So Terra Battle launched today. For those that haven't heard of it, it's a new free-to-play tactical RPG from Hironobu Sakaguchi and MIstwalker on mobile. I played through the first ten battles, which comprise the first two chapters, and so far, it's not bad. Free-to-play mobile brings to mind a lot of horror stories, but the game seems ideally structured and paced for a mobile game that uses facets like stamina (which is needed to start a batlte) and energy (which is used at the tavern to recruit more powerful, unique characters).

The battles are fought on a grid, and you just drag characters where you want to move them. Attacking is done by flanking enemies, and you can set up chains by lining up allies in adjacent rows and columns. The battles I've fought so far haven't been particularly challenging, save for some of the boss battles, which can throw extra-large enemies at you that take up more of the grid. The look and sound of the game are also really good, particularly in its character artwork and the Uematsu soundtrack.

Anyone else give this a shot? I'm liking it and hopeful that the free-to-play elements remain unobtrusive. It seems like its got a lot going for it so far.

I like it so far and not that I have a ton of experience with that kind of game, but it seems a whole lot less gross with regards to in app purchases than other games like it.

The one thing I still have trouble wrapping my head around is lining up my dudes. My brain refuses to grasp that when one of my guys wants to move past another one of my guys they trade places on the battlefield. Yet I keep thinking one would push the other along. Which isn't the case.

Also get your five energies while they are hot. That's like an entire dude worth of energies!

I really like the art design and music for this game, but I really stink at the Puzzle & Dragons style "move your dude all over the field to set up combos before the timer runs out" gameplay.

I don't mind trying to learn with this game though, unlike with Puzzle & Dragons.

I don't mind it. The game has been out in Canada forever now, so I have already finished with it and deleted the file.

It seems neat for the kind of game they're making, if a bit unadventurous. I feel like there are about fifty games in ios that roughly approximate Terra Battle, but the art is nicer than the typical fare. I'll mess with it for a while.

went to Sakaguchi's panel at Pax Prime and saw gameplay of this game, for a mobile game it looks fun.

ill download it just to support the whole "download-starter" they are doing with the game.

The download starter is already bearing fruit. They hit the 100,000 milestone tonight and unlocked a new Uematsu track that plays in the metal and hunting zones.

I have to say that I'm impressed. Just got to chapter 3 and I still haven't felt a pressing need to spend money on the game. The more I play it, the more it feels like the sort of free to play that should be the ideal; actually playable for free.

@hailinel: nice, here's hoping they hit the 2 million mark eventually for a console game.

I would kill for a Last Story 2.

That they would need to get Nintendo to agree to, but I am with you on that one. As for this, if they hit two million downloads, they'll start work on a console version of Terra Battle of some nature.

Oh cool, didn't know it was available yet!

I'll have to give it a whirl

It's safe to say that the game has its hooks in me. I've reached a point where I was able to class change two of my characters and in the process learned more about the skill system. You can actually copy skills from one of a character's classes to empty slots of another class, as well as swap back and forth between classes. So there's solid potential for min-maxing.

The game also reached the 200,000 download mark, meaning that new characters designed by Hideo Minaba (Final Fantasy Tactics, FFIX, FFXII) are now confirmed, though there's no set schedule for when they'll be available.

@hailinel: Hey, so what's the point of the characters you can buy with coins? They're all C or D rank. The D rank ones generally only have 1-2 skills, and no alternate jobs. The C rank ones sometimes have 4 skills, but still have no alternate jobs. The A and B rank ones you get from energy just seem like you should always have them in, since they generally have 3 jobs, meaning you'll have to level them from 1-60 three separate times. It just seems like once you have 6 or more A/B rank characters, you should just be constantly grinding out XP with them, compared to using some fucking wyvern that is only ever going to have one skill.

The only reason I can come up with to use the low ranked ones would be if you see a mission's enemies are entirely bowman or something, so you wanna just run all swordmen to counter them, and have to dip more into your low ranked pool of characters to actually have a full team of swordmen. But since so many of those characters are lvl 1 for me (because fuck using them), that strategy wouldn't be viable.

Also, is the blue B percentage just added on to each of the percent chances for each skill that character has? That's what I've been assuming.

@bisonhero: The Coin units are in general, garbage tier. In the beginning, the pool was actually only C and D units (there was a 0% chance of pulling a B or higher). However, the units they've added for the Download Starter thing can be received in either the coin tavern or the energy tavern. So... there's at least a very small reason to try it. Not enough for me to bother using it anymore.

@meant2live218: Yeah, I bought a few of them the first day or so when I had nothing better to do with coins, then realized that class change prices get pretty expensive. So yeah, I don't see any reason to buy the coin characters unless you've already class changed like literally every B, A, S, and SS character.

It just seems weird for their F2P model. I guess their thinking is that coin characters (C and D rank) are so bad it might entice people to buy energy to unlock the energy characters (B/A/S/SS), but it's actually pretty easy to get enough energy in the first week or so you're playing the game that you end up with 6 energy characters (helps that you start with one, plus Kuscah for a limited time, plus that code from Twitter that would give you 5 energy), and literally any team of 6 energy characters is better than using a coin character.

Hey @jslack, does this thread really have 3500 views? With only 15 posts? Are bots viewing the page through Google because the second post mentions a gift code?

@bisonhero: It probably really does have that amount of views, and some of them are probably bots, but probably not most of them. Hah, I know that's not specific. It's technically possible to get more specific data, but not super practical. A product guy might be able to dig up that data faster.

Bots definitely crawl lots of stuff, but I'm guessing more of those are legitimate than not.

@bisonhero: They're pretty generous with the freebies, that's for sure. You actually start with Grace of Bahl as your starting character (your first pull), plus you'll get Kuscah if you start in the next bit. The code for 5 extra energy is now expired, so re-rolling for 2 early SS units isn't quite as viable.

You're given 5 energy every 8 days just for logging on every day, plus you'll get some for your first 10 days of playing. Overall, yeah, it's pretty dang easy to get all 6 of your units B and up (unless you're unlucky and roll clones, which only level up your existing character). Some people insist on only using an account where they have 2 or more SS units, but I don't have any, and I'm on chapter 15 with no real issues or roadblocks so far.

Coins are easily farmed over the weekend in the Coin Creep zones; you can get 3-5k using 15 stamina starting in Hunting Zone 2, so every weekend I just stockpile coins for all the evolutions I'm attempting to get the materials for during the week.

I haven't spent a cent on in-app purchases, but I may use some Google Play credit from surveys on some energy just to show the devs some support. They've made an interesting game with a relatively high production cost, and I want them to continue development and support on it for a long time.

I actually got lucky really early on and got a SS rank with an early energy character, Gaiga, by spending energy I had earned in this manner. My roster at this point is a pretty healthy mix of B, A, S, and SS characters, with the requisite lower-tier monsters. Though I did roll for a while with both Kuscah and the generic healer in my main party for double the healing action until I got a better #2 healer. And though the game doesn't require in-app purchases to be playable or progress, I did spend money to buy energy to support the game, because this really is the sort of free-to-play design that developers should be striving for. A design that lets people that just want to play the game play it, getting rewards for the time they put in, and making the act of paying for energy something that actually feels optional rather than a requirement.

I just downloaded this based on UPF. I haven't played a full on phone game since Jungle Run, but man... this is great. Battles move quick, the art and music is nice, the FTP stuff doesn't bum me out, and it's just really hard to put down.

I'm curious if anyone else jumped on this after Drew showed it off. My initial impression was "eh... I'll skip ahead," but I'm certainly glad I stayed.

@csl316: I tried to but apparently the devs do not consider my country good enough for their game...

@csl316: Yeah, it's surprisingly fun. It kinda scratches that same itch as the original Puzzle Quest (the ONLY good Puzzle Quest. OK, maybe that Marvel one is alright, I haven't tried it yet). I wish there was somehow a little more interaction in when you use skills, instead of it just being a percentage chance where you go "boy, I sure hope all my skills trigger". But yeah, thinking about the best way to rearrange you guys, that you can reasonably accomplish within the fairly short time limit, is actually really fun, because even if you see where you want everyone to end up, there's still an execution element to it that you can fuck up, and being able to adapt on the fly when you fuck up takes some practice.

i really don't like mobile games and the free to play mechanisms but this is really fun and you don't have to buy anything. highly recommended.

Checked this out after seeing UPF. Might be the first mobile game i've ever had a good time with. So far, really fun and satisfying to play!

Animaton, why must you elude me? I need like, 12 of you to unlock various job changes, yet I've been sitting on a mere 2 for like the past three weeks.

Did anybody mess with the two Bahamut events? I was able to get Bahamut (and even some duplicates) during the first event, but the second event (which drops a unique class change item for Bahamut) just gave me nothing after running it at least a dozen times. Ah well, poor Bahamut will have to stay unchanged, unless they do an encore of that event.

Just downloaded it after I'd forgotten about it. Seemed interesting, since mobile took over the gaming world in Japan this makes sense that it's on mobile.

Edit: Just played it for a few hours, it's been fun so far. The gameplay is fairly intuitive - easy to get a feel for the basics, but kind of challenging to plan out your strategy for the next 4 seconds. I've never been that great at swiping my thumb across my phone's screen fast, but I'll get better with time I guess.

Probably will be my new mobile fix for a while, since I'd gotten a bit bored with Threes and EA's newer Tetris has a thousand ads and no way to get rid of them.

I'm kind of surprised how much I've been enjoying this game in a simple kind of way. It seems like if you've got some time on your hands you can use your stamina to move through the story, the battles last longer and are a tad more challenging. If you've only got a little bit of time but want to quickly spend your stamina and get levels or items, you can do this one fight that's quick, uses 10 stamina and gives you a shitton of levels. Or you can do a hunting quest that also costs 10 stamina and gets you items so that eventually you can get new job unlocks.

The gameplay is pretty clever, I thought after 10 minutes I'd seen the extent of the strategy involved but poison fields, spikes, bosses that attack in certain directions, etc. really mix it up.

I'm really interested in the job stuff, to see how FF it is and how much it impacts the gameplay.

The story so far has made no sense to me, kind of hard to get it when you skim these super tiny snippets of text between fights written in a really small size font. Something about exploring a tower to reach the "Maker."

The music has been... kind of a let-down for me so far. If it's Uematsu... it's pretty in line with his FF music, just this doesn't seem like the most memorable music he's done. More than that there seems to be 2 songs, one for normal battles and one for boss fights so the music gets old fast. Last time I played I turned the sound off and put Sgt. Pepper on the record player.

It's not available in Australia for whatever reason which is a huge bummer

I've become pretty much addicted to this over the last few days. Really love the artwork and character designs, battle system and music (though this is definitely not Nobuo's best). Story is pretty interesting as well. I got lucky and got an SS rank character too. My only complaint so far is that the Stamina is extremely limited. Even more than most mobile games I've played.