Today's Online Saturday game is Tower of Fantasy from Hotta Studio. This game is out on other platforms and has been for a little while now. The game is now out on PS4 and PS5. Today, i played this free to play game on PS4 and unfortunately, there were issues throughout the video.
After playing this game for an hour i feel like it's done very little to introduce me to the world or the characters. it's fine that i have amnesia, but the introduction before that was a lot of nothing. and when we meet other characters, the game tries to introduce them to us but everything feels soo shallow. almost as if i should already know a lot of the things they are saying even tho they already know i have amnesia. This means that there are also several conversations where the other characters say things that go against what's happened in the story so far. it leaves me wondering if i'm not the only one with amnesia or if it's just poor world building.
Then there are issues with the game itself. i was expecting my PS4 to be loud, and it is. i was expecting there to be loading times, and there are. but i wasn't prepared for the stuttering that happens a lot in this video. i can't say for sure whether it's the game itself or the connection to the server as in this video that connection is lost twice in an hour. It was easy for me to tell because my PS4 would go quiet before the game realizes what happened and ask to reconnect. what has to be the game is the pop-in. it's everywhere and i'm sure there are even textures just not loading at all. there was an instance early on where there were candles. some lit up as i got closer. some waited until i was on top of them, but some stayed strangely unlit.
The pop-in is frustrating and does take me out of the world, which is a shame because the world is bright, vibrant, and impressive. and yet, it also feels small. we were able to traverse the map much quicker than i thought and the biggest tower felt kinda small and not quite matching the description of what should be on top. Something else that became distracting was animations not finishing. i set the game to playout the conversations at it's own pace. i wasn't going to interfere with them. and yet, characters seemed to be missing animation frames, seemingly going from having an animated conversation to finished in an instant. That's not the only issue with the conversation system, as sometimes it forgets it's set to auto and just stops, waiting for me to press X to continue it on the controller.
There are a few other things you may see, and hear me complain about in this video, but it all boils down to a game that fails to tutorialise, fails to build a world, and fails to be stable. it's possible over the next few hours the story and world building will continue to improve. but it's hard to ignore the tech issues and poor tutorial to get there. so for now i won't be playing Tower of Fantasy and i don't recommend it on PS4. Yes, it's free, but there becomes a point when it's still a waste of your time.
(Version 1.10 Played)