Dragalia Lost

So this is a game that came out last month for mobile devices that kept popping up on my Facebook feed after a few of my friends started playing.  The first thing I noticed is that it's an original mobile game that has a big fat Nintendo logo on it and along side that a big fat Cygames (Shadowverse, Grandblue Fantasy) logo.  After umming and arring about it for a while thanks to it's MASSIVE 2.5gb download size from the app store I decided to just give it a go.

Dragalia Lost has absolutely NO BUSINESS being this good of a game since it's just your typical mobile gatcha affair but for some reason I just can't get myself off the damn thing.  I have no idea what the story is since following a mobile story is like choosing to eat a bowl of shit but the game play is fun and the amount of stuff there is to do is just staggering.  The sheer amount of content is important considering the games recent release since usually newly released mobile games are a little thin on the ground at first and flesh out later but Dragalia is going all out right out of the gate.

The game itself is the same gatcha bullshit you see on the app store all the damn time.  Pull stuff, power up stuff, do dungeons to power up stuff even more rinse and repeat and grind grind grind ad nauseam.  There's two cool things about it though that set it apart from other games in the genre which is one, combat that's actually more interesting than just tapping until everything falls down and two, a level of polish that is rarely seen in the entirety of mobile gaming.  The combat has you using the touch screen to actually move characters and have them hack, slash and dodge through the environments.  When enemies attack the game will put these sort of markers on the floor, something I've seen done in other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 which means that paying attention to things like positioning is very important. 

There's a lot going on in Dragalia that would take far too much time to type out so instead I'll just recommend that you go download it and give it a whirl.  It's free so worst case scenario is that you'll just be unimpressed by yet another gatcha title and best case is that it drags you in and holds your attention as violently as it has mine.

Shadowverse First Impressions

A few months ago I was walking through a train station when I saw a big poster for a new mobile game called Shadowverse.  It looked like an exact clone of digital card collecting favorite Hearthstone so until the other day I ignored it.  However due to a friend starting to play I decided to jump on and give it a go and boy Im glad I did because this game is awesome .  

If you have played Hearthstone then you have basically played this.  At its core it's the same game but there have been a few tweaks to the systems which stop it from being an exact clone.  I'm going to start talking about the game assuming you have a basic knowledge of how Hearthstone works so if you don't I'm sorry if you feel a little lost.  

So you do the usual thing of playing monsters with a health and attack value and you use these in conjunction with spells in order to try and bring your opponents life from 20 to 0, just like Hearth.  However this time around the characters don't have active abilities and instead have passive effects that do various things to their decks.  For example there's one character who's cards get stronger depending on how many spells you cast while another who has various abilities depending on how many cards occupy her graveyard.  

Each character has a unique play style and you're bound to find one that matches how you like to play.  

The other big new thing here is the evolution system which allows you after 5 turns to start buffing your monsters for +2/+2 and an added effect if the card has one.  

This allows the monster to attack the turn its played (monsters only, mind you) and can quickly change the tide of a losing battle if you're clever with your evolution points which are limited to 2 for the starting player and 3 for the guy who goes second. 

There are other slight changes but these are the two huge things and everything else is sort of taken from Hearth from there.  Of course there is online play which comes in the form of standard ranked/unranked and 2 pick mode.  2 pick is almost identical to the Area in Hearth but you pick the cards 2 by 2 instead of one at a time.  Also you aren't kicked out of the mode for losing and your reward is based on how many out of 5 you win.  

One thing I really like about this game over Hearth though is just how easy it is to access the content and get cards.  The single play story modes are avaliable from the get go and the game gives you 20 boosters just for clearing the tutorial.  You can get cards by collecting an in game currency which is awarded to you for logging in each day.  I'm still playing the story modes so I'm unsure if online matches provide this currency but even if it doesn't getting cards still doesn't feel like a massive chore like it did in Hearth.

Shadowverse is a quality digital card game that people should give some time to.  This is especially true if you're the kind of person who played Hearth and wasn't happy with some of the direction it took.  I'm playing the Japanese version on my phone but I know there's an English version avaliable on Steam so give it a try!