For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out Disney Pixel RPG, from GungHo Online Entertainment, on my iPhone 14 Pro.
There was a lot of excitement surrounding this game when it was announced so i took a step back from it and didn't learn what it was. so i go into this not knowing much more than what the screenshots in the app store show.
Unfortunately, Disney Pixel RPG starts with a bad first impression as i had to download extra data. it wasn't as much as some other games, but it was more than i would want to download over a mobile network. it did warn that the game was going to do this download, but it didn't warn about this eating into mobile data, some games have started to provide that warning and recommend that such a download be done over wi-fi.
Next is a basic avatar creator and then we're thrown into gameplay. it's here that the game tells us what it's story is and i think it does this fairly well. once we're told about it we're put into a combat scenario and shown how to fight in Disney Pixel RPG. the controls can be set to auto or each character can be given instructions. a cool feature is that we're shown is that you don't need to go into a menu to set a command, you can flick the screen in a certain direction to command a character. But it also shows how basic some parts of the game are. there's no "battle music" or "victory theme", it all just feels generic music when you're in a world.
After this the tutorial mostly stops. it's weird that Disney Pixel RPG's tutorial had been great up to this point but then just drops us in the home world. other than some basic party stuff, there's a lot of the menus not talked about. an example is how i was completing missions throughout this video but had no idea where that section was. things were happening in combat that weren't being explained, mainly status conditions. things like this were making the game feel old, like it should've come out a few years ago.
The Gacha mechanic is another example of this. games still have it, but some of the better games find a way to incorporate it into the game world. In Disney Pixel RPG, it feels like a separate thing from the game's story, just like how games used to have such a feature. It's also not as flashy as most modern mobiles games.
a weird thing about Disney Pixel RPG is how it uses abbreviations. none of them are detailed. some can be worked out or at the very least guessed, like i did with LBrk Eff guessing it was Level Break Effect. but next to it is a "i" button that doesn't show what the abbreviation meant. There were some others i had no idea what was being abbreviated.
In it's current state, Disney Pixel RPG is playable and fine. but it's not hard to see issues. i found the High Graphic mode seemingly broken, what looked like place holder text behind final text, and sounds far to loud and annoying. i highly recommend tuning the sounds as Disney Pixel RPG has some basic sounds that can be piercing and annoying. there are aspects of it's design that are also frustrating, like it never shows in numbers how much health we have left. Or that our team has a power level but the enemy doesn't so we don't know if we're about to waste energy fighting an enemy we can't win.
Version 1.0.3 Played.