For Mobile Friday this week is i tried Wizardry Variants Daphne from Studio 2Pro and Drecom on my iPhone 14 Pro.
This is the final Mobile Friday game of 2024 and this year ends with a good one. i'm not familiar with the Wizardry series, only really hearing about it earlier this year when Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord came to consoles. So going in, i didn't know what sort of RPG it was or what to expect, but the screenshots on the app store did help as i realized that it might be a first person camera style game were you navigate an area step by step.
It starts off with a tutorial that's simple but it gets the basic controls across and it gives us a little time of using the them before the twist happens and we start the game proper! Then, around 8 minutes into the game we're greeted with an extra data download scenario. i'm not a fan of these and Wizardry Variants Daphne has good and bad points about this. the bad point is that for those who download the game, start it to check for a download and find there isn't one, they're going to find out that there's extra download once they've left Wi-fi. most games with extra data do it before the game starts, having it around 8 minutes into gameplay is different and maybe not something mobile players will be used to. on the other hand, the way it's incorporated into the story is brilliantly done and not only that they have smartly covered up the extra download with a questionnaire that helps with creating your character. my character creation was done just moments before the download finished so i got to see some of the trailer that runs afterwards. it's a risky move having such a different extra data download section and i commend the devs for trying it. but i can't help but thing that letting players download it from the start, before the game starts, would also be an option.
Another one of these is seemingly the inability to change the game from right handedness to left hand. i played most of this video with just my right hand and it feels like the game's been cleverly designed around mobile play with a single hand. so not having an option to switch things up from right to left does seem a little weird. Another odd choice is how the text and speech are done. i was surprised by how much of the game is voiced, but when you start the text appears in the bubbles far slower than how it's spoken. it's so much slower i started to get frustrated by it and it really slowed down the gameplay. i think this needs to be clearer in the options or even something that we can choose before it starts, like the handedness i mentioned earlier.
Other than those mostly small things, the game is great. in a way for me, surprisingly so. for how good i thought this game was, i'm surprised that i've heard no one talking about it. i thought the music was great, from the background stuff to the fighting music, it was all nice to listen to. the controls are simple and accessible, to the point where the game's basic tutorial was actually all i needed. gameplay is also simple to understand and graphically it was great. there's some fantastic art, in game graphics, and i actually thought some of the character art was the best looking stuff in the game.
This video is longer than most Mobile Friday videos because the story grabbed me. it's a fantastic first hour with an very early twist to keep our attention and we were in two different areas. i wanted to see what happened next and something kept happening. there's our first story, our second story, what ever happened to our companion, what happened to the king, and the overarching story of what happens every 100 years.
One nice thing i didn't know was in the game was it's Gacha mechanic. like most good mobile games, they found a way to have one if Wizardry Variants Daphne that fits into the game's story. our character has an ability and we pick up bones early on. by the end of the video we find a place where we can use both and there we have new party members. in a way it's a little strange, but the video we get to watch as it happens is unlike any other gacha i've seen and yet it all fits into the game we've been playing perfectly.
I highly recommend Wizardry Variants Daphne. i think it's an approachable RPG for newcomers, it's well designed for mobile gamers, and for someone like myself who's never played a Wizardry game i never felt like i was missing something. you'll need to play to get the extra data download out of the way, but after that it makes a fantastic commuting game.
Version 1.2.0 Played.
