one of my top defenders got a big offer from another team. I, of course, wanted to hold on to him because there weren’t too many days left in the transfer window. Well, he didn’t take my turning down the offer well and he got so unhappy that he was useless. All these character-related features really make you see those players as real people (though not like them very often).

If you aren’t the kind of player who loves studying numbers and stats, FMT 2017 deftly lets you skim the surface of all those stats by offering features like quick player comparison, player rankings for each team position, and many more similar features that allow you to swim into the shallows of the stats ocean or dive head first and spend hours comparing them yourself. There was a time in the franchise not so long ago that we had to write player stats on paper in order to see which player was the best in a specific position, but those days are long gone.

FMT 2017 also lets you delegate as much of the burden of coaching as you want. The way FMT 2017 handles stat comparison is just one way in which the game allows you to take or relinquish control of your team to the degree you desire. The game is a beast in terms of how many aspects of a team you can control, but SI has learned by now how to give players ways to make the game as easy or as demanding as they want. When I say easy or demanding, I don’t mean in terms of how often you’ll win; that remains constant throughout. What I’m referring to is how easily you can pick which aspects of a coaching gig you actually want to mess with.

Let me give you an example. Imagine that your team is sorely lacking a strong striker and you want to fill that gap as soon as possible. One way to do so is to go to the Player Search screen, pick Attackers from the filter, further filter by price, age, stats, and more, then see which players look promising, and finally have your assistant scout the player. If you think he’s suitable, you can then make an offer by tweaking the many different incentives, clauses, and fees, and wait to hear back. Or you could just have your assistant do the scouting for you, and if he finds someone interesting, you instruct him to mark that player as a transfer market. Your assistant will then proceed to take care of all the negotiations – based on your instructions like maximum wage and so on – and either succeed or fail. So it either takes you 15 minutes or 2, your choice.

See what I mean by delegating? If you’re only interested in picking players and tactics, you can do that. If you want to set up training regimes for the whole team or for just a couple of players, you can do so. If you want your assistant to take care of friendlies, or contract renewals, or pretty much any part of the coaching, you can do so. I don’t know many iOS games that have such customization in terms of gameplay. and FMT 2017 is much better for it. These delegation options allowed me to either pop in and play briefly if I only had a few minutes to spare or sit on the couch and play for much longer. And this year’s version has a new feature that lets you get an instant result mid-way through the game if the situation demands it. Hats off to SI for managing to develop a game that can be played both casually and in brief intervals or as a complex, time-consuming football simulation.

The game still offers a 3D match day experience, which allows you to split your screen in all kinds of ways to get the information you need while the match is under way. For instance, you can have half of the screen show the highlights while the other is showing your players’ ratings. Or you can have both teams’ ratings to see which opposition player is performing too good for his own good. However, the 3D engine continues to have weird slowdowns and stutters, so that takes away some of the immersion. And you still cannot watch a full 90 minute game but only highlights. Still, it’s fun seeing your players mess up your instructions in 3D.

This year’s edition had added in-game social media, and it’s actually more fun and more useful than it sounds. You can follow the feeds of teams you want to keep an eye on or players you’re interested in or even your own players to see how they are dealing with the team’s results. It might be a small addition, but it definitely makes the game feel more “real" and helps you get even more information if you so desire. It’s actually funny seeing fans of your team express their dissatisfaction with your latest blunder over social media in not so subtle ways.

In addition to letting you pick a team and go for glory, FMT 2017 offers Challenges that let you test your skills. There’s one where your team is in the relegation zone and you only have half a season to keep them up, or another where your team is filled with exceptional youth players and you have to lead them to a trophy. All these challenges have various difficulty settings and are pretty fun to play. There are also Challenges you can purchase as IAP for $0.99 each. And if you want to make the game easier to play, there are quite a few IAPs that allow you to become impervious to any sacking attempt, get unlimited scouting, have all the players in the world interested in joining your club, and so on. These are completely optional so don’t see this as content hidden behind a paywall. I’ve never bought any unlockables and simply play the base game.

Is FMT 2017 worth buying? Let me put it this way; this is my game of the year so far, despite its frequent crashes. One reason the crashes haven’t been game-breaking to me is that no matter when the game crashes – be it during a match or after a match – when you restart it you continue right where you left off. If the game crashed in the 54th minute, when you reload you start from the 54th minute with the same score. Is that ideal? Of course not. I don’t enjoy a game crashing once, let alone frequently, and these crashes did affect my review score. Football Manager Touch 2017 is a five star game for me, but I can’t give it that considering the technical issues. Still, this is one of the most engrossing games on the App Store and will have you coming back for that “one more match" every single day. For me, that makes it more than worth the money.

In terms of gameplay, with this new update any new season you start on Football Manager Touch 2016 will reflect team rosters as of February 2016 rather than the ones from August 2015. While we didn’t have that many big transfers this winter transfer season, it’s nice to know that if you start playing with let’s say Liverpool, you’ll be managing its current players. In addition to the update, the game fixed plenty of issues with the database, the UI, the match engine (like fixing players taking a throw in from behind the goal line), and the transfers and contracts. So, if you’ve been considering starting another season, now will be a great time to do so. Just be prepared to be found mummified in front of your tablet 10 years from now.

I’m sure many of the people reading this review have played Final Fantasy 9 before. On the other hand, this game is more than 15 years old and hasn’t left the PlayStation eco-system before, so I’m sure many of you haven’t. So, I’m going to start by talking about the quality of the port, and then I’ll go into a review of the game itself. If you want the short version, this is an excellent port of a very good game, but neither the port nor the game itself are without their flaws. Even taking the few issues with the port into account, this is, without question, the best version of the game, to the point that it would be silly to play the older version if you have access to this one.

The challenges in porting this title to any modern platform were numerous. As with the other two PlayStation 1 Final Fantasy games, many of the 3D assets for the game’s backgrounds were not kept. Unlike the other two, there is no PC version of the game, which means that most of the background images were only available in their 320 x 240 versions. Modern mobile devices rarely use that aspect ratio, and the resolutions of their displays are significantly higher. Left as-is, the backgrounds would look terrible, but creating them all again from scratch would be like making an entire new game. A less significant but still important issue is that the game would have to be fully ported from the PlayStation 1 version, as there is no PC version to put a wrapper around similar to what they appear to have done with Final Fantasy 7 ($7.99). Apart from those main issues, they also needed to account for mobile-specific features, and if possible, address some of the complaints with the original game.

Keeping that all in mind, this port is just about the best it could be. All of the 3D objects in the game are presented at much higher resolutions, and many of the character models have been touched up to give them added detail. The main characters look fantastic thanks to this, and even minor characters benefit from the increased resolution and a bit of texture filtering. The backgrounds appear to have been filtered and touched up, which is probably all they could realistically do. They never look great, and sometimes the blurriness washes out details, but at least in my case, my eyes adjusted after a while, so they didn’t bother me too badly. I’ve replayed the original recently on an HD TV and a Vita screen, and it looked even worse there, so I guess this is the best we’re going to get for now. If you’re playing on a device that doesn’t follow the original 4:3 aspect ratio the PlayStation game was designed for, you’ll also have to deal with borders on the sides of the screen. Again, there wasn’t a lot they could do here. The full-motion video cut-scenes are quite clear, but on my iPhone 6S Plus the first few seconds of each and every one of them suffered from stuttering and choppiness. With the frequency that videos pop up in the game, sometimes to bring backgrounds to life, this is a pretty annoying problem, and one I’m sure is fixable.

One other compromise is that it appears the music has been compressed more than it was in the original version. It still sounds great, but if your hearing is sharp and you’re playing with headphones, you’ll probably notice the slight dip in quality. The user interface has been completely redesigned for touch screens, and it works a lot better than Final Fantasy 7‘s controller overlay. Menus respond to touches just as you would expect them to, and you can even tap a point on the screen to move your character there if you don’t feel like using the virtual stick. As with the iOS port of Final Fantasy Tactics ($6.99), there are occasional situations where it feels like you have to tap something very small, but in general, the controls and user interface are excellent. I only have two complaints. First, the game treats the borders as dead zones, so if you try to move your thumb outside of the main play area, you won’t get a response. Second, although the game has MFi controller support, it seems to be buggy or outright broken on most controllers at the moment. I imagine both of these issues will be fixed in the future, though, and in form and function everything else works very well.

As far as additions go, the game includes a selection of cheats along the lines of those found in Final Fantasy 7. You can access them from the pause menu, so they aren’t staring you in the face the whole time you’re playing, which was a complaint some had about Final Fantasy 7. The framerate in Final Fantasy 9 is better than that game’s iOS port, too, matching and even improving on the original PlayStation version in places. It’s still not as smooth as it could be, but I suspect they couldn’t venture too far away from the original without breaking things. There are two great new things in this port that I really like, too. First, you can flip a setting in the config menu to turn off battle introductions, which reduces the amount of time it takes to get into a battle by about five seconds. This goes a long way towards correcting one of the major complaints about Final Fantasy 9, the overall slow speed of the battles.

The other thing I really like is that the game auto-saves after every screen transition. Of course, you’ll want to make a manual save at every opportunity just to be on the safe side, but it’s really great to be able to fire up the game, run through a couple of screens, and close it without worrying about sniffing out a save spot. As an added bonus, it also works like a checkpoint in case a boss wrecks you. Just hit continue from the main menu and you can take as many tries as you need. Cheating a little? Sure, but it’s fairly harmless and certainly more convenient for mobile gamers than Final Fantasy 7‘s rigid adherence to the original save system was. In fact, I’d say this save system is probably my favorite new thing about this version of the game, as it makes it a lot easier to sneak in quick slices of the game during pockets of free time.

So if you’re wondering about the quality of the port, there you are. It’s an excellent port, easily the best of the Final Fantasy games on iOS so far, and worthy of mention among the best transplants to the platform such as Christian Whitehead’s Sonic The Hedgehog ports and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto conversions. The only way it could have been better is if it had been completely remade from scratch, and I suspect neither the game nor the platform could justify that kind of investment of resources. I wish Square Enix would show this level of care to all of the games they bring to the platform. I sincerely hope this, along with the more recent releases in the Dragon Quest line, demonstrate a new approach to mobile ports from the company. I suppose time will tell on that one, but if nothing else, Final Fantasy 9 fans have gotten the royal treatment after a very long wait.

As for the game itself, I have some conflicting feelings about it. It’s a very calculated throwback, and at the time of its release, it got a fair bit of criticism for that. In the here and now, with almost 16 more years down the Final Fantasy road, its reflection on the games that come before it is, at least in my books, quite welcome. Some of the references feel like they’re winking a little too hard at the audience, but there’s quite a bit of sincerity running through most of the game. This was probably the last time series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi had a major creative hand in a Final Fantasy game, which I think accounts for why it feels to many like it was the last traditional Final Fantasy. It’s kind of funny, because for most of its development period, the team making it wasn’t even sure it was going to be a numbered installment in the series. It has a very different look to it compared to the other PlayStation Final Fantasy releases, owing largely to the return of Yoshitaka Amano, the lead artist on the first six Final Fantasy games. Sakaguchi believed this aspect made it more suitable as a spin-off title, but Square Enix felt the game was worthy of being a mainline entry.

They weren’t wrong. Final Fantasy 9 has everything a Final Fantasy game ought to. There are tons of interesting places to visit, with fantastical cities, bizarre dungeons, and a big world map to explore. The cast of playable characters is fairly large, and unlike the previous two games, each has their own unique skills that separates them from the others. Each of the party members gets their own little slices of story to call their own, but the main focus is on hero Zidane, heroine Garnet, and the heart of the story, the black mage Vivi. The story is the strongest when it’s focused on Garnet and Vivi’s struggles with their identities and roles, but in the later part of the game, things start to home in on Zidane’s issues, which is where the game’s story always falls apart for me. For most of the game, he’s a refreshingly light hero after the gruff Cloud and the mopey Squall, but I guess Final Fantasy 9 wouldn’t be much of a Final Fantasy throwback if it didn’t fulfill the need for main character melodrama. The villains in this game are also particularly forgettable, and coming off of Final Fantasy 8‘s weaknesses in this area, that’s really saying something.

Still, I think Final Fantasy 9 is my favorite of the PlayStation-era Final Fantasy games. What it lacks in a strong villain it more than makes up for with a likable core cast. While there are characters who I feel are completely squandered, like Amarant and Freya, and at least one toss-away in the form of Quina, the rest of the crew is strong, playing off of each other quite well. Vivi is the main stand-out, and I think he’s as good of a character as the series has to offer, with an excellent arc that pays off well emotionally. Like most of the games in the series, the story drags a little too much between the halfway point and the ending, with a great deal of its story momentum front-loaded and the remainder packed into the ending. But wow, what an ending. After a couple of entries with vague endings that didn’t do much to satisfy after the long journeys before them, Final Fantasy 9‘s close is emotional and triumphant, leaving very few unanswered questions.

In terms of gameplay, I find Final Fantasy 9 more mechanically interesting than Final Fantasy 7 due to its larger party size and more specialized characters. Its basic systems are more functional and intuitive than Final Fantasy 8‘s innovative, messy ideas, too. The battle system follows the traditional Active Time Battle rules closely, a tried and true system that works well, even if it means combat is nothing particularly special relative to other installments. This game’s take on Limit Breaks is the Trance system, which differs from the former mainly in that they’re triggered automatically, making it more difficult to game them for use against bosses. I think that’s a good change given how overpowered Limit Breaks were in the previous two games, but others might find it annoying. As already mentioned, each character has their unique skills, so if a character can’t use Magic, that’s all there is to that. I find this adds value to each of the characters and encourages you to change up your party based on the threats you’re facing. This means you’ll sometimes need to use characters who you don’t necessarily like, but I feel like it makes for better encounter design and grants an extra layer of strategy to the game.

You do have some input on how your characters progress, however. In addition to their basic skills, characters can learn new abilities or magic spells by equipping gear. Each piece of gear has some abilities it can teach, although certain skills are limited to particular characters. Winning in battle will reward you with some ability points in addition to the regular gil and experience, and when you’ve reached a set number, your character will permanently learn the associated skill. It generally takes longer to permanently learn the skill than a gear piece is useful for, so you’ll frequently have to choose between using the best gear for the stat benefits or keeping old gear equipped to learn new abilities. If you’re the sort that really wants to max out your characters, this system could be a nightmare, but I rather like it. It makes me want to sniff out and collect every piece of equipment so that I can have access to the full range of abilities. I think I use the Steal ability more in this game than any other Final Fantasy as a result.

While there aren’t quite as many mini-games in Final Fantasy 9 as there are in Final Fantasy 7, the few that are here are substantial. The highlight is Chocobo Hot And Cold, a treasure hunt that sees your party’s chocobo digging around for treasure maps and some extremely powerful items, while the low point is the confusing card game Tetra Master, which pales in comparison to Final Fantasy 8‘s Triple Triad. It’s a little too random, in my opinion, but if you like Othello, you might enjoy Tetra Master enough to put up with its eccentricities. You’ll only have to play it a couple of times in the main story, so if you don’t like it, it’s not a big deal. I do have to point out that this game contains one of the most irritating secrets in Final Fantasy history, requiring the player to do an absurd speed run in order to obtain the best sword in the game. You do not need that sword in any way, shape, or form, but it’s something that always sticks in my craw when I come back to this game.

Outside of those minor distractions, most of Final Fantasy 9‘s gameplay is quite predictable by design. You’ll visit a new town or city, stumble on some reason to explore a nearby cave or dungeon, and finishing that will somehow open up the path to the next town or city. At various stages of the game, you’ll gain access to new means of transportation that will slowly open up the world map for exploration. You can find sub-quests by going off the beaten path, and there’s a ridiculous optional boss for expert players to grind their teeth on. As this is a deliberate throwback, many of the situations and characters you come across will echo previous games in some way, which can be a lot of fun as long as you aren’t annoyed by exploring yet another volcano or giant tree. For what it’s worth, the dungeon layouts are quite good, nicely demonstrating the team’s experience and maturity at working with pre-rendered areas.

Final Fantasy 9 has its issues with pacing and story, and there are some minor, perhaps unavoidable issues with the port. It needs one solid update to take care of the problems with MFi controllers and the videos stuttering, at the very least. That said, while I could knock it for what it isn’t, I think I’d rather praise it for what it is: the best version to date of an extremely good RPG, one that might not be in the upper echelon of the overall genre, but certainly in that category relative to other mobile offerings. I loved this game nearly 16 years ago as a joyous farewell to a series I felt was drifting away from me. Even though I ended up adjusting just fine to Final Fantasy‘s new direction from that point on, I still love Final Fantasy 9 today. Not as a farewell to the traditional, but as a wonderful celebration of it.

While the game will entertain every player who enjoys deep management games, it truly shines when you actually know football and follow it. Why? Because there’s a sense of vindication when playing FMT 2016 that I don’t think I’ve ever gotten from another game. When that no-name player you got into your digital team at the beginning of the year ends up becoming a big signing for a real-life big team merely a few months later, then you can proudly say “I called it." Outside the ‘moral satisfaction’ that such moments bring, they also show the game’s realism in terms of player representation, another reason why playing this game and watching the real sport end up merging together in a fabulous amalgam of sports entertainment.

Some might complain that we are getting another premium-priced Football Manager game too soon after Football Manager Classic 2015 ($19.99), which came out less than a year ago. Personally, I like that Sports Interactive released FMT 2016 because this game is by far the better mobile-ready game and definitely worth purchasing even if you own the previous game. The developers put a lot of time in making this game touchscreen ready, and while not everything is perfect about the UI, FMT 2016 definitely feels like a mobile game rather than a hasty PC port.

As with every Football Manager game, starting as a new manager means picking one of many, many teams coming from many, many leagues. FMT 2016 offers 51 playable leagues, so you will never run out of variety. Go with a strong team, and you have a relatively-easy ride but also high board expectations; go with a small, lower-league team, and you have a mountain to climb but everyone’s pretty sure you won’t climb it anyway. And you aren’t locked into a team for the duration of your playthrough since if you get fired or you quit, you can apply for other jobs and end up managing a completely different team than your original one. Or, you might even end up coaching a national team, something that changes the game completely since you’re playing in different competitions and have to deal more with scouting and tactics than contracts and training.

In this year’s version, you can even create your own club and have it play in any league. Trust me, this is even more fun than naming XCOM squad members after your friends because while losing one of those XCOM squad members in battle can be ‘sad,’ being able to complain to your friend that his goalkeeper counterpart stops less shots than a pillow is much more entertaining. The game also offers a Challenge Mode where you are dropped in the middle of (usually) a crisis and asked to turn the team around, a much shorter and more goal-driven way of approaching the game.

While it’s easy to get lost in the multitude of options, numbers, and players FMT 2016 offers, the game does a marvelous job offering you plenty of cruise-control options that help you take or relinquish control of the various aspects of running a club as you see fit. If you don’t want to deal with training players, one tap of the screen later and your assistant is running it. If you don’t want to bother searching for players, you can set your scouts on various assignments. The game assists you even when hunting a specific player; instead of throwing offer after offer at the player, you can tell your assistant to do so, you give him the parameters of the deal you want to make, and then you unleash him onto the world.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an iOS game as complicated as this one allow you to play it either by micromanaging every single aspect or standing back and letting the game help you. At the same time, what I enjoy about FMT 2016 is that you can go half-way; if you feel that a specific player will benefit from a different kind of training, you can go in and set a specific training regime for him while allowing your assistant to continue training the rest of the team. The game’s assistance comes in degrees, and this enables players with different levels of familiarity with the franchise and different levels of dedication to enjoy FMT 2016.

The game’s accessibility is definitely helped by the much-improved interface compared to the previous tablet iteration of the game. In most aspects of the UI, SI has made the interface much more accessible, with the most prominent example of this change being the Matchday screen. Your team instructions are now broken into very informative screens that show you how your instructions will be realized on the field. For instance, showing you a visual representation of the option ‘Look for Overlap’ is great both for making the game more visually pleasing and for helping those who lack familiarity with the sport. Most buttons are larger than the last iteration too, and the players can be dragged around the Tactics screen more easily.

The other way SI improved the interface is by making really excellent use of the iPad screen’s real estate and filling each screen with as much information as possible without crowding it. This saves you from having to flip back and forth between screens constantly, an issue that’s all too present in Football Manager Mobile 2016 ($8.99). There are, still, some issues with the game ignoring some taps, like when you try to fiddle with a contract offer; I wish SI did away with plus and minus icons that require a minimum of 20 taps because they really are a pain to use.

Going back to the information aspect of the game, I will be forever grateful for SI’s decision to make information like which players are tired or lacking match fitness available in the team’s main screen. Those who haven’t played previous iterations of the game (or haven’t played Football Manager Mobile 2016) will really not understand the frustration of having to go check every single player in your roster one by one to see whether they are fit to play at their maximum capacity. FMT 2016 fixes this issue (and many like it) by cleverly finding ways to give you all the necessary info in as fewer screens as possible. Seriously, you can’t understand how much time well-organized information can save you in a game with a billion numbers and stats.

Speaking of numbers and stats, as I’ve discussed in my review of Football Manager Mobile 2016, many call Football Manager games ‘spreadsheets’ because of how often you end up comparing a stack of numbers with another stack of numbers. SI over the years has done so much to humanize your players that is quite unrepresentative of the current state of the franchise to call it a spreadsheet.

Your players have very complex personalities (to the point where you’ll want to punch more than a few of them over the course of your career), very specific pros and cons that can be related to the players’ athleticism or personality, and preferences to where they want to play and what kind of position they expect their team to be. Fail to sign the right kind of players, and you’ll end up with a bunch of unhappy brats who play well below their true ablities. For instance, if you sign a highly ambitious player but you are just a mid-league team, expect him to get disillusioned pretty soon. Fail to treat your players like human beings, and you’re guaranteed to have a dysfunctional team on your hands.

The only unexpected disappointment in the game is how the 3D engine is a huge step back visually. In FMT 2016 you can either watch a match in top-down 2D screen, a detailed text, or in 3D. Last year’s 3D engine was very sharp and while the animations were often a bit wonky, the match looked great. This year, because of what I guess are technical limitations, the game’s 3D engine is so blurry and low-resolution that you’ll have to put an effort to read the players’ names.

I like to split my matchday screen in two, having my players’ stats on the one half and the match in 3D on the other half (by the way, the game still doesn’t offer the full 90 minute match in the 3D engine). When I split the screen that way, I can’t really enjoy the 3D match because of the low resolution players and field. Yes, the game still offers many ways to watch that match (different cameras and so on), but the blurry 3D engine really is a let down.

Despite the 3D engine disappointment, the game still stands as the king of manager games on iOS and an extremely-easy recommendation to anyone even remotely interested in sports. The game’s depth is probably incomparable to anything on the App Store, its replayability probably unmatched too, and the entertainment it offers ranks up with the best gaming experiences I’ve had on any platform. SI has put a lot of work to make the game play better on tablet, and it shows as it’s definitely the most tablet-friendly manager game to date. Be warned, though, that the game only plays on the iPad Air 1,2, iPad Mini 2,3, and 4, and the iPad Pro, but even my iPad Air 1 struggled to keep up at times, and I faced occasional (but relatively-rare) slowdowns. The game offers cross-save compatibility with the PC version of Football Manager 2016, a fun feature if you happen to own both.

The game’s $19.99, and if you complain that a game as deep and as rewarding as this shouldn’t cost that, I think you might want to reassess your views on game pricing. There are IAPs, but they are the type that simply make the game easier to play (you can poison the other team’s players, become literally impossible to be sacked, and so on). All are completely unnecessary, but if you don’t want the game to be too punishing or simply like to pay to have an easier time, you have that ability. I’m very excited to finally have in Football Manager Touch 2016 what I think is the best Football Manager version I could have hoped for, and despite my niggles with the 3D engine and some interface issues here and there, this might be my game of the year.

Football Manager Touch 2016 let’s you mess around with a transfer market that includes more than 300,000 real players and staff, all of them with pretty realistic stats. This version offers enhanced tactical options (like set-piece planning and opposition instructions), the ability to create a club (so you can build a squad with all your friends), redesigned screens that should hopefully make navigating the game easier than last year, and, of course, the 3D match engine that lets you see your team lose in 3D glory.

The game costs $19.99 (totally worth the price), and works only on the iPad Air 1 and 2, the iPad Mini 2,3, and 4, and the iPad Pro (go here for the Android list). Be warned, though, this game will take up any free time you have and even time that wasn’t free to begin with. I’m serious though; this is the kind of game where you can really just look at numbers for hours and then go through that “just one more match" syndrome over, and over again.

In order to take care of this scourge once and for all, a special force of veterans is organized, the Ork Hunters, whose mission is to once and for all eradicate the threat. Inquisitor Horst has been sent to Armageddon to help these warriors, so expect to see him pop up and talk a lot. Because this Campaign doesn’t include any Space Marines, the unit disposition is very different from the rest of the Campaigns, and the whole Campaign calls for different strategies than most other missions. You’ll also see four new Ork units (Feral Wildboyz, Huntas, Boarboyz, and Junkas) along with six new Ork hunter infantry types (Ork Hunter Company Command, Infantry, Flamers, Anti-Tank Support, Fire Support, and Snipers). All in all, the 10 missions of the Ork Hunters Campaign should be quite fun to play. The new Campaign is out right now, and it costs $4.99.

Warhammer 40K: Armageddon‘s gameplay roots reach all the way back to Panzer General in the 1990s and to its successor, Panzer Corps. Just like its predecessors, Warhammer 40K: Armageddon is a hex-based, turn-based strategy game, but this game offers a long campaign where no Nazi can be seen anywhere: instead, you control the Imperial forces of the Armageddon Steel Legion and various Chapters of Space Marines in their fight against the Ork invasion. The game delivers its narrative in great-quality voice-overs that help to some degree create a sense that you are guiding people to war rather than just a collection of zeros and ones. Most wargames provide a pre-battle briefing that includes a map and the objectives, which removes the human element from the upcoming battle. Warhammer 40K: Armageddon coats this otherwise dry information in the Warhammer lore and the interesting – if predictable – characters, which bestows to what would otherwise be a dry wargame a sense of personality that makes the game much more interesting to play. It’s a shame, then, that such a great lore is distilled into very predictable mission objectives that are mostly either capture or hold X number of Victory Hexes. Some of the DLCs have more interesting mission objectives, but I wish those were also in the base game. What I did enjoy, though, was the way many scenarios will often change mid-way with new objectives coming in that force you to quickly relocate units and adjust your strategy, which can offer some moments of real strategic tension.

When you are ready to go to war, you’ll have to pick which units to deploy from a large selection that can make for a variety of strategies and also really change each battle’s flavor. The game offers a variety of unit types such as infantry, walkers, light vehicles, tanks, artillery, aircrafts, and even the humongous Titans, and most units can be equipped with different weapons that can be more effective against armor or infantry. Going with armored units and huge artillery makes for a very different battle than going with numerous agile light vehicles. I was glad that the game offers a comparison system that clearly displays the benefits of one unit over the other because otherwise I would have been totally lost. The units are also drawn very well, which helps the Warhammer flavor of the game even more.

I did have an issue with the unit information, though, as the game’s tooltips fail to work most of the times. Since the game’s manual includes very little information about all these icons, the tooltips were essential, but, unfortunately, they don’t work as they should. Speaking of manuals, as a gamer who loves a good, hefty manual (stems from my days of buying boxed games I suppose), I was disappointed by the game’s manual as it feels hastily put together and doesn’t provide all the necessary information about the game’s UI, which will definitely make this game less accessible to those not willing to spend the time uncovering the game’s secrets. Also, the indicator of whether a unit has moved or attacked in a turn are very small and quite hard to see without zooming. The good news, though, is that the in-battle sprites are very detailed and colorful, and even though they aren’t animated, all their firing actions are, including flying missiles and tiny mushroom clouds. The UI sideboard provides all the necessary information about the battlefield, and with the game’s maps being very well-drawn, the whole battle comes to life nicely. Yes, some in the forums will and do complain about the lack of unit animation, but, personally, I’m used to my strategy games being on the inanimate side, so I didn’t have an issue with that at all.

Once you enter a battle, you make your strategic decisions primarily based on unit capabilities and terrain cover. The game includes numerous terrain types that offer varying degrees of cover and line of sight, which in turn dictate your units’ strategic positioning. The battles can get quite strategic, and I enjoyed that in most clashes my units didn’t have to act as battering rams, simply smashing into an enemy unit until it perished. Instead, I would carefully situate my artillery so as to use the terrain to protect it, then move my aircraft just close to enough to fire without being fired upon while using my tanks to force my way through the enemy’s defenses. As the game has a carry-over system, which allows a core group of units to gain experience, upgrade, and stick by your side throughout the campaign, you have to make tough decisions regarding when to risk an experienced unit or when to save it for a future battle if it has taken a battering. The relatively-limited movement range of most units doesn’t allow for grand sweeping maneuvers, and there’s no bonus for flank or rear attack, so your strategic options are somewhat limited. Overall, the battle mechanics aren’t the most complicated, but that is fine because not all games need to be accessible only by the very few supremely-motivated players. That said, even though it’s not part of the traditional Panzer Corps mechanics, I would have liked unit facing to be a factor in the battles.

What I do wish was different, and this is the core issue that many wargamers have with the Panzer Corps game and its likes, is how the game often feels like a puzzle. Often, especially in the higher difficulties, the first couple of times you play a scenario become scouting missions in order to get a sense of where all the units are because the game can get so difficult that you have no chance of winning if you don’t know where some units are situated. As the enemy’s units always start at the same location and since this is a hex-based game with units that have relatively short movement ranges, the scenarios often feel a bit too similar in each replay. A randomized unit placement (always within specific parameters, of course), would have done wonders in terms of replayability. However, as this game is quite huge with a branching campaign (you can choose which battles to fight at certain points in the story), five difficulty settings, and, of course, a multiplayer mode, Warhammer 40K: Armageddon offers many hours of gameplay that somewhat remedy the unit positioning issue. The game has a huge amount of content even without the three DLC campaigns that offer a total of thirty extra missions and some new, fascinating mechanics, like the way eliminating certain units in a battle can change the flow of subsequent encounters.

Speaking of the multiplayer mode, I consider it the most entertaining part of wargames like Warhammer 40K: Armaggedon because no AI opponent can come close to how a human opponent plays. Slitherine’s game lets you construct a challenge map and play either as the Orks or the Imperial troops. However, the game, again, lacks a bit of flexibility in the multiplayer side of things as it doesn’t allow you to set specific mission goals. Even without that flexibility, the multiplayer mode is very entertaining and will offer many hours of entertainment. Yet, I increasingly get the feeling that Slitherine needs to take advantage of what the iOS platform has to offer because as it stands now, Slitherine’s ports have much less to offer in terms of a mutiplayer experience when compared to other iOS games. For instance, Slitherine uses its Play By Email mode where the game emails you when it’s your turn to play. However, in most of my multiplayer games I wouldn’t receive any email announcing my turn (which has happened to me in other Slitherine games too). When iOS offers a built-in notification system, developers should take advantage of it because getting notified the moment your turn is up can make the difference between a multiplayer game taking a day or half a week. Also, the multiplayer mode currently doesn’t offer a way to add friends, which is a pity.

Despite the multiplayer mode feeling slightly obsolete in the age of iOS 8 (and almost iOS 9), some UI issues and the relatively-simple battle mechanics, Warhammer 40K: Armageddon is a lot of fun to play primarily because of its fun story, great units, and the fascinating lore that makes playing Warhammer 40K: Armageddon more fun that it probably should have been. This has been the most enjoyable turn-based strategy game I’ve played in quite a while and that comes down mostly to the incredibly fun theme. In a sea of stale WWII (or, in the odd occasion, WWI) strategy games on PC and iOS, Warhammer 40K: Armageddon is a breath of fresh air that will definitely keep you killing Orks or Imperial Troops for many, many hours. The game, though, does suffer a bit in its iOS translation. I hope with Slitherine’s acquisition of Shenahdoah Studio, the multiplayer features of its future wargames will improve. If Slitherine improves its multiplayer modes, it will really help raise its already good iOS ports to a whole different level. The base game (with the free Untold Battles DLC) is $19.99 and each of the three DLC costs $4.99 (with a Triple Pack saving you $4.99), so with thirty dollars you can get an ungodly amount of content on your iPad. And no, the game isn’t expensive at this price because it’s cheaper than the PC game and offers many hours of entertainment and a quality package. If you like your Warhammer, then, or you’re just itching for a good turn-based strategy game on your iPad, give Warhammer 40K: Armaggedon a try.

I’ve already written a lot of words about Chaos Rings 3, with some fairly in-depth impressions posted a few days after its release in Japan last October. You would think that would leave me without much to say in this review, but the nature of Chaos Rings 3 changes dramatically the more time you spend with it, and having spent almost four times the amount of time with the game now than I had then, there are a lot of things I want to talk about. This is, of course, the latest in Square Enix’s Chaos Rings series, developed by Media.Vision of Wild Arms fame. The first game was one of the earlier big RPG efforts from any major company, launching in the spring of 2010. Most of the assets from that game were recycled to make a quick prequel a year later in the form of Chaos Rings Omega ($6.99). A year after that, Chaos Rings 2 ($14.99) debuted, adding in a few twists and taking the Chaos Rings ($6.99) formula to perhaps its ultimate form.

No other original RPG IP released by Square Enix on iOS has been able to match the success of Chaos Rings, and it seems like the publisher has stopped trying. I suppose it’s hard to blame anyone involved for that. These games are somewhat costly to produce and are priced appropriately with that budget in mind. At the same time, by App Store standards it’s a high price for a customer to pay for an unknown quantity. Then there’s the nature of the market itself, which has changed greatly in the half-decade since the first game in the series debuted. In the face of that shift, the very existence of Chaos Rings 3 is a little bit surprising. Particularly since it seems to have kicked the unreleased free-to-play Chaos Rings Sigma to the side on its way out the door. I feel like today’s mobile gamer is more used to seeing the opposite of that situation occur.

When I first started playing Chaos Rings 3, the cynic in me couldn’t help but smell a couple of rats. While this is a turn-based, single-player RPG that uses familiar spell and item names, with a familiar mission-based structure and emphasis on rounding out a collection of special gene attacks, it’s a massive tonal shift from the rather unique flavor of the Chaos Rings games prior to this one. Cold, immaculate spaces give way to lush, vibrant vistas. Grizzled, aged protagonists have handed off to a pack of veritable high school kids. While it has its moments, it never quite hits the sort of oppressive tension the older games did. Is this really Chaos Rings, or did Square Enix think the only way to sell an original RPG on iOS was to stick the familiar branding on it?

Then there’s the game’s economy, for lack of a better word. Collecting cards through random draws, fusing them to create new ones, sacrificing them to other cards to help level them up. A rare currency that the game doles out a little bit each day or upon completion of a mission. A temporary VIP membership you can buy with that currency to boost your rewards for a period of time. A battle arena with time-limited events where you can spend your rare currency on boosts and try to win prizes. This feels suspiciously like a modern Japanese social RPG, but there’s not an ounce of IAP to be found in the game, and it plays just fine without going online. One can’t help but wonder about the motivations here.

Playing through the whole game put a rest to some of my skepticism on both of those points. While the game is still very different in its tone from the others in the series, it hasn’t quite given up its tendency to swing into some very dark places. The combat system feels like a solid evolution of the one found in the other games, while still offering up its own quirks. The expanded size of the party shakes up the system found in the other three games, but party members can still team up to deliver more powerful attacks if you time things right, and as the familiar break gauge returns, there’s still a heavy emphasis on keeping momentum. The new gene system draws in elements from the previous games along with a few dashes of Persona and modern social RPGs, and while it’s fairly different in its implementation, the resulting abilities are taken from the same trusty line-up as before. The structure of Chaos Rings 3 is also quite familiar, retaining the designed-for-portable, mission-based set-up and expanding on it in satisfying ways.

After you get through the introduction of the game, you’ll find yourself able to choose the missions you’d like to take on. Many of these involve going into a stage you’ve been to in the story and finding certain items or killing certain monsters. Some of them just require you to run around the town areas a bit and talk to certain people. Only a small portion of these missions are directly connected to the main story, and while you can tackle those exclusively, your levels are going to fall behind pretty fast. This might have resulted in some terrible grinding, were it not for a few things. First, the side missions usually tell mini-stories in and of themselves. It might just be a couple paragraphs of text, or it might be a tear-jerker cut-scene or two in the style of Dragon Quest, but there’s always something to try to give you a higher reason for your return trips. The side missions change each day, and I found myself getting more lost in these mini-stories than in the main plot.

That’s not the only side content where you can power up, either. In addition to the story mode, there’s a battle mode where you can take your characters into the arena to face various challenges. Included in these challenges are special timed events where you can earn some nice rewards. Any experience points you earn in this mode carry over to the main game, so if you feel like you need a little boost and run out of side missions to take on, you have the option to do so here. Sadly, this is the one mode where the game’s lack of English voices actually has a real impact. The whole time you’re fighting in battle mode, a couple of characters from the main story will be providing commentary. It’s pretty funny stuff at times, but the English version makes no attempt to translate it at all, so unless you understand Japanese, all you’ll really get out of it is the feeling, I think.

I still think the rare currency is pretty suspicious, but it ended up being a non-factor over the course of the game. The game gives some to you every day, and you can earn more by doing side missions. It’s pretty easy to rack up a good bunch as a result, but if you’re the sort that plans to binge on the game, you’ll probably have to make do without for the most part. The coins are used for a number of purposes including drawing random gene cards, buying keys to open golden chests, picking up powerful items, continuing if you’re wiped out in battle, and buying buffs to use in the arena, but you can easily beat the game without any of those things. The lowest price of any of those things are the keys, which cost a meager two coins each. Even blasting through the game, you’ll get enough coins to open most golden chests, if not all of them. Those chests usually contain items used to complete certain side missions or pieces to modify your equipment with, and neither of those are necessary for beating the main story. As for gene cards, you’ll end up with plenty of them on hand even if you never make use of the game’s random pulls at all.

The gene system is as complicated as you want it to be. You could get through the game doing nothing more than slapping your best gene cards on your characters and only changing them out when you get better ones. If you want to engage more with the system, you’ll find a Shin Megami Tensei-like fusion system where you can combine two cards to create a new, more powerful one that inherits some abilities from both its parents. You can sell extra cards for more cash, feed them to other cards to boost their levels, or just collect them. Your card inventory does have a limit, as in most social RPGs, and you can of course expand that limit using your rare coins. The more of these genes you discover, the higher your team level becomes, so there’s good reason to sniff them out beyond looking at the pretty art. Most of your party’s statistical definition comes from the genes you’re using. Each character’s element is determined by the gene they’re using, and their core stats are closely connected to their chosen card, as well. In fact, your characters don’t even accumulate experience points or level up. That’s all on the gene cards, and the more powerful they are, the higher the level they can attain.

As in previous games, you can sort of set your own pace with regards to levels. Before heading into any area, you can select what level range the encounters will be there. As you play more the of the story, you’re able to choose higher ranges, which is a good way to make sure even starting areas retain their challenge when you’re going back to them for side missions. The maps are bigger than ever, with more side paths and branches than in previous games. There’s a good variety to them, too. Lots of lush, beautiful, natural environments interspersed with technological creations. There are plenty of darker places, too, more in line with the type of atmosphere seen in the earlier games. As you play, you’ll earn new abilities that will allow you to navigate these stages differently, as well. Some stages build in their own gimmicks, like an early level whose paths are blocked by rivers that can only be crossed on the back of a raptor. You won’t encounter enemies while you’re riding one, but you can’t take it into indoor areas, so you’ll have to get off sooner or later.

While the main plot appears to be trying to cast a wider net than the previous games in the series, I still found it satisfying in spite of the presence of a ton of anime tropes. It’s not as philosophically chewy as the other titles, but it’s not afraid to throw punches, especially after the breezy first chapter. There are a lot of the bizarre touches that the Chaos Rings series is known for, and the main themes of the game certainly fit the overall mythos well enough. I won’t say much else for fear of spoiling anything, but I enjoyed the game’s story. The translation is fairly solid, too, though I’ll mention once again that the voices are Japanese only. You can turn them off in the options if they get on your nerves, at least. I found a couple of typos in the script here and there, but it’s well-translated for the most part and doesn’t fumble on the game’s numerous references to the earlier games.

As you would expect from a Chaos Rings game, the presentation is outstanding. The visuals are gorgeous, the music is varied and catchy, and it all runs very smoothly, a nice change from Chaos Rings 2. The UI is exceptionally well-designed given all of the things it needs to handle, and the game offers a nice array of options to fiddle around with, including the ability to download the extra chapters before you unlock them, in case you happen to be out and about when you hit a chapter end. I like that you can delete chapters as you finish them to free up space, too. Very considerate of Square Enix to include that. Sadly, there’s no iCloud support, so I guess the goodwill only goes so far there. There also isn’t any MFi controller support, an odd omission given Square Enix’s recent push to add that support into older games, and the fact that the game is also available on PlayStation Vita in Japan. If nothing else, let’s at least applaud the arrival of the first universal Chaos Rings game on iOS.

In short, Chaos Rings 3 is a big, meaty evolution of the series that makes a lot of changes. Some of those feel like natural progressions from the older games, while others are obviously coming in from other sources, but the game on the whole is richer for having all of them. Some elements, like the crafting system or the poorly-implemented summons, could probably use more attention if the series continues, but I can certainly appreciate that the developers threw a lot of things in there for people to play with even if they’re not all fully integrated and fleshed out. The battle arena and daily side missions give the game a bit more replay value than the average RPG, a pleasant bonus given the main story is more than worth it on its own. While I kind of missed the more tense atmosphere that Chaos Rings has been known for up until now, I also think the series needed a proper shake-up if it was to continue. As for the burning questions of whether it was always a Chaos Rings game, or if it was always meant to be premium? Well, given the game came out this good in the end, I honestly can’t say I care much about the answers.

Throughout my gaming life spanning from the mid-80s to today, I’ve mostly gravitated towards games that ask a lot of a player but provide fantastic experiences in return. I loved the RPGs of the 80s and 90s (the Baldur’s Gates and the Fallouts), and also many classic hex-based strategy games (I still fondly remember Blue Byte’s Battle Isle and its glorious hexagonal warfare). I’ve always looked for games that made me feel that my choices, even small ones, mattered and games that let me create my own stories. In RPGs, I got to choose my class, equipment and, often, morality, while in strategy games, I often hand-picked the units I would bring to battle and had plenty of freedom in planning and executing my strategies. Unsurprisingly, I also really enjoyed many choose-your-own adventure gamebooks, and their later digital adaptations, for the stories they let me build and the sense, or illusion, of freedom they provided.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve started a review of Sports Interactive’s Football Manager Classic 2015 (FMC) ($19.99), which has finally landed on tablets, with a confession of my love of RPGs, strategy games, and choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks. It’s because even though many don’t realize it, at its core, FMC is a game about creating stories. In my many, many hours playing Football Manager and its precursor, Championship Manager, I’ve had to make choice after choice and, in the process, I’ve created a multitude of stories. Playing Football Manager has always been a very intense gaming experience because I always know that every decision I make, like buying a new player or changing tactics mid-match, changes my story in the game. I’ve spent literally countless hours playing Championship Manager and, subsequently, Football Manager on both a PC and a tablet, and my clubs have experienced incredible highs and remarkable lows. Yet, even my failures have been entertaining because FMC has mastered the art of letting the player create unique and utterly entertaining stories in every single playthrough.

So, what exactly is FMC 2015, and why is its arrival on tablets (admittedly, only “high-end" tablets) a big deal for iOS gaming? In FMC you are the coach of a football club and you get to manage its every aspect, and I do mean every aspect. The Football Manager franchise has been primarily a PC game since its first appearance in 1993, and while a few years ago SI decided to develop a handheld version of the game (called Football Manager Handheld), the developers had to remove many of its features and shrink its huge player database to keep phones from exploding.

While the Handheld version was fun, by the time the 2015 version was published, many members of our forums were, rightfully so, complaining about its limitations and claiming that top-tier tablets had the processing power to run a full port of the PC game. I’ve no idea if SI developers read our forums, but they certainly tacitly agreed with these complaints and decided to port to high-end tablets the PC game’s “Classic Mode" (the Classic mode is a streamlined version of the full game, but for many, it’s the preferred way of playing the game because they consider the Normal mode too bloated).

By porting the PC game on tablets, SI has given iOS gamers an “open world" experience with almost no equal in the App Store – the game offers you the world as your playground, since you can pick any club out of 117 leagues from 51 nations around the globe. There’s absolutely no restriction over which club you can lead to triumph or humiliation. Even more importantly, almost all of those clubs have their real-world players and staff, which make the game an amazing reference guide to all things football and increase the sense of realism. Just to help you comprehend the range of possibilities and gameplay experiences this game can offer, imagine this: you could choose to lead Real Madrid, the Spanish superteam worth 1.3 billion, to the pinnacle of European football, or, if you are feeling more humble and want a greater challenge, you could manage Stevenage, a mid-level League 2 English club with an estimated value of 2.7 million.

Once you’ve decided which team you’ll be ruining next, you get to control pretty much every aspect of the club. You choose how you want your club to play by picking formations, tactics, which players should be playing and in which position, whether the club needs more players, and the list goes on and on. You primarily manage your players, but you can also deal with the club’s finances, infrastructure, and youth facilities, all to the degree you desire. The game does a fantastic job of catering both to your need to micromanage and to your desire to delegate. If you don’t feel like tinkering with every single aspect of your club’s day-to-day operation, you can let the game delegate the boring aspects to your staff. For example, if you hate having to figure out how best to train your players, you can have your assistant run the club’s training schedules. If you don’t want to deal with player contract negotiations, there’s an assistant for that job too.

The game also comes with an on-screen tip system that explains each menu and each option as well as a manual for those who miss the 90s. This franchise can be very daunting for newcomers, but the use of assistants lets players assume or relinquish control of the club to the degree that suits their free time, gaming habits, and degree of addiction.

Managing your players in FMC, which is what you’ll be doing most of your time, is a lot like managing your party in an RPG, minus the spellcasting. Even though your FMC “party" consists of more than just a handful of individuals, your club’s players still have their “classes"—defender, attacker, midfielder—and their attributes—jumping, movement, shooting, etc. Your players will often feel like more than just a collection of numbers because of how SI gives them personalities —they’ll disagree with the way you’re handling your transfer budget and get mad at you (which influences their morale and, in turn, their form), they’ll decide they’re homesick and will want to leave your club immediately (even though you spent almost your WHOLE budget to buy them less than a month earlier), and they’ll even get angry if you release a fellow player they like and won’t bother turning up on match day.

As when dealing with an RPG party, you’ll have to figure out how to plan your tactics around your players’ skills. You’ll have to decide where to play your really agile but weak player (answer: not between the other team’s huge defenders), or what duties to assign your slow but hulking defender (answer: not marking the other team’s fast attacker). You can also train your players to increase their skill levels and improve their performance.

When you finally decide who to play where (either through careful deliberation over each player’s skills, morale, and form, or simply by going with what your assistant says), the game moves to Match Day mode where you get to enjoy seeing Lionel Messi miss chance after chance either in full 3D or from a top-down perspective. This is the first Football Manager mobile iteration to come with the 3D engine, and it’s quite a welcome addition as it really brings the match to life. You get to watch as much or as little of the match as you want (you can watch either extended or just key moments of the match), and the match engine does a great job of giving you visual representations of the processor’s number-crunching. You can see whether your attacker is shooting for the moon rather than the goal or whether your defenders aren’t pressuring the opponent’s players enough.

Again, the developers provide plenty of help to those who aren’t very familiar with the franchise by having your assistant coaches offer observations on what’s working and what’s not and offer to remedy any issues at the tap of a button. It really is immensely entertaining sitting on the couch and watching your team perform on match day, all the while trying to figure out how to maximize each player’s performance or how to hold on to that goal you accidentally scored in the first minute.

Watching matches and managing your club might be fun, but many might wonder what FMC‘s end game is. Does a player have specific goals, or is this a sandbox game, which for some is a euphemism for an aimless experience? Well, the game offers a combination of both play-styles; at a micro-level, it’s goal-driven, and at a macro-level, it’s a sandbox. The game is full of short-term goals that you have to achieve if you want to stay employed. Your Board will set goals each season (depending on the club you pick and your previous coaching experience), and if you don’t achieve them, you’ll get fired pretty soon (your club’s fans might even riot against you and force the Board to sack you).

However, your career doesn’t end when you get fired, and this is where the sandbox aspect of the game comes in; instead, you end up on the unemployed list, and you start applying to coaching positions that pop up as other coaches fail to live up to their club’s expectations. If you have a good enough reputation (which you build through the seasons), you could even land a better job than the one you had before getting fired. If you’re successful in your coaching gig, many other opportunities can arise, including better clubs knocking at your door or even national teams wanting you to lead their country to World Cup glory.

So, when you consider all the decisions you have to constantly make while inhabiting a very detailed and fleshed-out game world, you’ll realize that FMC really is like a very good choose-your-own adventure gamebook almost at every turn. Imagine you’re doing such a great job at your club that the U.S. National team comes knocking. Do you say no and stick with your club in order to see whether the youngsters you bought with so much hope will turn into superstars? Or do you jump ship and try to prove your worth by winning the World Cup with the U.S. team? Even smaller decisions can have a huge impact in your time with the game. Remember that one player you bought from Brazil when he was 18 just because you had a million or so sitting in the bank? He turned out to be a star, sold for 25 millions, made your club rich, and let you to build a much stronger club and hunt for the big trophies.

Every single choice in this game matters, and no two careers feel the same. Injuries, mistakes, luck, bad or good decisions, all culminate to make each FMC playthrough a distinct experience filled with “Do you remember that one time when…" moments. And for those who like to call FMC a spreadsheet game, well, I’ve never agonized so much over spreadsheet numbers as I did when I was down 3-1 in the Champions League Final with a few minutes to go, hoping that I could get a miraculous win (which I did, and it was glorious).

With such a high level of micromanaging and detail in FMC, the way it controls is crucial to player enjoyment. SI claims that it has optimized the UI for touchscreens, and for the most part its claims are valid. Despite the UI consisting of a great number of menus, they’re all where you’d expect them to be, and that gives the game a coherence that most other management games lack. FMC‘s interface resembles that of web browser, which makes navigating the game very intuitive for anyone who’s used to browsing the internet.

The only problem I’ve had with the interface is with scrolling —it’s often quite floaty, and you can have a hard time scrolling up and down long lists. This was more of an annoyance than a game-breaker, but I wish they had made the scrolling more responsive. The other problem I’ve had is the odd crash, which would’ve been fine if it didn’t mean that if the game crashes just after a match, the match result can be completely different when you reload your game. Hopefully, that’s something the developers will fix soon.

I find that with all the gameplay variety and level of detail FMC 2015 offers, its price is appropriate, even though not everyone in the forums will agree. It’s $19.99, which is at the higher end of the spectrum for iOS gaming (at the same price X-COM Enemy Unknown was), but this is a full port of a very complex PC game. Many mobile gamers complain about the lack of more “hardcore" games on iOS and about the F2P cataclysm, but at the same time, they are unhappy when publishers put full PC games on the App Store at high, but still cheaper than PC prices. I would’ve paid more than $19.99 to play this game on PC, and this version has the added bonus of allowing me to play the game anywhere I want to.

For those who like to grease the wheels a bit and make their lives easier, the game also offers some “interesting," but unnecessary, IAPs like a Magic Sponge that treats any injury immediately or Spoiled Lasagna that can make some of the opponent’s players conveniently unavailable. All the IAPs are optional, and you’ll never hit a wall where only an IAP can save your career.

Football Manager Classic 2015 is a fantastic game not just for those who love the sport, but also for anyone who enjoys RPGs and choose-your-adventure gamebooks. With its great help system, you’ll rarely feel like you’re drowning in numbers and menus despite the game’s complexity, and the UI makes navigating the game very intuitive. Despite a few UI niggles, that will hopefully be fixed soon, the game mostly plays nicely with the tablet screen. Every playthrough feels like a different journey, and that makes FMC 2015 a game with almost infinite replay value.

So, if friends have told you that this game is boring or too complicated, do yourself a favor and ignore them. FMC offers countless hours of entertainment, and there are so many stories waiting for you that you won’t regret taking the plunge. Now, excuse me because I have to go find out why my star striker has forgotten how to kick the ball. Perhaps I should just publicly humiliate him and hope the Board members won’t get angry with me for messing with their star player (all real things you can do by the way). See you on the pitch.

In Pike and Shot, you will take on the role of army commander in a variety of game modes including campaigns, asynchronous multiplayer and even user created scenarios. The game focuses on 1600’s style combat featuring the old “stand in a line and take turns shooting at each other" strategy. As silly as it seems in hindsight, there was still a large amount of strategy involved in battles of that time, and the game does a solid job of imparting to you what they were and how to utilize them in game. Extremely detailed tutorials will ease you into this game even if you have never played a war game before. Victory on the battlefield requires a certain percentage of the enemy army to be routed. Getting the enemy to break rank and run is extremely satisfying, especially when you can align your charges to create a domino effect of collapsing enemy troops.

Each unit you control in game has strengths and weaknesses. You could sit and shoot an armored enemy turn after turn with nothing to show for it, but if you treat a light unit to the same attention, you might see it scattering very soon. Some units excel on charge impact and others do better in prolonged melee combat. Others yet can althogether dodge away from charging enemies to bait a charge. Most strong units are costly and you only get a certain amount of currency to employ extra troops each fight, but they do pack a large punch that I usually cannot help but splurge on.

If you are expecting a hex grid for this game, you might be disappointed to find that it is laid out on a square grid. This is probably the biggest departure from standard strategy games. I don’t mind this, especially since it’s actually an octagonal grid in disguise. Units can aim diagonally to charge and shoot, which means the angle of attack isn’t nearly as limited as you might initially assume. The Octo grid works well for this game. It is very head-on and, well, it just makes sense given the battle strategy of the time period.

Visually, the game offers a clean if not spartan experience. The UI is compact and intuitive, but the maps and terrain are regrettably similar. While it is more interesting that staring at a grid, Pike and Shot does little to break up the rolling country side you fight the majority of battles upon. Our forum thread has had some concerns surface in this regard as well. Walls and barriers do offer some diversity on the strategic side of things, I just wish it had rolled over a little more into the graphical side of things. One other thing you might expect to be in the game is a fog of war mechanic. It makes sense to me that it is not included. This is, after all, a large amount of men standing in open fields gunning each other down at times at point blank ranges. I enjoy the fog mechanic when it shows in a strategy game, but it’s absence here is understandable.

As a game in the $20 price bracket, it’s expected that Pike and Shot come fully loaded with it’s async multiplay and multiple campaign scenarios as well as skirmish options. I think that is kind of the general feel of the game. The majority of the game only achieves what is expected and doesn’t break the mold. It does, however, fit the mold very well. One thing I do really enjoy is the domino effect feeling of rolling through the flank of an enemy army. It actually reminded me greatly of my days playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle on the table top. Much like Pike and Shot, WFB also primarily functions on the rank and file approach to stand and shoot warfare. Just like Pike and Shot, a WFB flank charge was often devastatingly delicious.

It is funny that for less than the cost of taking someone to a movie you could get this game, but it is still considered a high price for an app. With that said, I don’t think you could go wrong if you are even slightly interested. The game has strategic depth and lacks the cracks and wrinkles of many of its competitors.

In addition, Battle Academy 2 features Slitherine’s excellent multiplayer system, including cooperative multiplayer. Add to that a random map generator and this is a game that should keep you plenty busy long after you’ve beaten the single player portion. Being that this is the App Store, it’s obligitory that I mention the price of Battle Academy 2 which is on the high end of the spectrum at $19.99. However, that’s half the cost of the game on PC and as Slitherine’s previous releases have shown us they’re well worth every penny for iPad-owning strategy fans. For more, be sure to see what folks are saying about Battle Academy 2 in our forums.

It’s only been out for about a day and a half, but already the folks in our forums are singing the praises of Commander the Great War. It’s on the higher end of App Store pricing at $19.99, but if you’re familiar with Slitherine’s previous work, you’ll know that their games are well worth the price. Our forum user volcanopele sums up their initial impressions: “Insta-buy for me. I’ve played a bit. Combat mechanics are a lot like Panzer Corps, but there are more elements you have to deal with, like industrial production. It is pricey compared to a lot of other iOS games, but good strategy games are worth it for me."

User Parkingtigers offers their opinion, “Had been waiting for this one. I played 7 straight hours in my first game, and still only reached turn 15 (out of a possible 118), which was January 1915. It’s going to be a long war, there’s some serious gaming time here, and it’s wonderful. Couple of very minor rough edges to the port, but overall plays really well on original iPad mini. There’s nothing else like this on iPad and it is well worth the price, which as usual is half the cost of the PC version." Parkingtigers elaborates further in a follow-up post that’s worth reading if you’re interested in impressions.

If you’re into war strategy games or are already a fan of Slitherine’s excellent iPad catalog, Commander the Great War should be right up your alley. Grab your iPad and spend your weekend waging war.

After Square and Enix merged, the company clearly decided they wanted to make a strong effort to establish Dragon Quest outside of Japan with the release of Dragon Quest 8. It helped that the Japanese version was already a gorgeous game, in sharp contrast to Dragon Quest 7. The publisher went the extra mile for the English release, adding excellent voice acting, extra animations, an overhauled menu system, and an orchestrated version of the soundtrack. This game was also the first release of the main series in Europe. Just for extra mustard, Square Enix packed in a demo disc for Final Fantasy XII. The game ended up a critical and commercial hit, and it finally seemed like Dragon Quest was overseas to stay. In the next few years, Square Enix would translate several spin-offs and remakes, releasing almost every game without fail.

Perhaps they went to the paint a bit too hard, though, since by the time Dragon Quest 5 DS released, sales had greatly tapered off. Square Enix took a step back from English releases, handed the car keys to Nintendo (who also seem to have cooled on localizations), and wouldn’t handle Dragon Quest again themselves outside Japan until, well, today. It seems the series is getting another chance with the English release of the iOS version of Dragon Quest 8 ($14.99). Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much gusto behind this game as there was last time, and the results might be a little underwhelming for English fans.

Let’s talk about the game itself, first, though. While other RPG series had reduced their scope and backed away from world-spanning adventures across open environments due to the rise in costs of realizing such an ambition, Dragon Quest 8 represented the full, glorious 3D realization of the JRPG in its purest form. It has big towns and cities filled with NPCs who give you vague advice and don’t care if you steal stuff out of their dresser and a huge, treasure-packed overworld map that’s in scale with your character’s dimensions. It has cool forms of transportation, dungeons with branching paths that lead to treasures for some reason. There are animated 3D battles with a menagerie of interesting creatures, epic boss fights, and a twisty story with lots of memorable vignettes. You can gamble in casinos, create a monster team to battle in a coliseum, hunt unique monsters, and craft a veritable arsenal of weapons and armor. You’ll travel the seas, fly through the air, fight evil wizards and dragons, and save the world through the power of friendship and love. It’s a wonderful, charming game that any fan of JRPGs will find something to love about.

You play as the nameless hero, as he travels with his companions trying to lift the curse that has befallen his kingdom. As usual for a Dragon Quest game, on the way to reaching your goal, you’ll end up mixed up in a whole bunch of other situations along the way. Some of these side-stories end happily, others not so much, but they’re all quite interesting. One of the reasons why I love this series is its bittersweet nature. Sometimes you’re too late to save the day, and all you can do is help people find closure. Sometimes, you can’t even do that, and you’re left to just reflect on what happened. A cursory glance at Square Enix’s two main franchises would probably have you peg Dragon Quest as the more childish series, but there’s actually a sort of maturity to the storytelling that you rarely see in games.

More unusual for the series, the party members in Dragon Quest 8 are quite fleshed-out and very memorable. The boisterous thief Yangus is the clear star of the show, and his constant feuding with King Trode is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny at times. Jessica’s slightly spoiled yet kind-hearted personality and Angelo’s pompous self-adoration round out the main cast nicely. Even the mute hero gets quite the backstory, though you have to go digging into the post-game to unveil it completely. There are lots of other memorable characters you’ll meet along the way, including the awful Prince Charmles, the colorful (in more ways than one) Morrie, and the mysterious thief Red.

Dragon Quest is well-known for being a very orthodox JRPG series, and its battles reflect that more than anything else. The encounters are invisible and random, and the battles are the stereotypical turn-based affairs associated with the genre. The only new thing Dragon Quest 8 added was the tension meter, which allows you to use a character’s turn to charge up for a powerful attack. Tension actually makes this one of the easier Dragon Quest games, but you still have to remember to use buffs and debuffs to your advantage if you want the sailing to be smooth. They’re very important in this series, and people ignoring them is what tends to lead to the mistaken notion that you have to grind in these games to win.

Unlike the preceding and following installments, there isn’t a job class system in Dragon Quest 8. Instead, when you level up, you get points that you can put towards any of five different categories. When a certain number of points are put into each category, your character will learn a new skill or ability. If it’s your first time playing, my advice is to pick one or two categories and lean into them hard. While I miss the great customization the class system offers, the skill system still offers quite a bit of flexibility while making for a more balanced experience. It’s almost impossible to screw yourself over by developing your character the wrong way, since there really is no wrong way to develop.

All told, the game’s main quest will take the average player 60-70 hours to finish, and the side content and post-game will easily drive that to the 90-100 hour mark. The pacing gets a bit spotty in the middle, but for the most part, you’ll be so absorbed that you won’t notice the hours go by. The main quest takes the form of a road trip that helps keep things moving, while the focus on smaller side-stories means you can take the game in digestible bites if that’s your speed. If you step away and forget what you were doing, you can talk to your party members. They’ll bring you up to speed and make some amusing comments, to boot.

As for the iOS port, it’s not quite as good as you might hope. Since this is just a translated version of the Japanese release, the orchestrated music and voice acting found only in the western PS2 release are out. The orchestrated music, I can live without, since it was recorded at low quality and bloated the game’s loading times, but losing the voice acting hurts. Reading Yangus say “Cor Blimey!" just isn’t the same as hearing it, and some of the jokes have a lot less punch in text, like the gags around Prince Charmles’ name. Tailored for the train-faring Japanese population the game is played in portrait mode, which is going to seem like an odd choice for some people. I actually like being able to play one-handed, but there’s no doubt the lack of horizontal space cuts down on the feeling of grandness in some of the game’s environments. The controls themselves take a little getting used to, but after an adjustment period, I didn’t have any problems with them. It’s certainly a unique interface, but it ends up working out fine.

The game only supports hardware with A5 chipsets or higher, but realistically, you really should have an A6 if you want to play without problems. This is a heinously inefficient port, suffering from framerate issues even on an iPhone 5S, so playing it on a 4S and its contemporaries is basically asking for trouble. Loading times are on par with the PS2 release, but not as well-hidden due to the loading screens. Apart from framerate problems, technical issues were minimal on the 5S, but it’s apparently crash-prone on A5 devices. Dragon Quest 8 is a beautiful game, don’t get me wrong, but there’s really no reason modern mobile hardware should be struggling with it at all. Oh, and just to settle any fears you might have, there’s no online connection required and Square Enix hasn’t messed with the game at all, so there are no IAPs, either.

Although the loss of the voice acting and slightly more cramped view make for a lesser experience than the PS2 original, this is still an absolutely incredible game, provided you have the hardware to run it. Up until now, Square Enix has been content to deliver ports of their NES and SNES games, along with the odd DS game. This, however, is one of the genre kings of the PS2 generation, and as such, it feels like a much bigger and more advanced experience than virtually anything else available on the App Store. This is one of those games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic ($9.99), where it feels absolutely amazing to be playing this on my mobile device. Sure, it’s expensive, but if any game could justify a higher price tag, Dragon Quest 8 is it.

I acknowledge this is a very long review, so for those of you who gave up and skipped down to the bottom, here’s the short version. Dragon Quest 8 on iOS isn’t quite up to the original English PS2 game, thanks to a lack of voice acting and some technical issues, but it is a largely faithful version of one of the best RPGs of the last decade. It’s a grand adventure that no JRPG fan should miss, as long as your device can run it. Here’s hoping this return is a successful one.

The learning curve on Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown ($9.99) isn’t as steep as on Julian Gollup’s original, but there’s a lot of depth to this game, and the interplay between the game’s tactical combat and resource management layers is crucial to success. Like the original X-Com / UFO: Enemy Unknown, you can lose this game by inches, working yourself into an unmanageable position with terror levels rising across the world.

Even if you win all of your battles, you can still lose the war by failing to make progress toward assimilating alien technology and understanding their goals.

Combat 101

• Tanks, but no Tanks – XCOM is a turn-based cover shooter. Armor helps your units survive one, maybe two hits, that’s it. An exposed squaddie is a dead squaddie. Even the heaviest of your SHIV support vehicles can easily get toasted in a single round.

• The Best Defense is a Cautious Offense – at the same time, rushing headlong toward the enemy, even to claim a kill before they get to act, invites tragedy. Advance slowly, from cover to cover, and plan on leaving a few of your units with good line of sight free for overwatch (response) attacks.

• Work the Numbers – pay attention to your to-hit chances. Cover works both ways, so if you’ve got a low-probability shot, you’re often better off taking overwatch and hoping your enemy steps into view. Also remember that a height advantage makes it easier to land hits and harder to get hit, and that units in smoke are harder to hit, but suffer no penalty to their own attacks (unless the enemy is also in the smoke cloud, a tactic the AI favors).

Base Basics

• Excavate Early and Often – dig out empty space before you need it, as building new facilities takes a long time, and you don’t want to have to wait extra days to clear the room you need for that new thermal power plant or psionic training facility.

• Eye in the Sky, Money in the Bank – it takes about 20 days to build a Satellite Uplink facility, and just as long to build the satellites themselves, which the game won’t let you do until you have uplink capacity for them, so plan ahead and make this a top priority at the beginning of a new game. Also, make sure you order at least one interceptor (from the Hanger) for each continent you’re launching satellites over, so you can protect them.

• Engineers Rule, Scientists Drool – you need more engineers than scientists. At least twice as many engineers and workshops. Between Foundry Upgrades and building gear, you’ll use them more, and the cost per item, in terms of alloys and Elerium as well as credits, is based on how many engineers and workshops you have. As if that wasn’t enough, certain items and upgrades require a minimum number of engineers.

• Training Day, Officer Hoyt – as soon as you can (right after the first mission on Normal difficulty) buy the Wet Work ability in Officer Training. +25% XP gain is something you can’t live without. Upgrade your squad size immediately when you unlock those training options. There’s one other bit of training you need as soon as you can get it: the automatic Rookie level-up to Squaddie, so when you get new troops, you immediately know what they’re good for, instead of having to take them into combat with no skills once or twice just to find out their character class.

Human Resources

• Support – don’t underestimate the Support squaddie. If I had to pick just one class to play the entire game with, it’d be Support. If you have a dedicated medic, you’ll want a Support unit for that job, but that’s not all. Support units with more combat oriented skills are the best scouts and medium-range fighters in the game, with high versatility and my single favorite ability: high-level Support squaddies get an extra accessory slot, and a properly kitted-out Support unit can fill any role. Treasure a Support unit with Psionic talent: that piece of the puzzle makes a medic into a one-soldier hospital and headshrinker, and turns a combat Support squaddie into (IMHO) the deadliest unit in the game.

• Sniper – there are a couple of classes that you can nerf if you take the wrong ability early on: for my money, a Sniper’s not a sniper until (and unless) they get Squad Sight, allowing them to target enemies in any of your units’ spotting radius as long as they have line of sight. If you then take the Gunslinger ability at your next level up, you can then use your sidearm to devastating effect after moving, negating the value of the Snap Short ability  A well-placed Sniper is your long-range, fire support, and defensive umbrella (on overwatch) all in one. The weaknesses of this class are that you will more-or-less always want to equip them with a Scope, foreclosing any other use of their Accessory slot, and that the best sniper rifle can only be built (at great cost) not captured from the enemy.

• Heavy – the second time the Heavy levels up, the Bullet Swarm ability can be chosen. Forget Holo-Targeting, take Bullet Swarm. The game’s description makes it sound like this ability allows you to move after firing, but it’s much more useful than that: as long as your first action is a basic attack, you can do anything with your second “move" including making two attacks in the same turn, attacking and going on overwatch, or even firing your gun and then launching a rocket. This makes your Heavy soldiers into the rooks of XCOM: place them well at the end of your turn, and they can unleash hell the following round.

• Assault – these are your close-in fighters, or depending on the abilities you select and their equipment loadout, strong mid-range riflemen. The game says that “most" of your squaddies will be Assault-class, but that’s a scurrilous lie. About 25% of your new recruits will be Assault-class, the same as any other type. That matters, as your Assault units are more likely to get killed than any other type, especially until you get some decent armor. If you’re optimizing an Assault squaddie for close combat (close = shotgun), focus on defensive abilities – they’ll need them. The mid-range variant can focus more on damage boosting abilities.

Intermediate Tactics

• Set to Stun – alien weapons have a deadman switch: kill that Sectoid, and his gun bursts into fragments. If you stun him, however, that plasma weapon is now yours. This is by far the easiest way to outfit an entire team with plasma guns, but your Arc Projector caps out at a 70% chance to hit. The advanced Arc Projector project boosts that chance all the way up to a maximum of 95%, making it the most essential upgrade in the Foundry.

• Blast ’em – the Blaster launcher shoots a smart bomb that can literally turn corners to hit its target, but this powerful replacement for the Rocket Launcher is a hidden piece of tech. You have to research enemy fusion cores to get it, and those are only found on their battleships. If you’re doing well, you might not be seeing battleships: to lure one out, ignore a regular contact with a UFO and wait. There’s a good chance a battleship will show up next to take advantage of your lassitude. Now all you have to do is shoot it out of the sky and take out its entire crew. Cakewalk.

• Out of the Frying Pan – Suppressing fire (Heavy, Support, SHIV) is a good way to reduce the threat value of an enemy you can’t take out this turn, but it has more uses than that. You can use it as a more focused alternative to overwatch, and to negate an enemy’s reaction fire (especially valuable against Muton Elites and Sectopods). But there’s one more combo that’s less obvious: Suppression allows you to take a reaction shot on your turn. When an enemy has good cover, you can use the Assault unit’s Flush ability to inflict a little pain and force them to move. The problem is that flushed enemies tend to move to another hiding spot. However, if you have one or more units suppressing the enemy before you Flush them, they will all take their shots as soon as the target is exposed. Squish.

• Hushabye Muton – the Ghost Armor may seem underpowered, as you can only go invisible four times per mission, the effects only last one turn, and are lost if you open fire. If going invisible took an action, the suit would be nearly useless, but “stealthing" is the only free action in the game. The enemy completely ignores invisible units, offering unprecedented new strategies (my measure for great ability and gear). Ghost Armor is great for scouts (usually Support or Assault units), and can provide your Sniper with a little extra security, but it’s best used to set up flanking attacks and ambushes. It may sound paradoxical, but Ghost Armor was made for the Heavy squaddie. Go invisible, waltz right past enemy lines, and then open fire the next turn. If you position yourself well, you’ll be able to make two flanking attacks (with Bullet Storm) and they’ll never know what hit them.

In the end, a large part of the fun of XCOM is coming up with your own squads and strategies. These tips should help you get going and avoid missing key advantages. Advanced strategy is all up to you: you may find a way to make Holo-Targeting pay off, or a mind-blowing combination involving smoke grenades and Archangel armor. You can share your favorite strategies and tactics in the forum or in the comments below.

We’re going to have loads of XCOM content today between a TA Plays and an actual review, it’s just going to take a while to get rolling as the game is a 1.86GB download which then expands all the way out to 3.23GB once finally installed… XCOM will run on the iPad 2 and up as well as the iPhone 4S and up, so if you’ve got one of those devices, have $20 to your name, and are as stoked for this game as we are… Make sure you’ve got free space on your device so you’re ready to roll the second the game is available in your area.

Oh, and of course, we have a thread in our forums for the game. Be sure to check it out.

International App Store Link: XCOM: Enemy Unknown, $19.99

It’s going to be a universal app with both Game Center and iCloud support, providing the complete console experience in a snazzy new touch interface. Additionally, multiplayer is said to be coming later via a free update. Awesome, right?

We’ll have a full review and all sorts of coverage on the game as soon as we can.

Why am I so willing to forgive its faults? There are a lot of reasons. Some of them are connected to the fact the game’s an audiovisual feast for street culture enthuasists, others to the fact that the gameplay is, even now, a refreshing change from the norm. Most of all, however, it’s because the emo-ness actually makes sense here. The World Ends With You: Solo Remix is a story about children transitioning from a safe environment into a darker, grimmer world. It’s a game set in freakin’ Shibuya, a place where high fashion and high pressure meet. If there’s anyone who deserves to be a little neurotic, it’s the kids in this game.

Before we get into the review itself, there’s something I have to tell the card-carrying members of The World Ends With You fan club:

The answer is yes. Yes, yes and yes again. Square Enix actually did an exemplary job at porting everyone’s favorite DS cult classic to the iOS platform. Sure, they could have made the price of entry a little lower and, maybe, asides from offering a Universal build, cleaned up the iPad version a little bit more (I can see the pixels, you bastards!), but by and large, it’s stellar work. I’m especially impressed with how they’re revamped the combat system to better work with iOS surfaces, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

When I said that The World Ends With You: Solo Remix is a treat for the senses, I meant it. There are certain caveats, of course. If you find graffiti and Japanese youth culture appalling or think there’s just too much damn anime in the world already, you probably won’t like the aesthetics found in this game. The World Ends With You: Solo Remix is a heady, hap hazardous mix of all those things. The enemies are half-beast, all tribal tattoos; the characters a stable of too-skinny kids with thick, comic-book lines and clothes befitting Shibuya royalty.

And the music? It rocks. Specifically, it’s J-Rock and J-Hop and a whole bunch of other things wrapped up into one groovy medley of tunes. I won’t go too much into it but let’s just it’s one of the few soundtracks I own.

As for the tale itself, it’s an interesting one. You play as the amnesiac Neku, a boy with a hatred for the masses and an unusual predicament. Unlike others, who come and go as they please, you’re trapped in Shibuya, a pawn in the Reaper’s Game. It’s a game you’re going to have to play. Failure to do so will result in erasure.

Invisible to all but a select few and doomed to experience what you hate most (close proximity to others), you find yourself flung into an eclectic company of people. There’s your first partner Shiki, a fashionable girl with a seemingly indomitable sense of good cheer, a guy named Beat who ends every other sentence with the word ‘yo’, his androgynous-looking friend and more. They’re a familiar group of archetypes but framed against this weird universe, they work in a strange way. (A partial spoiler: the story is far darker than you might initially think it to be.)

In regards to the gameplay itself, there’s a wide variety of things to do in The World Ends With You: Solo Remix. On the most basic level, you’re going to have to figure out how to fulfill the missions you receive each day. This can mean anything from battling the spirits haunting cursed statues to restoring power to a concert hall to collecting 1,000 Yen pins from the Noise.

The Noise are the half-animal foes I was talking about earlier. Comprised of everything from frogs to kangaroos to sharks, the Noise are only visible to those involved in the Reaper’s Game. While some boss battles initiate on their own, a majority of your fights with the Noise happen when you tap one of the red Noise icons after you’ve scanned your surroundings (scanning also lets you do nifty things like look into the inner thoughts of random people and is accomplished by clicking on the little Player pin on the bottom right of your screen). Once you’ve done that, you’ll be transported to the fight.

Like the original, the iOS version of The World Ends With You: Solo Remix makes creative usage of touch controls. Some abilities, or Psyches as they’re called, will ask you to tap feverishly on the screen while others may require you to draw lines of fire across the screen. It all varies, depending on the kind of Pin you have equipped. I haven’t been able to verify this for the iOS version just yet but in the DS version, you even had Psyches that required you to shout into the microphone. The fact this game is incompatible with microphone-less iPod touch devices could be telling.

Unlike the original, however, there’s no dual-screen combat. Everything happens within the space occupied by your character. Here, in the Solo Remix version, your Partners function very much like another Pin except for one major difference. For best possible results, you’ll have to alternate your attacks with theirs to increase your sync percentage and to increase damage. Once your Sync rating has hit 100%, you’ll then be able to unleash an all-out, screen-wide attack.

Yes, it’s definitely a significant change and one that can make the game feel a little too easy for veterans. Nonetheless, it does make The World Ends With You: Solo Remix considerably more approachable, something that may well help it earn a new following among iOS users.

By the way, your Pins can be leveled up. Depending on the Pin, they might even evolve into something else. There are two ways to make these things happen. The first method is to engage in gratuitous amounts of combat. The second is to simply keep the Pins you want to level up equipped when you exit the game. You’ll earn a certain amount of Pin Points during this down period.

What else is there? There’s equipment you can purchase from the various stores in Shibuya, stickers you have to collect to upgrade your two-man party’s strength, food to eat and fashion trends to worry about. (Fashion trends are actually important here. If you’re dressed in the wrong threads in the wrong place, you might find yourself at disadvantage in your next fight. Eek.) Oh, and there’s a mini-game called Tin Pin Slammer that you can choose to lose yourself in.

Long story short, you should probably buy The World Ends With You: Solo Remix. Yes, the price tag is rather astronomical when compared to bargain-bin, $0.99 titles but there’s a reason for that. The World Ends With You: Solo Remix is not a game built for five-minute diversions; it’s a solid game, one meant to leave a permanent impression. Square Enix probably could have done the port a little better (Universal build, anyone?) but all said and done, I couldn’t be happier.

[For another look at The World Ends With You: Solo Remix, check out our recent TA Plays video.]

It’s this dual-combat system that received the most radical reworking bringing the game to iOS, hence the new title The World Ends With You: Solo Remix ($17.99). That second character you’d normally be controlling on the top screen of your DS has been worked into the main character’s repertoire of offensive moves, and it seems to work out just fine in my short time with the game.

The rest of the game should seem mostly how you remember it if you played the DS original. The comic book-like presentation and art style is fantastic, and the story and characters are all sharp enough that I’ve been having no trouble being engaged in what’s happening and wanting to push on. If you can look past some of our off-topic discussion about Brad cutting his hair and possibly waxing his chest, you should get a good look at what the entire first chapter of The World Ends With You: Solo Remix is like on iOS in the video below.

The plot here works something like this: an apocalyptic force is threatening Earth with impending doom and there is only one person in the universe capable of stopping it. Can you guess who that is? Yup, that’s you. Sort of. In Chaos Rings II, you’ll play as Darwin, a rather effeminate-looking chap that had been unwittingly pushed into the role of the Nominator. As the Nominator, his job is to sacrifice the Pillars (a bunch of people that were forcibly drafted for the dubious honor), harvest their spiritual energies, complete something called the Rite of Resealing and seal away the Destroyer in order to save the world.

Here’s where it gets problematic for poor Darwin. To begin with, he wasn’t supposed to be the Nominator. Due to a freak turn of circumstances, he acquired the position after he unwittingly killed the original candidate. To make matters worst, he sort of murdered the poor bastard in front of the Pillars. Under normal circumstances, this probably wouldn’t have gone over so badly. After all, one predestined murderer is the same as the other, right? Obviously, that wasn’t the case here. You see, the Pillars in the Rite of Resealing are always composed of those who have some form of attachment to the Nominator. As you can imagine, this makes things a little bit awkward. Not only do you have to murder innocent people, you’ll have to murder some innocent folk that had ties to the dude you unintentionally axed.

(In spite of the religious undertones to the game, the eventual evolution of the plot will probably grab a smirk from any atheists in the audience.)

Intriguing as this all sounds, however, there’s a slight problem. While the Japanese voice acting is rather superb (my best friend, who is Japanese, assured me that the voice acting is also supported by decent lines), the localization is not. Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s no rampant Engrish, no glaring grammatical errors, no spelling mistakes that may evoke a heartfelt palm to the face. Nonetheless, that doesn’t change the fact the English text feels … lackluster. The dialogue’s also anachronistic in places. Words like “gotta" and “c’mon" pop up from time to time to rattle your sense of immersion. As such, I can’t help but feel as though the full potential of the plot was never realized. Something had to have been lost in the translation. Still, it could have been much, much worse.

Gameplay-wise, those who have any experience with the original game or, JRPGs in general, will probably find themselves in familiar waters. For the most part, the game operates in a fairly linear fashion. You’ll be given a task and told to advance to a certain location. You must then make your way through an assortment of random encounters before achieving your goal. From there, you’ll have to go back to the central hub and begin the process anew. There isn’t much else to do. You get a certain amount of freedom in determining the sequencing of events but that’s pretty much it. There is no open world exploration. There are no mini games to engage in. What saves Chaos Rings II from being completely linear are the side quests that you eventually acquire from the corpulent, cat-like Piu Piu (he’s the only merchant available to you and your party) and and his scantily-clad cutouts.

A lot of your time will be spent moving through the exquisitely presented remnants of your world. Along the way, you’ll stumble across equipment, items and, of course, random encounters. You’ll also get to move through ‘shortcuts’ in the world. Once you dive through a portal, you’ll find yourself in this odd little realm that would probably not look amiss in a cyberpunk setting somewhere. Here, you’ll also be called upon to partake in some incredibly light puzzle-solving. Each of the accompanying characters have a special ability that will allow the party to access a part of the world that cannot otherwise be reached. For example, Li Hua is capable of punching through barriers while Connor can shoot at distant targets. Needless to say, once you’ve sacrificed somebody (yup, you’re going to have to kill those people), you’ll lose permanent access to those unique skills.

While it doesn’t deviate too far from the standard formula (you’ll be able to attack, cast magic, defend yourself, occasionally escape from combat and utilize items amongst other things), combat in Chaos Rings II is actually rather entertaining. There are plenty of variables to juggle and even more to worry about. To begin with, you’re going to spend a lot of time deciding if you would rather have your characters acting separately or together. If you choose the ‘Pair’ option, you’ll have access to stronger attacks but will also open your party members up to damage that they would have not taken otherwise. Acting ‘solo’, on the other hand, will provide you with more control but less of a punch.

It gets even more complex than that, of course. Technically speaking, combat in Chaos Rings II is turn-based but the reality is that things are also highly dependent on speed. This can be a serious problem if your opponent is armed with some truly devastating moves. If they have the opportunity to assault you before you can defend yourself, you can expect to see the ‘Game Over’ screen faster than you can enunciate your favorite obscenity. Additionally, there’s also a layer of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ that you will have to factor in. Depending on what forces are currently in play on the battle field, attacks and defenses may increase or decrease accordingly.

On top of that, there is also the Break Gauge and the Charge Gauge. The former was inherited from the original game. It’s a pretty nifty mechanic that monitors the flow of the battle. When it is marked even, neither parties will receive bonuses. However, when it sways in favor of you or your opponent, the Break Gauge will cause the beneficiaries to increase in potency. As for the Charge Gauge, it functions something like the Limit Break mechanic in the Final Fantasy games. Once it has filled up to a certain extent, you’ll gain access to your ‘Awake’ and ‘Advent’ powers. The latter will allow you to summon a massive being known as, well, an Advent that is associated with the Human Sophia (that thing you get after you’ve defeated the creature born from a dead Pillar) you currently have equipped.

Speaking of Sophias, those form another interesting component in the game. While Pillars are the only ones capable of bestowing the command of a monstrous critter upon you, you can also acquire Sophias from the game’s menagerie of enemies. Each ‘Monster’ Sophia will grant your characters certain atributes and skills. Once you’ve unlocked the right recipes, you’ll be able to acquire even more abilities by combining Sophias in a certain way, something that adds considerable depth to your character customization.

On a more shallow note, I’m going to take a moment to once again remark on the fact that Chaos Rings II looks pretty darn sweet. It is, by far, the prettiest game in the franchise yet. Compared to its predecessors, the resolution in Chaos Rings II is so much higher, the backgrounds more lavishly detailed. Even the characters themselves look more refined. That said, I’m really mostly in love with the little things in the game, things like cherry blossom petals suspended in the air and waterfalls trapped mid-motion.

As for the music, I’ve nothing but good things to say about it. I would buy the soundtrack if the Malaysian App Store would let me do so but I can’t so I’ll settle for assuring you that it’s something that would deserve a spot on most playlists unless, of course, you have an aversion towards soaring vocals and epic-sounding melodies.

In many ways, Chaos Rings II is the quintessential JRPG. You will spend a lot of time grinding. You will be gently but firmly led along the story’s path to its inevitable end. You will see all of the familiar JRPG tropes. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but your decision in regards to whether or not you actually want to purchase the game is going to be dependent on this. For all of its flaws, Chaos Rings II has done more than ample justice to the formula. It’s refined, it’s meaty, and it’s definitely worth the high price of entry.