In the mobile gaming community, Terra Battle for both Android and iOS devices recently launched. This game is made by Mistwalker Corporation who is headed by the person who created Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi and with this release features music composed by Nobuo Uematsu. If you don’t know Nobuo Uematsu, he pretty much composed music for nearly all the Final Fantasies and popular JRPGs like Chrono Trigger and The Last Story.

Lately, or rather, since I downloaded this mobile game a few days ago I had been hooked. I never looked at mobile gaming as a serious thing because to me, mobile games were just different skins of similar games. Though I don’t know what game Terra Battle might be similar to, I find myself picking up my Nexus 7 any chance I get to play the game.

Game Mechanics

Terra Battle is a tile based strategy game where you move only one character (out of up to six max characters) in a 8×6 grid. You only get a couple of seconds to position one of your characters in a flanking attack (two characters surrounding an enemy vertically or horizontally) in order to cause damage on an enemy.

During your movement, you can also move your characters around by having the character you are moving pass through any of your other party members. Doing so, the party member you passed through will move one direction opposite to where you are moving. The reason you’d want to do this is to maximize the amount of enemies you can get in a flanking attack. Also, if you can get your party to line up horizontally or vertically, you maximize damage output and you can set up a bunch of chain attacks this way too.

Characters and enemies have different types of attacks: sword, bow, spear, and staff. The way it plays out is that one type will be stronger than the other, but weaker against another type. This formula basically works like rock-paper-scissors, which the game will mention. Sword is strong against bow, which is strong against spear, which in turn is strong against sword. Weaknesses work in reverse. The staff represents magic and is generally weak against any of the other three. Magic characters have either fire, ice, lightning, or darkness type of attacks, and other magic characters can heal or cure status ailments.

Some of the characters will also have similar attribute to work with their type of attack, so you can have a sword unit that can do fire damage. There seems to be resistances that work from what I can assume in my time playing when I paired up a sword-fire type against the same thing, so try to line up your party as much as possible to help you throughout the game.

As you take down your enemies, you have a meter that builds up that gives you a power up you need to align your characters with to reap the benefits of. You can build up the meter up to three bars giving you three power ups, but only once per turn.This comes in handy if you can move the power up around to save it for a boss fight or if you want to end your current section in style.

At the end of each session you are rewarded with experience points, items, and coins, and at the end of each chapter you get at least one point of energy as well.

Experience points lead to level ups for your characters. If one of your characters gets knocked out during a session, if you win at the end, they still get experience points. However, if you end up with all your characters K.O.’d, then you have the option to spend one energy to resume the fight.

Items can grant you the ability to upgrade your job as long as you have enough coins to spend. Upgrading your jobs helps your characters learn new skills that will help your game progress further. For example, one of my units through the job upgrade allowed me to have an area of effect (AoE) attack that hits enemy units surrounding her and also causes additional damage to whatever it is she already is fighting.

Not only do coins allow you to upgrade your characters, but they can be used to hire other characters (either basic or sometimes rare, or types of monsters you find throughout the game) in the tavern area.

Energy is used to revive your party to pick up where you had fallen. Five energy points can be used to hire named and sometimes rare characters.

Characters in this game have different classes: SS, S, A, B, C, and D. Basically, the rarer the character, the better the character is through stats and skill. At this moment, I am only graced with on S rank character, but seemed to have no problem with my As or Bs so far and I’ve made it up to chapter 8. My guess is that this is because most of my units are a few levels hire than the difficulty of the chapter.

Each chapter is broken into parts (or sessions as I’ve been calling them) and to play them, you must expend a certain amount of stamina. If I remember correctly, you get 20 stamina at the beginning of the game. Stamina usually regenerates 1 point per 3 or so minutes, and it also regenerates as you play. You can also expend one energy to refill your stamina to feed your need to play. I did this once, but found it to be a mistake because that’s when I learned that energy is the thing that you can purchase to get more of.

Buying energy costs from $0.99 to $59.99. You are rewarded energy at the end of each chapter as I said before, but so far it’s only been at most one energy. I’ve already dropped $40 just because I wanted more characters. But other than that, it is a free to play game, and if you don’t want to spend money and don’t mind your characters, then it’s a free to play, patient to play more game.

Story

As far as I know, your characters traverse a world ruined with destruction in search for the Maker that is deep underground. As you continue on looking for help and set off on your journey, you will fight threats along the way.

The Art of the Game

The character portraits look superbly done in my opinion, and absolutely love the style (an example found on the official wikia). The background looks amazingly done and it always changes depending on what chapter you’re in to fit the scene.

I enjoy the the dark colors that portray the world to represent its grief and imminent destruction.

The music is well done. To me, it’s not surprising that it’s so excellent, only because I’ve played a lot of games the Nobuo Uematsu as worked on. The battle music or even the title screen and menu theme hasn’t got me tired of hearing them yet. Here’s the song from the menu screen to listen to.

All in All

This is the first mobile game I’ve ever committed money into and don’t really regret that. I’m having a wonderful time with the game and I feel always eager to start up a session once I allow my stamina to fully restore. Though I’m not addicted to wanting to buy more energy, I do have the need to collect every character. So far, I am resisting the urge.

Lining up my units to maximize the amount of damage dealt and also positioning my units to attack multiple enemies in one turn is the most satisfying thing in the game. Defeating all the enemies in one turn is possibly the greatest feeling I had so far.

The only time I’ve really gotten frustrated with the game is when I misplace a units and ruin my turn, but that’s on me and not the games fault.

The game is a free to play game with in app purchases, but if you can wait a while and if characters aren’t that big of a deal to you, then I can recommend giving this game a lot of your time. I say give it a shot, and if you don’t like it, at least it was free.

Another thing, the more downloads this game gets, the more features unlock. At the time of this post, the game has reached 650k downloads and so far only new characters are being made. They are being created by artists responsible for a lot of JRPG games. There are things to look forward to if more downloads happen that include more new art, purchasable books of the artwork, free download to the soundtrack, a live concert, statues, and at 2 million, a console release which I don’t know how they’ll do it, but heck, I’d put money in a console version because I absolutely love the game.

Hope this helps and I hope I encouraged you to check out Terra Battle

Cheers!
~Emerson