It is a Pokemon-lit game with chibi art style though. Sephiroth is just bonus. However, I find it hilarious that SE want to attract more fans by releasing the game on PSV and PS4, as if kids play those things. WoFF was doomed when it was announced. Maybe the west can help them recoup the cost, but the mission of attracting new fans will certainly fail.
Okay, so I watched two English demos of the game (E3 and a PAX West one that was also a developer interview), and then looked at all the Gematsu updates on the title, since they covered all the weekly (or more frequent) marketing updates.
Here's what I noticed:
- Mechanically, this seems to work like a standard ATB based Final Fantasy game with a couple of alterations. You can catch monsters, which you insert into your "stack", which essentially serves as a battle deck of skills. This means if you have a Bomb on your head for example, your character will be able to cast a couple of fire spells in addition to whatever else you do. I think you can have two monsters in your stack at most.
- The creatures you catch level up by something resembling a three lane version of the sphere grid.
- There's also a major summon mode where both of your main characters (who similarly have an ability load out) can stand on top of one shared giant creature.
- Finally, there's some kind of super attacks you can do where you summon a classic Final Fantasy character who performs a 15+ second long attack animation as a super, which generally has a bunch of call backs to things they did that were popular in their games.
- I list these all separately since most of these mechanics seem to be thrown at you very quickly all at once in the game, at least based on a demo that looked like it was very close to the beginning of the game.
- The world area plays out something like Final Fantasy X where you're mostly walking along narrow paths, but there's some switches, light puzzle elements, and treasure chests thrown around.
- For the game's promotional videos, there were a few trailers that overwhelmingly focused on the game's story and presentation as opposed to the actual gameplay.
- For the weekly updates, about 10 of them focused on the classic Final Fantasy characters you could use as super attacks in the game, whereas 2 of them focused on the various monsters you could collect. This even happened with updates in Jump, where they'd bring out a character like Cloud or Snow and the entire advertorial page would focus on them being added to the game.
- The only mention of toys related to this game are a set of six figurines releasing in January. Five of them cost $40 each, while there's an extra expensive one that costs $60.
- There doesn't seem to be any anime or manga tied into the game's launch, outside of some kind of short anime promotional video.
- So far, the only mention of multiplayer appears to be some kind of one line sentence about how the game will have player battling and trading, though it is noted that the multiplayer will be added in a day one update to the PS4.
- This is more of an oddity, but the game won't launch with voice acting on Vita, and instead you have to download it separately as DLC. Square Enix said this was done to save on cartridge costs.
I don't know. This game strikes me as a product that expects you to jump into a fairly complicated combat and leveling setup immediately (yet one that'd be familiar to long term Final Fantasy fans), seems to think its audience values characters from games released 15-25 years ago more than anything else, feels there's very little interest in the actual types of monsters you're catching, focuses heavily on marketing the plot over the gameplay, and sees things like the multiplayer component as a complete afterthought.
This strikes me as a product made by a team who really wanted to make a normal Final Fantasy game, but figured out the best way to get that greenlit was to make the game ostensibly targeted at children, and then proceed to build the game they felt like making. The only things that makes this stick out as a game for younger children is that the main characters are a few years younger than normal, it bares a passing resemblance to Pokemon, and it features chibi art (but not always chibi art). While people will frequently point out the platform they're releasing on, it strikes me as entirely appropriate for what the development team actually wanted to do.
