This Monster Hunter-like game starts out strong, but doesn’t go the distance.
Final Fantasy Explorers is a fun and adorable little action RPG you can play with your friends. It offers a generous portion of customization, and there are plenty of quests and sidequests to do. Yet there’s nothing remotely special about Final Fantasy Explorers – it’s all very safe and well-trodden territory. That’s okay. Sometimes, it’s enough to just have a good time wandering around fighting monsters.
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There’s a story buried in here somewhere: something something crystals, something something battle powerful guardians called Eidolons, something something explore an island and fight cute monsters. I didn’t mind the lack of meaningful plot, actually – after the confusing tangle of story threads that have plagued the last few Final Fantasy games, it was refreshing to turn off my brain so I could bop fiends on the head.
For the most part, combat is good stuff. To start with there’s Final Fantasy’s signature job system, which adds welcome variety to Explorers’ real-time battles by letting you equip a mishmash of weapons and abilities tied to your chosen profession while in town. Getting the literal drop on enemies using the Dragoon’s Jump ability or roasting fools with a Black Mage’s fire spell put a smile on my face. There are some rewarding mechanics on top of the hack-and-slash action, such as accumulating points in combat that can be used to trigger a Crystal Surge, a phenomenon that temporarily boosts stats like spell power or movement speed. Being able to briefly transform into well-known Final Fantasy heroes and use their signature moves on the battlefield was a nice bit of fan service, too. I could even borrow an Eidolon’s power, when I was lucky enough to encase its power in equippable magicite.
I stacked a fire spell with cool attributes and renamed it Flaming Cheetos.
Another point in Explorers’ favor is the customization. Spells and skills can be tweaked and tailored however you want using special mutations learned in battle, which can make them much more effective. I stacked a fire spell with cool attributes like Dark and Stop and renamed it Flaming Cheetos, and I’m pleased to report that Flaming Cheetos was wonderfully effective at blinding and immobilizing enemies while they burned to death. The surviving fiends found their counter-attacks ineffective because I had gleefully used harvested items and monster souls from the battlefield to upgrade the stats on my armor – which, by the way, you can swap in and out to create some interesting styles, and even dress your avatar up as famous Final Fantasy characters like Aerith and Lightning (these specialized outfits come with impressive stats). Customization applies to the landscape as well, as you can alter battlefield conditions using a feature called Cataclysm, which can neutralize bad weather or or bring it about. Gaining the power to summon extra powerful monsters like hard-hitting Tonberry Kings also provides a welcome bit of customization, since they won’t appear until you feel like challenging them.
Changing the terrain and job swapping was amusing for a while, but six or seven hours in, I began to feel a serious sense of deja vu because of a severe lack of variety in settings and objectives. Both main quests and sidequests required me to visit the same handful of areas and battle the same Eidolons over and over again, while listening to the same battle tunes on loop. (Explorers’ soundtrack is pleasant, but nothing memorable or fancy.) Getting to these locations is a pain too, since the town’s airships stops are poorly placed and require long runs to reach your actual objective. That’s a peculiar oversight since it forces people playing in short bursts on their handheld device to waste that precious time with unnecessary travel. Plus, even with randomly generated dungeons, the maps are pretty linear, and although there’s some variety in the background – snowy mountains, pretty meadows, rainy marshes – there are only three or four diverging paths; it’s impossible to get lost.
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In fact, despite the title, there’s not a whole lot of exploring to be done here. I found that disappointing. It didn’t help that the camera doesn’t tack automatically when you change directions, leaving me to juggle walking, fighting, and steering the lens at the same time.
It wasn’t until I had cleared the story that I felt contested on the battlefield.
As a final anticlimax, once I finally reached my destination, I rarely found much of a challenge waiting for me. I’m not bragging when I say that I cut through most enemies like butter, and even the all-powerful Eidolons went down pretty quickly after blasting them with a few hard-hitting spells. I never really had to worry about running out of abilities points either, since the action point gauge automatically refills them over time. And if I did die in battle, I could spend a chunk of time allotted for quest completion to revive myself. Even switching on the optional mission handicaps, like toughening up enemies or slowing my movements, didn’t initially do much to ratchet up the difficulty. It wasn’t until I had cleared the story (which took me a little over 20 hours) and opened up extra quests with harder foes that I felt contested on the battlefield. That’s too far to go without breaking a sweat.
The best way to play Explorers is in co-op with up to three friends, which is a great way to make nearly any game more fun. Explorers makes finding and joining a game a snap too, thanks to an intuitive menu system.
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I was happy to learn that while in co-op I didn’t have to fight my friends (or strangers if I was playing with random people online) for resources. Once enemies are defeated, everyone gets their own loot. Monsters are noticeably harder and rewards greater the more people you play with, which makes for a nice incentive to extend an invite to someone who’s also looking for rare Jenova Cells to unlock Sephiroth’s outfit.
Human camaraderie is swell and all, but I had nearly as much fun rolling out with my monster buddies I’d created in the hub town’s Monster Lab. And let me tell you: having notoriously nasty enemies like Malboro and Cactaur on your team is pretty sweet. If properly leveled up their abilities can flatten enemies in no times, which reminded me how ridiculously easy this game can be, but sure looked cool. Plus, if I was ever short a player or two in co-op, as team leader I could conveniently fill the empty slots with monsters from my inventory.
For a few hours at least, Final Fantasy Explorers is a charming little adventure that’s fun to play alone with your monster buddies or with real-life friends. But repetitive quests, the lack of a serious challenge until late in the story and a poor travel system eventually broke the charm spell that Explorers had cast upon me.
