The global version of Final Blade sure took its time to arrive. It was playtested by hundreds of thousands of players in Taiwan and South Korea before finally becoming available to the global audience. That is not a complaint, as more playtesting means that every bug and flaw has been found out and fixed. And sure enough, the version that finally made it to our hands is in pretty good shape.
Final Blade is a tactical RPG with a gacha system that allows you to summon a cast of more than 300 characters. Yes, these kinds of games are all over the market these days, but developer Sky People has given Final Blade a few things to make it stand out from the competition.
First, let’s go through basic setting real quick. You will take on the role of Black Prince, a powerful warrior with a team of equally competent heroes by your side. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the game you come across a giant monster that is intended to be undefeatable, and your party is forced to retreat.
Visually, Final Blade looks great with a 3D background and 2D characters that are well-designed and smoothly animated. The story is pretty interesting as well, with several twists and revelations to make you want to explore more.
Rise of the automatons
Throughout the game you will earn sapphires, which can be used to summon new heroes. There is a total of over 300 heroes to for you to collect, but don’t worry, it won’t require too much grinding as you can unlock 10 of them at a time with just 2000 sapphires..
Furthermore, you can also buy formations, and all the ones you’ve unlocked will be available for you to choose before heading into a battle. The formations have several slots that you can assign your heroes to, although more often than not the auto-assign feature will suffice.
Additionally, there are Ultimate – powerful single-use party skills – that you can buy as well. Needless to say, each hero has his or her own unique skill too, and once again, you can choose to manually use them when you see fit or just let the AI do it.
The autoplay doesn’t end there. Final Blade allows you to automatically stages by spending another kind of resource: Rice. Yes, you spend rice to play this game, does it get more Asian than this? All jokes aside, with this feature enabled, your team will automatically play through stages after stages until you either run out of rice, complete the chapter, or lose a battle.
This will come in very handy in the early game, where you mostly focus on gaining XP, unlocking new heroes, and leveling up. Battles at this point are practically a formality. An entertaining and visually impressive formality, but still a formality nonetheless. With that being the case, the ability to earn rewards without grinding endlessly is certainly welcome.
What a gem
As mentioned, you earn sapphires and rice by playing through the game, more specifically, by picking up the souls of your vanquished enemies. Unfortunately, there is no automatic pick-up when it comes to this unless you are willing to spend some real money to hire a fairy, so you will have to do this manually.
In term of gameplay, if you are a fan of tactical RPGs on mobile, you will find Final Blade very familiar. After every battle you get currencies and items, as well as XP to level up and unlock new game features.
These features include training (a way for you to level up quickly), dungeons, raid bosses, guilds, clan wars, and an intriguing mode called Black Money. In this mode, you will be the bad guy and raid gold wagons to obtain ill-gotten gains.
Outside of battles, there are several other tasks that demand your attention, such as in-game missions that reward you for playing a certain period of time.
You’ll also need to take care of your heroes to keep them leveled up and evolved. A unique feature of Final Blade in this aspect is that it allows you to combine 2 heroes once they are at max strength to get a new, stronger hero. Note that this process is completely based on RNG, so it is possible that you’ll end up with a Mage after combining a Warrior. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can spend a few emeralds to reroll the dice.
Overall Final Blade is pretty standard for a mobile tactical RPG, but it does have a few innovations to keep things somewhat fresh. It is also pretty laid-back with all the autoplay, so if you just need a game to have fun with and don’t really want to spend too much time and effort, you can check it out on Google Play.
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