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Mobile Review: Terra Battle (iOS)

Added: 21.10.2014 0:00 | 2 views | 0 comments

At the end of August, I ran a lengthy campaign at the Penny Arcade Expo 2014 in which I managed to speak with luminaries of video game development. Some of the individuals I spoke with from publishers like Square Enix remain stalwart visionaries. Minds behind timeless franchises like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy spoke with me at length about the nature of their products both on mobile and console platforms, but it wasn't until I met Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy franchise itself, that I started to expand my understanding of video gaming exponentially. The way games allow us to enter new worlds has always enticed me and in that way my lifelong fascination with the medium has driven me to this point. Rather than sitting down to play Sunset Overdrive, an Xbox One game I've been exceedingly eager to experience at home (possibly in the hopes of awakening my inner child once more to reignite a burning passion with gaming that has admittedly waned as the business became my livelihood over the past 5 years), I ignored that blockbuster action game to play Terra Battle. I spoke with Sakaguchi at length about his mobile strategy game, and his development studio dubbed Mistwalker has an enticing package of thinking-challenges that test both planning and execution of moves on a Go-like board. I can't even lie. I actually sat down on my couch and eagerly launched the app on my iPhone late Friday night. Living alone, I can easily play video games all the time, though it has been quite some time since I last played a game on my mobile device as readily as I have with Terra Battle over the past three days. I think this comes from two primary causes and conditions. First, having witnessed the ubiquity of technology at E3 2014, faced with coworkers I never see due to my working remotely from home all glued to their mobile handsets at a company dinner, I have extremely high hopes that all this consumption of media, both social and in prepared content like games, TV, and more, actually contributes to something positive in all of our lives. The highest order of this is exemplified in Terra Battle's light RPG elements which introduce predators, lizard people, and other fantastical elements despite presenting gameplay in a way that actually has me thinking such activities could cure diseases or aid in development of other health-minded endeavors. Second, It's a damn fun game. While you can spend time in the Tavern recruiting characters to your side while expending both energy and currency, the meat of Terra Battle's gameplay comes from chapter-by-chapter progression in battle. This allows for light story exposition, but largely highlights the way players can grow their own skills in battle. For one, enemies can move multiple units at once, while the player can only move a single character. Doing so properly actually allows you to position other party members for heavy damage. The idea is that sandwiching an enemy between two of your characters will allow them to combine their attacks and weaken or eliminate the competition. This starts with relatively week bat-like enemies yet progresses extremely quickly into an all-out tavern brawl by Chapter 3. You have to clear a series of battles in each chapter and there are also larger boss enemies that take up multiple tiles and require heavy damage to bring down. I can say with some certainty that Terra Battle does not achieve the kind of holistic and life-changing effects I'd like all games to. If you consider warfare a game itself, then it's really only fun for the individual who enjoys an overview of the battlefield as opposed to being the soldier getting stabbed with a bayonet in the trenches or being steam-rolled by a tank. In that way, I prefer Mistwalker's approach to strategy, boardgame-esque mechanics and the way players have to deftly manipulate a character with his or her finger, pin-wheeling and twirling into other party members to push them into the correct position. While many early chapters offer flat formations to start from, the satisfaction of identifying and executing a move properly only gets better as random power-point squares and pre-existing party formations from a previous turns allow for heavy damage on groups of enemies. IÄ‚ËĂ˘â€šÂ¬Ă˘â€žËve made a habit of not scoring mobile reviews and defaulting to writing them in our Manifesto content stream, but if I were to issue a review for the game on iTunes, I wouldnÄ‚ËĂ˘â€šÂ¬Ă˘â€žËt hesitate to write something like "5/5 how do u get more energy w/o paying?"