Final Fantasy Explorers Review

Brave New World:

Final Fantasy Explorers isn’t your father’s Final Fantasy. The RPG behemoth has been experimenting with different genres for a while now, and with Explorer’s developer Square Enix have tackled the monster hunting enterprise with confidence and originality.

Story:

Explorers is a classic pioneer tale of much wants more. Our people have taken a liking and developed a dependency for Crystals, sources of life and power, and we brave new worlds and kill new beasties to get our hands on the stuff.

We are the titular Explorers, a group of pilgrim-cum-hunters who have travelled to the newly discovered Crystal –rich land of Amostra. The story doesn’t allow for much development, so focused are we on our single task of requisitioning Crystals and pocketing some extra Gil in the process. A multiplayer game such as Explorers does well to get its story out of the way, and FFE does so admirably. Every scrap of dialogue seems to revolve around your monster-killing, Crystal nabbing duties, and it doesn’t need to be anything more than that.

Gameplay:

Final Fantasy Explorers tasks you with heading out into the wilderness surrounding your home town and taking down monsters of ever-increasing size. You do this by teaming up with friends (or, if you’re adventuring alone, monsters you can hire and train), casting impressive spells and slashing away as one of the twenty different job classes.

These classes, all familiar to Final Fantasy veterans, allow for huge diversity in play style. Monks are up close and personal, attacking very quickly and keeping their foes on lockdown, leaping Dragoons come in from above for surprise attacks and White Mages can stand on the sidelines and heal their allies. Forming a smartly organized party is key in trouncing some of the games tougher bosses, and it’s this strategy that lends Explorers its complexity, and a lot of the fun.

There’s a lot of depth to Explorers, much like the popular monster hunting series that obviously inspired it. The job system is deep and satisfying and the game rewards significant time sinks with cool rewards. What it does much better than its forebears is introduce and acclimatise you to its systems in smart ways. In other monster hunting titles I’ve often felt overwhelmed and quite honestly put off during their opening hours. Final Fantasy Explorers organically introduces its myriad systems and wrinkles as you progress in a way that never feels daunting. This is in part thanks to a streamlined and slightly less complicated game, but smart tooltips and great pacing is just as much to blame here.

Explorers doesn’t sacrifice much in an effort to smooth out a familiar formula, either. It’s still a feature rich game that has plenty of things to see and do for most fans, although the sheer depth and volume of content present in Explorer’s peers simply isn’t matched here. It’s a shorter game with less replayability than the competition, but I was very happy with the time spent in Amostra. Tasks and missions can get a little stale before the games end, however, and Explorers doesn’t do enough to keep the experience fresh throughout. Still, it wasn’t bad enough for me to stop playing before the title had run its course.