my review of this "almost GEM"

[JthePK]

There are many things about this release that both bother me and disappoint me as a veteran tactical RPG (FFT is the best, but I started with vandal hearts decades ago), and since I won't be playing this game I will just spell out a handful of my most obvious grievances here. Some of them are easy fix if you chose, some not.

1: When in the town, during missions, the bottom right button that tells you there is an activity available is horrible. It goes in its own order, and you cant delay the option to the end of the list, you can only ignore. What you should have done, is make a left and right arrow box, and allow players to view ALL of the available activities by clicking the arrows left and right. theres no reason to make us ignore it, there are so many litte things to do that one will just click end week out of habbit and miss out that week on different activities that were ready.

2: NOBODY likes a lengthy forced tutorial. There is literally nothing new you are introducing. theres no need.

*3*: How are you going to have directional DMG bonus but you will not allow players to choose their direction? since you automatically decide the path a character walks, there are times when the character will be facing a stupid direction even when he SHOULD have been able to face a proper direction if the player could pick his own movement path. theres no excuses for not being able to pick a direction. this dumbing down doesnt make the game more tactical and doesnt require additional strategy. it makes me want to pull my hair out because your AI chose to make my character navigate from the left instead of the right and now hes facing the stupidest direction possible.

4: while skills are on cooldown, the player is unable to click on them to read the info for the skill. makes no sense. let people read the tooltip for skills that are on cooldown.

5: while in a combat menu, right clicking should go back to the previous menu. EXample: if i click move unit, and decide i want to attack instead before i have moved my unit, i should be able to right click and it should cancel the movement selection and go back to that units main turn options. hope that one made sense i didnt know how to word it. right click should take you to the previous menu during combat.

6: there MUST be a wait command, that pushes a units turn further back in the turn order.
7: movement feels slow and clunky. some units can only move 2 spaces? all units should probably get +1 to their movement speed across the board.

8: if a player isnt pressing any buttons, dialog should not auto-scroll by itself.

9: the delay before the main character joystick pops up for moving around town is too long

10:if there are any facilities that are not being used, a warning box should pop up before a player is allowed to end the week.

11: since the player isnt allowed to chose his own movement path, the AI will walk your unit into fire or other hazards even if there are alternative paths to the same place. makes no sense.

***12***: you cannot call this a strategy or tactical game when the number one most effective strategy will be to make in game purchases. period. this game could have taken over EVERYTHING in ways you wouldnt have predicted. but instead you went the greedy route and put micro transactions in it. hope it was worth it, you will end up with more money but your brand name is gonna be forgotten and this game wont be remembered as a legend at all.

+13+: round based strategy games are bad and lazy. FFT has systems in place that completely embarrass this game. and FFT is decades old. its almost like you guys didnt do ANY studying before making this game,

cant stress this enough, you cannot claim your game is a strategy or tactical game when its p2w with a 2% legendary rate. theres nothing tactical about it. its TIERed, not TACTical. huge difference. any kind of ranking system you impliment for pvp will actually be ranking their irl wealth a VAST MAJORITY of the cases.

the most die hard tactical strategy fans are skipping on this game because we know better. i really hoped since you picked up legendary audio ppl from past franchises that you were getting coached to make a good game by veterans but this game is a giant blunder. and honestly, its too late to fix it. microtransactions have been integrated into the game to a degree that you will never be able to get rid of them even if you werent greedy and wanted to get rid of them.


im MAJORLY dissapointed in developers greed. FFT would have flopped if it had microtransctions. this game is ruined. as is, will not be playing. wasted too much time in other microtransactions just to see that theres is NO HOPE for the average person to compete with the richest people. its a scam. you are a scam. this game is a scam.

you dressed it up as a tactical strategy game because you knew there was a market for it. but if you knew ANYTHING at all about tactical strategy games, youd know these game types are incompatible.

the ONLY way that I would consider this game playable is if:

1: legend rates were DRASTICALLY increased. (dont go 2% -> 3% and call it done lol.....)
2: directional waiting is a MUST. pvp will be a gimmick without this.
3: turn passing. units NEED to be able to wait for a later chance in the turn. the fact that this game is round based is


gameplay: 6/10 no waiting your turn, no directional waiting, cant choose your own movement path.
graphics: 10/10 simply amazing, this should be the new standard for which future strategy rpg games try to mimicry.
audio/ost : 9/10 a lot of songs are generic and boring, but the style and theme fit the game still to a great degree
unit management, town management: 5/10 needs to be heavily optimized.
are microtransactions fun?: 0/100000
frustration with developers choices: 10/10

you guys could have been the kings of strategy games. this game is going to net you a lot of money, but you will be the kings of nothing and you will not be remembered.

[Overeagerdragon]

Originally posted by DAOWAce:

Not being able to choose a direction, and units having seemingly random speed stats that often make no sense (why is an assassin almost always last?), is a huge glaring flaw in a tactics game that's emulating FFT.

The UI along with the controls are also bad, because it's made for a touchscreen. A Playstation 1 game from 26 years ago shouldn't have better UI and controls. Being forced to constantly click 'standby' (which often makes no sense, their turn is over, just end it), and having to DOUBLECLICK to access a tile behind another object.. it's awful. You need different control schemes for different platforms.

Then there's the energy and gacha elements.. It's comparable to War of the Visions in terms of some design (unit dupes especially), while ripping all its gacha elements from Genshin. A gacha tactics game basically invalidates any 'tactics', because of p2w.

Like damn, playing this made me want to finally sit down for Octopath Traveler, or emulate FFT again after all these years.

This could've been a great game if it was just a full price release. But no, it's a sad excuse for an FFT clone for the mobile gamers of today. Very disappointing knowing what the game could be, but isn't.

I'm liking spiral of destinies for exactly the fact you ARE beholden to "make do with what you get"... so the tactics nomer being invalidated because p2w doesn't really hold up all that well. I've done well with stuff I got for free and I haven't spent a dime so far yet have plenty of unique characters. What can I say; I like freeloading these games to see how far I can get without spending and usually do so until I've established I like a game VERY much (which usually takes 200hrs or more)...

But hey... maybe look into games like Ogre Tactics:Reborn, Disgaea or my personal fav atm: Troubleshooter; maybe they can tickle you tactics itch ?

[Plantszaza]

Originally posted by DAOWAce:

Then there's the energy and gacha elements.. It's comparable to War of the Visions in terms of some design (unit dupes especially), while ripping all its gacha elements from Genshin. A gacha tactics game basically invalidates any 'tactics', because of p2w.

Have you actually played Spiral of Destinies?

[Soli]

I have no idea why this review is getting so much backlash, it's on point for pretty much everything. People are getting hung up on the gacha part, but like even if you take that out, everything else in this review is super valid gameplay criticisms. We shouldn't allow developers to make modern games lacking basic gameplay mechanics and QoL features that have existed for literal decades, without calling them out on it.

They can do better, they should do better, and we must expect better

[internetgrout]

It's a phone gacha what do you expect? Spiral of Destiny is like a secret actual game inside of it that you can play if you want

[TigerNightmare]

Originally posted by Soli:

I have no idea why this review is getting so much backlash, it's on point for pretty much everything. People are getting hung up on the gacha part, but like even if you take that out, everything else in this review is super valid gameplay criticisms. We shouldn't allow developers to make modern games lacking basic gameplay mechanics and QoL features that have existed for literal decades, without calling them out on it.

They can do better, they should do better, and we must expect better

It's because it's extremely hyperbolic about microtransactions and gacha rates in spite of the former being completely ignorable and the latter being considerably more generous compared to other games in the genre. It insists you have to compete against rich people, but that doesn't even happen. If people want to buy their way up the tower or the clash ranks, why does that affect me? There are set rewards for reaching thresholds but there's no incentivized PVP that unfairly pits overpowed accounts against accounts in lower power tiers. If you claim there is, you are lying.

Most of the other complaints are just nitpicks about little quirks like the game having a tutorial or a thing you have to click on before you can skip the week (even though you don't want to skip if you forgot to put units in rest or do your quest for the week). You can long press to look at skills on cooldown. Manually choosing a path would be nice, but it would give the player an advantage over the AI. Facing a direction at the end of a turn would have minimal impact, since the AI will just walk around to your back if they can, some units auto turn as a reaction skill, and alert abilities require a manually set direction to face.

There's just a correct way to have criticisms and coming from just a misguided anti-capitalist mindset is immature and ignorant. Did you know that there are games that force you to pay one $60 microtransaction before you're allowed to play the full version? What a scam!

[Sir Gura]

Originally posted by TigerNightmare:

Manually choosing a path would be nice, but it would give the player an advantage over the AI. Facing a direction at the end of a turn would have minimal impact, since the AI will just walk around to your back if they can, some units auto turn as a reaction skill, and alert abilities require a manually set direction to face.

Not being able to choose your facing direction is a huge downside exactly because there are abilities that require you to be attacked from certain directions to trigger, not being able to force the enemy to walk deeper into your team to try to backstab you is a problem, it strips some tactical thinking from the game. If you don't want to implement manual facing, don't implement abilities that require certain facing to work.

Also, why the player getting an advantage over the AI from being able to use better tactics in a tactics game should be a problem?

Originally posted by TigerNightmare:

There's just a correct way to have criticisms and coming from just a misguided anti-capitalist mindset is immature and ignorant. Did you know that there are games that force you to pay one $60 microtransaction before you're allowed to play the full version? What a scam!

There's nothing anti-capitalist about pointing out what gacha is, one way to extract the most amount of money out of people through systems designed with that intent in mind.

Paying 60$ for a whole game somehow being used as argument in favor of gacha is one of the funniest things I've read to date.

[Plantszaza]

Originally posted by Sir Gura:

Originally posted by TigerNightmare:

Manually choosing a path would be nice, but it would give the player an advantage over the AI. Facing a direction at the end of a turn would have minimal impact, since the AI will just walk around to your back if they can, some units auto turn as a reaction skill, and alert abilities require a manually set direction to face.

Not being able to choose your facing direction is a huge downside exactly because there are abilities that require you to be attacked from certain directions to trigger, not being able to force the enemy to walk deeper into your team to try to backstab you is a problem, it strips some tactical thinking from the game. If you don't want to implement manual facing, don't implement abilities that require certain facing to work.

Also, why the player getting an advantage over the AI from being able to use better tactics in a tactics game should be a problem?

Now I'm curious.
How much strategy impact this would make if you're allowed to face any direction you want with the standby command, while the rest of the commands stay the same?

Is all you people will do after that change is make everyone hug the wall with their back?
I also commented on another thread about some seekers having the skill that allows them to teleport behind the enemy's back. (They are also the ones who benefit the most from back-attacking.) It will teleport to the side of the enemy instead if their back isn't accessible.
I can see this skill become significantly weaker if everyone hugs the wall all the time.

Also about the auto-pathing.
Sure you cannot choose which tile you will walk, only the destination.
But the AI will try to avoid any ground hazard if possible.
So if you see they're walking through fire, that's because there is no other option.

[Soli]

Originally posted by TigerNightmare:

Originally posted by Soli:

I have no idea why this review is getting so much backlash, it's on point for pretty much everything. People are getting hung up on the gacha part, but like even if you take that out, everything else in this review is super valid gameplay criticisms. We shouldn't allow developers to make modern games lacking basic gameplay mechanics and QoL features that have existed for literal decades, without calling them out on it.

They can do better, they should do better, and we must expect better

It's because it's extremely hyperbolic about microtransactions and gacha rates in spite of the former being completely ignorable and the latter being considerably more generous compared to other games in the genre. It insists you have to compete against rich people, but that doesn't even happen. If people want to buy their way up the tower or the clash ranks, why does that affect me? There are set rewards for reaching thresholds but there's no incentivized PVP that unfairly pits overpowed accounts against accounts in lower power tiers. If you claim there is, you are lying.

Most of the other complaints are just nitpicks about little quirks like the game having a tutorial or a thing you have to click on before you can skip the week (even though you don't want to skip if you forgot to put units in rest or do your quest for the week). You can long press to look at skills on cooldown. Manually choosing a path would be nice, but it would give the player an advantage over the AI. Facing a direction at the end of a turn would have minimal impact, since the AI will just walk around to your back if they can, some units auto turn as a reaction skill, and alert abilities require a manually set direction to face.

There's just a correct way to have criticisms and coming from just a misguided anti-capitalist mindset is immature and ignorant. Did you know that there are games that force you to pay one $60 microtransaction before you're allowed to play the full version? What a scam!

Put everything about the gacha rant to the side, and look at his gameplay points. There's more than just turning; he's expressing a frustration that many of us share, with the dumbing-down of strategy games. Strategy games are supposed to make you think, and new series should be challenging us in new ways. Instead, the devs took the route of making the game simpler and more casual. Sure, he was prickish in expressing his point, but this industry trend has many of us writhing in frustration

He brought up not being able to adjust facing, which has been a staple in pretty much every tactics game. Like why would you have skills interact with facing differences but then not give an option to choose which way you look, on a standby?

He brought up the gross simplification of the speed/turns. This game took the easy route of everybody getting 1 turn per round, which takes out so many layers of strategy. Takes out the biggest reason to have a fast character. Takes out balancing opportunities for magic and abilities, especially with charge-up magic

He brought up the tutorial, which was an obnoxious and awful barrier to my entry to the game. Took 45min of gameplay to reach spiral of destinies mode, only to then have to do ANOTHER tutorial level. I've been playing these games for over 20 years, I don't need my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hand held at any point, and it took a lot of willpower to finish it. Have a tutorial, sure, but give an option to skip it for us veteran gamers. Especially when your game doesn't add a single new element to the combat gameplay loop, and just reuses existing ones from other games. This is another disgusting trend in many new games

He brought up not being able to choose your path, which is an absurd thing to leave out. Like that's such a basic feature that we should expect devs to include it, and call them out when they don't


He didn't effectively communicate his argument, and was a bit obnoxious with how he presented it, but there's a lot of meat and truth to what he said. All of which, you're conveniently ignoring, and just focusing on the gacha part.

This is a great foundation for a game, and with the right dev mindset, it could become something truly special. But that'll never happen if the devs don't know we want it.

[internetgrout]

Well, it's more likely that it will never happen because it was designed as a gacha mobile phone game. The unique thing here is that spiral is a fairly entertaining game inside a totally standard gacha. These games are designed to extract quite a lot of money from the whales over however many years they can turn a profit, and then they turn them off. So while it's fun for us to talk about the gameplay or whatever, that's not what the game was designed for and typically Chinese developers won't spend much time on steam forums feedback since the steam community isn't available there without a VPN.

[puppychow]

I've played plenty of gatcha games that eventually shut down because the revenues weren't enough to keep the servers up and running. So every 2fp game must have a mechanism to bring in revenue. That's the tradeoff versus asking people to pay X amount of money up front and hope it sells enough to pay for X number of years of server fees. When the gatcha revs don't work out, the devs will either go belly up or sell to another publisher, which will then make changes to further monetize the product.

So while gatchas are "bad" for consumers, it's what keeps the games in service.

[TigerNightmare]

Originally posted by Sir Gura:

Not being able to choose your facing direction is a huge downside ... it strips some tactical thinking from the game. If you don't want to implement manual facing, don't implement abilities that require certain facing to work.

Also, why the player getting an advantage over the AI from being able to use better tactics in a tactics game should be a problem?

A 'huge downside' is a bit of a stretch. The game functions fine as is, if not ideal. Strategy is still central to the gameplay if you're not just brute forcing The Fool's ourney by overleveling. Like Plantszaza said, people think putting their backs to a wall should be a thing to help avoid bonus damage, as if staying out of attack range wasn't more important. My guys die getting hit with front-facing attacks all the time. And a player getting another advantage on top of having powerful units with powerful abilities would make the game easier than it should be.

There's nothing anti-capitalist about pointing out what gacha is, one way to extract the most amount of money out of people through systems designed with that intent in mind.

Paying 60$ for a whole game somehow being used as argument in favor of gacha is one of the funniest things I've read to date.

You seem to have missed what the original poster said, and also lack awareness for what you yourself are saying, which is that a game designed to sell purchases to customers is inherently bad. Every single argument is that they're trying to make money, with some of the more ridiculous ones invoking hypothetical, pitiful people who have serious gambling issues. There's nothing wrong with criticizing capitalism, especially when there are actual abuses by bad or harmful business practices, but the idea that them trying to make money is offensive and in itself detracting from the game is beyond silly.

Originally posted by Plantszaza:

Also about the auto-pathing.
Sure you cannot choose which tile you will walk, only the destination.
But the AI will try to avoid any ground hazard if possible.
So if you see they're walking through fire, that's because there is no other option.

I have never seen the AI avoid a hazard. They will kill themselves walking through multiple scorch tiles, wander into an alert field while in dying status, it is significantly stupid when it comes to the environment.

Originally posted by Soli:

He didn't effectively communicate his argument, and was a bit obnoxious with how he presented it, but there's a lot of meat and truth to what he said. All of which, you're conveniently ignoring, and just focusing on the gacha part.

The point of my post wasn't to address every single "point" and defend the game, I was answering a question of why people were dunking on the post. Bad writing, whining, inaccuracies, nitpicking, exaggerating, ignorance. For you, I'll talk about the specific things you brought up that you think are worth talking about.

Facing: Already talked about this, said more. Next.

Speed/turns: Under the purview of nitpicking. The game functions a certain way, which isn't inherently bad, it's just how it works. And I use/abuse Urgent Order all the time, allowing me to have characters act twice per round, and any charge moves can be activated during the same round.

Tutorial: Also nitpicking and also addressed already. Just because the tutorial isn't for you, it doesn't mean how they did it was bad, and even if you could skip it, why would you want to? You get rewards for doing it. It also familiarizes the player with the interface, several functions, abilities, and mechanics. Not all tactics games play the same, and no matter what expertise people pretend to have, learning how this specific game works is a good thing.

Pathing: Nitpicking and addressed. Why are you including this in points I didn't address?

None of these are dealbreakers or as remotely impactful that changing them should be a priority over something like UI uncluttering, translation issues, confusing and unclear descriptions, bugs, probably other things I'm not thinking of that actually matter. If they add facing and path routing, that'd be great, but I don't care whether they do or not.

[Plantszaza]

Originally posted by TigerNightmare:

Originally posted by Plantszaza:

Also about the auto-pathing.
Sure you cannot choose which tile you will walk, only the destination.
But the AI will try to avoid any ground hazard if possible.
So if you see they're walking through fire, that's because there is no other option.

I have never seen the AI avoid a hazard. They will kill themselves walking through multiple scorch tiles, wander into an alert field while in dying status, it is significantly stupid when it comes to the environment.

I was referring to this specifically:
https://imgur.com/a/41zcdTT
I agree that the AI is not the smartest and has suicidal tendencies, there is no argument there.

[TigerNightmare]

Originally posted by Plantszaza:

I was referring to this specifically:
https://imgur.com/a/41zcdTT
I agree that the AI is not the smartest and has suicidal tendencies, there is no argument there.

Ah, I see what's happening there. Maybe the route has some basic hazard avoidance, but I'm not sure it does. It uses Col's entire movement of 5 in order to avoid the scorch tile to reach the spot where she can't attack the calamity, and the path to the tile where she can attack uses her entire movement because stepping on a scorch tile uses 2 movement. So she can't get there unless she steps on the scorch.

[internetgrout]

It's really kind of a shame that spiral is locked inside another crappy gacha. Sometimes these games run for nearly a decade, othertimes they shut down after a year or two (blue protocol just announced their shutdown after a little more than a year).

[Nah]

the dumbest thing is that to play at 2x speed you need to hold a button down no way to make it just stay at 2x unless you auto in which case your characters commit suicide so i just have to drop my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ phone on the spacebar in order to play this game without wanting to kill myself and even then im nearing my limit with all the stupid puzzle stages they keep on doing