Fantasica

Read about this social game while going through some older posts at Andriasang.com today.  It’s described as a simulation roleplaying game but in reality, it’s a peculiar mixture of tower defense and super simple one-touch automated RPG.

The game starts off with a brief tutorial that allows you to select a single random unit which comes in the form of a card.  I think you can then draw a few more units. (I can’t remember clearly. ^^;;)  And finally, it tells you to select a unit to be a leader character.  Er, oh yeah, there are different types of characters like fighters, archers, and magic users.  Not all units are human either since I’ve drawn monsters too. ^^

The tutorial then continues with the tower defense gameplay mode by teaching you the basics of selecting a unit and placing them in a highlighted area.  Each unit has a cost and every stage gives you a fixed amount of unit points to start off with.  The points regenerate as you play the stage.  Also, you can only place a certain number of units on the gameplay field.  If you have any leftover space (and some available points, I think), you can select characters from other players to assist you in your battle.

The other gameplay mode has stages where your leader character runs northward along a very long dirt path.  It seems the point of it is to collect certain unit cards.  You can also level up your leader this way though.  Anyway, along the path, he or she will encounter monsters or chests where you can get new unit cards.  It seems that random characters from other players will pop up too? I’m not sure about this though.

Of course, there are many other things to do in the game such as trading cards with other players, fusing cards to strengthen characters, buying and selling cards + items, sending friend requests, and more.

One big gimmick about Fantasica is that both gameplay modes as well as obtaining new cards from the Gacha menu require some sort of points which limit how much you can do during a single gaming session.  I believe the gameplay ones replenish after a while but getting new cards require either points obtained in the TD or RPG modes or by purchasing them with real money.  There seems to be like 3 sets of points too. X___x  In a way, it’s reminiscent of the Stamina & Friendship Points systems from Puzzle & Dragons.

I should note that this game requires one to register with the Japanese Mobage social community.  The registration isn’t difficult but they require personal information like your gender, birth date and blood type (I wonder if all Japanese social networks ask for this. 9__9).  Oh, and even if you don’t live in Japan, you’ll be forced to select a prefecture before you can finalize the registration process.  If you’re hyper sensitive about allowing the public to know about these things, you’d best not even bother with the game.  Or, you can quickly load up your Mobage home page after you finish registering so you can hide the info through the privacy settings.

Fantasica is available globally (I believe) but the US link is: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id506604550?mt=8 The game is also available on Android but since I couldn’t install it on my tablet, I have no idea if it’s available for phones outside of Japan: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.mbga.g12007722.mktapp

The official site can be seen here.  It’s Japanese only.

Oh, despite the fact that the product page on iTunes says the in-game languages are English and Japanese, 99% of the game is in Japanese. 😛  The English bits only come in the form of unit names and stuff.