Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius (iOS) Review

With a wonderfully well-animated cut-scene and many minutes of juicy story told through pixel graphics, the scene is set for an experience that will make old-school gamers squeal with joy. The plot follows Rain, Lasswell, and Fina through their adventure in the magical land of Lapis, where visions of the fallen can be found and mastered. These visions are - surprise, surprise - mostly the souls of the characters from other Final Fantasy titles, such as Terra, Cecil, and even Kefka.

It is difficult to stay critical after such a strong opening mixed with strong nostalgia that the first minutes of Brave Exvius delivers. Luckily, this first impression isn't all there is to the game. Brave Exvius offers mechanics that mix Brave Frontier and typical Final Fantasy gameplay together in an F2P adventure. The biggest challenge with a title like this is to deliver on the promise of feeling like a full-sized Final Fantasy adventure while still keeping both the gacha and energy elements that have become the signs of the Japanese mobile market.

While the gacha element is stronger in Brave Exvius than in Record Keeper, it still manages the story elements far better. The greatest weakness in Record Keeper was the fact that it didn't really feel like a new game, but a mash-up of other Final Fantasy titles, putting too much focus on old characters. In Brave Exvius, however, all focus, as far as the main story goes, is put on the new main characters, which helps the game gain an identity on its own. Having the bonus characters feel just like that - bonus characters - helps justify the strong gacha elements.

The new characters are not the only things that help make Brave Exvius feel more like a full RPG experience. The game adds both villages and explorable dungeons, which are both made in a wonderful pixel-based art style that keeps the game playing on the strings of nostalgia. The villages have shops and side quests to explore and reap rewards from, and the explorable dungeons contain plenty of resources, hidden treasures, and random encounters, as opposed to the normal (for the genre) wave-based stages.

These two elements do a better job at capturing the feeling Record Keeper was aiming at - the feeling of nostalgia - than just taking random segments of different Final Fantasy titles to play through. They make the game feel like its own old-school game, rather than just showing pieces of existing ones.

Brave Exvius has many strengths. However, it does also have some weird weaknesses. The most obvious one is that some of the side quests demand farming specific mobs with extremely low appearance rates, or even worse, farming low drop rate items. While this is common in the RPG genre, the fact that there is energy not only makes this a tedious task, but also very time-consuming. Some side quests can take a day or two to complete due to the energy meter, which makes it more ever-present than it was in Record Keeper.

On top of this, some of the side quests are very unclear with where to farm for things, and sometimes, it feels like it is important to sit next to a wiki, which removes some of the charm and point of smart phone titles. This issue is, however, only a slight nuisance, as the side quests are 100% optional and are, so far, not mandatory to get good enough stuff to get through the entire story without any problems. In the end, the strengths of Brave Exvius by far outweigh its weaknesses.