Does it even matter who is in your party? Its seems like everyone just uses an attack that causes equal damage. Your party might as well be nothing but Fighters.
No, not everyone causes the same damage. Each deals different damage and at different rates, since for example the spell casters generally do more damage but take way longer to execute their actual attacks, while melee ones generally do so in less time but deal less damage.
This just shows how a lot of people are jumping to conclusions by just watching the IGN video.
It does. You unlock different weapons that drop from each mosnter that alter the damage done by each class. Each class is very unique.
However, I wouldn't go as far as saying they're all
very unique. They're basically split into melee and magic users with their differences being what I wrote earlier.
From people who've played it, how's the balancing in this?
Do you feel that it's balanced so that you'll die sometimes or often, or is it evenly balanced where if you have more characters, your chances of victory increase? I'm genuinely curious about this.
Edit: I find it odd that you enter battles with a randomly-chosen party, as if your skillsets don't seem to matter or whatever FF characters you choose (who could probably provide defensive or attack passive skills in other games) simply don't factor in battle outside of what animations they may execute.
I have to say, though, that I like the battle backgrounds--it's interesting to see the 3D FFs in 2D like that.
The first few stages of the game are easy enough that you can breeze through them but once you reach Fabul Waterway's first mini-boss (the game's 4th stage) is where I think most people got wiped out. At this point you can wait till time goes by and your party naturally regenerates, buy hourglasses and have them regenerated instantly OR, and this is what I did, exit out of the battle and grind on earlier stages. The game is set up so that everytime you tap on a FFV goblin sprite in the world/stage map you get four encounters with four groups of enemies, and you get awarded experience points and gil after every one of those battles. In my time with the game I noticed that it took about four or five battles of the latest stage's enemies to level up, I did this to the point where I could defeat the boss I was stuck on which was usually about five or six levels than I was prior. The higher your level the more party slots you have (up to a maximum of thirty two party slots, the other eight MUST be unlocked via SNS sharing), the more character classes you unlock and the more damage they deal. By grinding till I could finally beat the boss was how I progressed through the whole game till I got to the final boss at level 99. Grinding might sound dull and time-consuming but since battles in this game are so quick, every period I grinded for took just a few minutes, and the game actually rewards you for it since every enemy has a unique drop (some have two drops, actually), all the drops are weapons, and weapons serve as permanent stat-boosting items for all the classes and characters that can equip them.
However, even at level 99 and with many weapons acquired, the final boss is impossible to beat without dying, even if you use the game's fever mode, which happens once every three real time hours. When I reached that point was the first time I actually had to wait. And I did, and beat it once my party had regained about twenty members (it isn't necessary to wait for the whole party to recuperate to play again).
Like I said earlier, as your level gets higher you gain new characters with new classes. At first you have access to warriors, white mages and black mages, typical FF stuff, and by the end you have upgraded versions of all of them, however you never actually get to pick which you bring to battle, it's all random. The game seems to try and have at least one of every class available to you as long as your maximum party slots allow it, and then they start to repeat; that's not to say you will ALWAYS get at least one of each, because sometimes you don't. If you buy premium characters, they're almost 100% guaranteed to appear in your party, however buying them is almost a pure nostalgia bait, since many of them aren't nearly as useful as some of the "late game" classes like onion knights or summoners.
By the end most of the melee characters and classes deal 5k+ damage, with samurais and onion knights almost always dealing 9999, while magic users almost always deal 9999 damage but their ATB bar charges much, much slower. And this is where the only gameplay "mechanic" comes into play, because once you are in a "hard" fight the rate at which each character's bar fill is actually important to stay alive. Characters like summoners or devouts take so long to fill their bars that they're just standing there for most of the battle, which makes them the enemies' primary target. The melee characters on the other hand are much quicker in both their attack animations as well as the rate at which their bar fills up. Thieves don't deal much damage compared to other characters but their attack animation is quick and their bar charges faster than any other with the exception of the onion knight. Onion Knights use "Attack" as they did in the original FF games where a hit counter appeared over their heads. In this game, the higher your level the higher the chances of dealing more hits they have, and the higher their hit count, the faster their ATB bar charges. If they deal 16 hits, they're ready to attack as soon as their current attack animation ends, and no other class or character has this.
Taking all that in consideration, the game's balanced so that at first it might seem "easy" with huge difficulty spikes as soon as the early stages end, and those spikes always happen with all mini-bosses and bosses, this probably done so that impatient players will spend money on hourglasses, but whether they do or not is up to them.
For the record, I bought the game, three premium characters and a world ticket and I did enjoy it, because I didn't expect anything other than a simple timewaster with cute sprites.
EDIT: Also I forgot to mention that the reason why the bosses are broken is because they have (specially the late game ones) millions of hit points, and have attacks that in a single hit kill whole rows and columns of characters.
Also, regarding the hourglasses and the whole wait or pay thing, I'm surprised people are suddenly outraged that they're charging for this, yet I don't think I ever read anyone complaining about those things in games like Guardian Cross or Knights of the Crystals. What they're doing now is something they've been doing for a while now.
Is it because people thought this game wouldn't be like those other two, which in turn are basically the same as most other iOS and Facebook games?
Is it because it has the Final Fantasy brand attached to it?
