Guardian Tales (Switch Port)

Guardian Tales is an incredibly fun game, but with flaws. Widely accepted as a mobile game with more effort than usual as well as free, but with microtransactions it can be easily written off as Pay to Win, but alternatively you can reset your account any time so long as you aren’t too far things should be fine. With just learning the basics and what you need to know then starting a new game should help.

Gameplay

It is an RPG so leveling up and exp are the main mechanic. Each companion has a type and different teams can have advantages in different areas and while you can get more companions these can cost gems or tickets. After Awakening specific skills you can evolve your heroes and use Chain Skills to do combination attacks. The game has a consistent difficulty curve until you hit world 7. Even if you do end up using gems to continue. At that point you have Nightmare mode for new resources rather than difficulty. What I also like about the nightmare levels is that these levels take place after the events of the quests and the main story. The layout is the same, but both the monsters and main goal of the level changed. For example the tutorial level Kanterbury Forest has the goal of locating the princess, meeting the first members of your party, the Guardian Wolf, Innkeeper Loraine, Red hood Elvira and Vampire Karina, and finally unlocking the town simulator. The nightmare level has the goal of figuring out the monsters hiding in the forest, but while you do so several characters from the quests in the normal mode mention things that happened in that world. One character states the disappearance of a brutal Guardian Wolf that lives in the forest, another is looking for the Red Hood, but fails and instead mistakes someone else for her. It’s small, but I like the change of instead of normal levels just harder we actually see people reacting to the changes that happened during the normal playthrough. Much like other RPGs there are different classes for different characters. Tanks do damage and can take a lot of hits the tradeoff is there is not a lot of tanks available to the player unless you use summons, Warrior does a large amount of physical damage guickly, Ranged are good at bows/ riffles and magic with limited ammo but great distance and elemental damage, and Support heals the player.

I liked this game unfortunately at world 7 the game quickly devolves into how many gems do you have and are you willing to spend any throwing away the good gameplay, fleshing out characters, and puzzles for money. For boss rushes and repitious dungeons fortunately World 8 feels better with a bigger focus on puzzles I enjoyed what I played to that point so it really is your choice. The game is free so it doesn’t hurt to at least try.

Score: 7/10