Mobile Friday - Fake Future - Great Pixel Art But Story And Gameplay Feel Separate And Disconnected

For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out Fake Future on my iPhone 14 Pro. This game from Sentai Inc is also out on Android.

From the Store page, i couldn't work out what this game was. But i could see that it had some great pixel art and that was enough for me to give it a go. But it will download extra data when it starts with no warning. be careful, do not play this game for the first time on mobile networks. start it on wifi! thankfully it's not the GB's the last few games have needed. but 67.86 MB is still a chunk of data.

The next weird thing is the song that plays. it seems to have no connection to the game. the lyrics don't seem to match the gameplay and it's weirdly upbeat and long for a screen that's not around for long. The music in the game is generally all over the place. none of it is bad, but it feels out of place more often than not.

Next is a section where the translation wasn't finished. something that also happens a few times in the video. i think the lack of a translation here, especially, was one reason why i never quite grasped the story. here and there issues weren't really a problem, but right here in the beginning when the game is trying to establish the story was. the game moves onto it's goals and this was another example where the game never explained the "why." I'll do what it asks, but the "why" typically is the story element. Why was i creating a character, why do i have to do these things. After an hour i'm not sure i have a decent answer for that.

Then we're on the main game screen. we have a character called Victor and not the character we created. it's confusing as we don't end up using our character for a little while, instead we have Victor. Again, there's no why, no story element. we just go and do stuff.

This lack of why, the disconnection between the music, story, gacha, game mechanics, and game story really detract from what good there is with the game. I did like the pixel art, i liked the story from the past, i liked the intrigued set up by what happens to Victor, i liked the world i saw. but it didn't seem to have any relevance to anything i did in the game.

I only played an hour and it could be this is actually part of the game. right at the beginning, "Discover the truth of this world" is teased. it's possible the whole disjointedness of this game is part of it and something we uncover as we play. but after the first hour i spent with it, i'm not willing to put in the extra time needed to find out. Fake Future isn't a mobile game i would recommend. 

(Version 1.9 Played)