Title: Fantasy War Tactics (Global)
Platform: Android
Genre: Strategy RPG
Language: English
Company: Nexon
Summary: The game starts off decent as a solo experience… except once you step into any social aspect of the game, which is hard to avoid since they all aid the solo experience, it’s a very pay-to-win/ultimate grindfest environment. And even towards late game, the game pushes for SOOOoooo much grinding I just decided to throw in the towel in the end because there wasn’t enough story or attachment to the characters for me to give reason to literally grind a stage 100+ times just to gain a few skill levels. I have better uses for a smartphone than to spend it constantly repeating a stage or letting a game fucking play itself.

Anyway, one of my coworkers summed this up pretty well and I should’ve woken up to the fact before I even dumped another 5 bucks on this (luckily I’ve only spent $7 total on this, and this was money I earned free from doing surveys anyway???…lulz)… but when he asked me what one of my biggest complaints about the game were, and I said “the grind”, he said… “well, yeah that’s because it’s a Korean game” and YEAH THAT SUMS IT UP. I was aware it was a Korean game when I first looked it up, but having this coworker point it out in this specific context hit me. It took me back to my Ragnarok Online days, a game I don’t regret picking up overall, but I DO regret wasting so many of my high school years on it when I look back on it.

The good thing about Fantasy War Tactics is that unlike Ragnarok Online, there’s a solid, linear storyline to follow, and that’s what has kept my interest from my first play. But upon coming towards the end of the original islands, it’s only setting itself up to extend its own storyline in order to get people to play even longer, with longer grinds and longer everything.

Well, I bought the starter pack on Nov 9, 2015 and am planning to wrap up the experience by mid-January (update: done.). Not bad for how little money I spent and ranking ~200th place tier in weekly PVP, but that was at the cost of all the time I spent grinding on it. Fun in the short term, but definitely not something I’m going to keep up for much longer. I’ve already gotten bored of the strategy aspect of the game since that all sums up to the grind in the end. So going back to the roots of the game and just clearing it without so much grind, so that I can enjoy it as a strategy game once again.

It’s a good game for what it is, as long as you don’t get too caught up in that pay-to-win/ultimate grindfest mindset that it tries so hard to seduce you into. The PVP aspects are a decent challenge for anyone who’s into spending ridiculous amounts of time for small victories–in my case there are a lot of other things I’d rather be spending my time on. Was okay for a try, but I’m already bored of it.

Not to mention that various bugs were killing me at a certain point of the game (fortunately, they fixed it), or the constant threat of spending hundreds of hard-earned gems on lame things like expeditions because of the slow button responses, and knowing that people who join in the game later have zero chance of catching up to other people in the game without spending exponentially large real money fortunes, or losing all humanity/sleep in order to do so. I’ll stick to strategy games that don’t give such BS stamina limits like Fire Emblem and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon in that case :V

Game is uninstalled as of January 24.
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