***I started this entry but never finished it and now it's been over a year since FFRK in the US was terminated. Rather than delete it completely, I decided to just post whatever I had written. Thanks for your understanding!***
Back in June, I blogged about how my favorite game on the mobile phone was coming to an end. This is a game that I had played since release, I was so excited to hear about a game that featured all my favorite characters and battles from one of my favorite video game franchises of all time: Final Fantasy. I was so saddened when I learned that the game would be reaching an end of service, with no ability to download and play the game offline. Here is a dedication to one of the great games to ever hit the mobile platform...
Final Fantasy Record Keeper
Final Fantasy Record Keeper (or FFRK for short) was a turn-based game that featured battles of your party up to 5 characters against enemies bosses throughout all Final Fantasy games in the series: FF1-15, FFT, Type-0, even Kingdom Hearts and Brave Exvius made cameos in the game. What made the game great was that there was never any ads, and the developers rewarded you with their in-game currency by completing missions or logging in during certain events. For the entire course of the game, I only payed $30 once, mostly as a support to the game's creators. By the end of the game, I had more resources than I could spend and I never felt handicapped in the game during the time I played it.
Mythril was used for the relic draws, which basically determined what Limit Breaks your characters had access to. Relic draws were typically 50 mythril each, with a chance to grab 1-3 Limit Break granting relics out of a set of 10.
Gil was mostly just use to upgrade characters and items, as you can see I had over 443 million by the end of the game, so I was never short on that resource.
Stamina basically allowed you to enter dungeons, costing anywhere from 1-60 stamina to play the battle with unlimited restarts. If you left the damage, you lost the stamina, but you would gain one every 3 minutes. The 275 amount you see below was the maximum possible, which would take half a day to recharge fully. You could also spend Mythril or obtain Stamina Potions to recharge to max capacity.
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| Mythril, Gil, and Stamina |
FFRK was also completely turn-based, but you had the option of an Active Time Battle (ATB), where the enemy would keep attacking you even if you didn't put in actions, or a Wait mode, where the time would stop until you took your characters' turns. You also had limited actions: Attack, Defend, Ability 1, and Ability 2. The simplicity made it easy to pick up, so the strategy came in executing Soul Breaks and whatever abilities you had access to.
What made FFRK great was that it encompassed all the games in the Final Fantasy franchise. I collected all the characters and leveled them up to a maximum level. Although there is an addition leveling system past Lv99 called "Magia Levels", which basically allowed you to assign points to various powerups like elemental offense and defense, hit points and magic points.
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| All 262 Playable Characters |
Before I delve into the characters deeper, I would like to explain the missions available for players to embark on. Each set of missions usually had it's own theme, some related to the Final Fantasy world while some where actually unique to the game's story itself (which involves the Record Keepers who are responsible for keeping records of all the Final Fantasy memories stored in paintings).
Realm Dungeons are where the game starts you. Each realm has several dungeons that are memorable points in each Final Fantasy game, and the stages get progressively harder. I still remember when I first started playing the game, I had so much trouble advancing through stages. I would have to carefully plan my parties to survive the mobs on the way to the boss fights. As I leveled up over time, these dungeons became much easier to the point were I could simply auto-battle and collect all the rewards at the end. Regardless, they are important because they give you Stamina Shards, which are basically what allow you to play the game more frequently (unless you choose to refill stamina with mythril or a potion). Each Realm had a Cassic side (normal mode) and Master side (more difficult, with additional challenges to complete), although I would argue these Dungeons were some of the easiest to complete.
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| Realm Dungeons |
Record Dungeons was the game's story mode, although I'll be honest, I got a little disinterested and eventually started skipping all of it. They introduce about 5 story characters: Keeper, Elarra, Dr. Mog, Biggs, and Wedge. There's also Cid and Shadowsmith, but neither of playable. The record dungeons bounce around a lot across all Final Fantasy realms, but what made it unique is that it actually recreated the stories via cutscenes. There were even some dungeons that had explorable maps, although you could only click to move to a location, there was no free movement. They only released two episodes for record dungeons and they forced certain characters into your party from each realm. And finally, the characters in the Record Dungeons had separate levels from the rest of the game, which actually made some of the dungeons more challenging then say the Realm Dungeons.
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| "Prelude" Record Dungeons |
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| "Canon" Record Dungeons |
As the game continued to expand, they introduced methods to level up characters quicker and upgrade abilities and weapons faster. There were multiple resources that achieved this:
Orbs were used to create and upgrade abilities. Various abilities could be used across all characters, but some were specific to certain classes. Most of the time, I spent my excess stamina farming orbs so that I could max out any ability I wanted to use in battle.
Growth Eggs were used to level up characters, but eventually I found these worthless once all my characters hit level 99.
Crystal Water was used when a character reached maximum level, but only gave a small boost to the key stats: HP, MP, Defense, Resistance, Attack, Magic, and Mind.
Adamantite and Scarletite were for upgrade weapons to a maximum level based on their rarity. In addition, Rosetta Stones were something they added to try and make weapons slightly stronger once maxed. However, I felt standard weapons via Relic Draws became worthless once Artifacts were introduced, which made both of these materials worthless towards the end.
Rainbow Crystals were used to upgrade Artifacts, the strongest weapons in the game. So these had the most value. There were more Artifacts than anyone could upgrade, so you had to really be decisive about what you wanted to upgrade, since the only way to obtain Rainbow Crystals was to destroy the items you obtained via Relic Draws.
Arcana was the only resource you couldn't farm in a Resource Dungeon, and these were used to upgrade Magicite. Rat Tails were also unfarmable, and those were used to upgrade Historia Crystals. Both of those I'll get into later. I was able to max out all my Magicitie so Arcana was not really an issue, but rat tails were definitely scarce and it was very expensive to max out all your Historia Crystals.
Finally we have Motes, which basically were added midway through the course of the game to give even more bonuses to your characters and unlock classes, which gave the characters more abilities to choose from. Motes were definitely the way to truly unlock a character maximum capabilities, since it also unlocked very powerful abilities specific only to that hero. There was no way for me to unlock every character's maximum.
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| My Collection of Resources |
The most challenging dungeons in the game started with the Nightmare and Magicite dungeons. Nightmare involved a ramp up to a difficult boss, usually with some special gimmick for the final boss in each. Once you completed a Nightmare dungeon, you'd obtain a powerful ability to use in battle. Unfortunately, the only ones that were useful were Curada, Valigarmanda, and Affliction Break. Occasionly Reraise was helpful, but Soul Breaks with Last Stand were far better for Revive-on-KO. Regardless, these were important to complete in order to unlock the more useful Magicite dungeons. Magicite dungeons were all elemental based and my favorite dungeons in the game. By beating these you'd be rewarded with Magicite, which was not only a summon you could call within battle but also increased your elemental damage. And the more you combined your obtained magicite, the more powerful your party became. I felt like Magicite dungeons were the most balanced dungeons in the game, where you really couldn't advance to the next level until you mastered the current level.
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| Nightmare and Magicite Dungeons Mastered |
Like the Magicite dungeons, there existed Dreams, Torment and Cardia Dungeons (Dreambreaker and Dragonking), which instead focused on Realm synergy instead of an elemental focus. So for example, instead of specializing on Ice damage, it was more important to bring characters all from the same Final Fantasy Realm to really boost your success. Beating these dungeons required the use of Historia Crystals, which not only allowed a powerful summon to be called within battle but also boosted the power of characters from the same realm. Again, beating the lowest levels of these dungeons made it easier to tackle the next, making for a progressive climb throughout the dungeon gauntlet. Cardia dungeons were the hardest dungeons in the game to complete and unfortunately I could not master any of the Dragonking challenges, although I hoped that I would have eventually had the game service not ended when it did.
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| Dreams, Torment, and Cardia Dungeons |
Magicite was definitely easier to obtain the maximum levels because it was in the game for longer, but I was unable to max out all the Historia Crystals given how late in the game they were introduced before the shutdown.
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| Magicite and Historia Crystals |
The playthroughs of FFRK varied among each user, the strength of the characters mostly being determined by the Soul Breaks they obtained via the Relic Draws. This is the fun of a gatcha game. You spent your Mythril in hopes you'd gain the powerful Soul Breaks for the characters you liked the most. In some cases, there were just some Soul Breaks that were so good, you just couldn't afford to pass them up. In the remainder of this blog entry, I will go through each Final Fantasy Realm to describe which characters were the best in my playthrough, basically an ode to my strongest parties in each realm.
***END OF ENTRY***
