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Tower Of Fantasy is an MMO gacha game that can’t match Genshin Impact’s polishIt’s a disjointed RPG mix that’s hard to pin down
It’s a disjointed RPG mix that’s hard to pin down
Tower Of Fantasyis a free-to-play MMO gacha game, the sort of game that implores you to spend in-game currency on lootboxes in the hopes you’ll build a particularly powerful collection of anime people.Genshin Impactwrapped this business model up in a surprisingly excellent open world RPG, that Graham calledone of the best games of 2020. Tower Of Fantasy pulls from a neighbouring gacha vending machine, except that its mixture of MMO, realtime combat, and lootboxing isn’t wrapped up in as consistent a package.
Tower Of Fantasy is a “shared open world RPG”, which sees you select a server from a series of regions and create a character. This is one of the game’s key differences to Genshin Impact, placing it more in the MMORPG space to Genshin’s comparatively solo RPG experience. Although I wouldn’t say the ToF server I’m on is teeming with players likeWorld Of Warcraft, but there seem to be a fair few catboys and girls populating global chat with either requests to party up or all sorts of nastiness that makes the world feel lived in, in both the nicest and absolute worst sense.
Shared Open-World Trailer | Tower of FantasyWatch on YouTube
Shared Open-World Trailer | Tower of Fantasy
Character creation is remarkably robust, with plentiful sliders and options to help create your perfect anime persona. You can even choose from upvoted player creations if you’d like to rock someone else’s look (they are almost always horny). Although, outside of story cutscenes I see myself exclusively as the Simulacrum I’ve got equipped, like Shiro here.
At its core, though, the game doesn’t hold my attention like Genshin. Where you might forgive – or even learn to love – Genshin’s gacha side because its story, combat, and exploration help endear you to its greed, Tower Of Fantasy lacks that rock-solid core and, in turn, makes its gacha-ness harder to accept. It leans too heavily into MMOism for my liking, where missions and overall exploration seem a bit too simplistic.
Compensation is a bit of a theme here, isn’t it? MMOs like WoW make up for dated quests with systems that make the reward meaningful enough to motivate you through mundanity. You don’t mind collecting 15 mackerel eyes for the witch down the road, because the resulting pumpkin tokens will net you that hardened vegetable shield you’ve always wanted. And the way the combat and exploration are constructed matches its slower tempo, with hotbars and cooldowns, lengthy griffin rides and hours of marketplace trading. But Tower Of Fantasy is this unreliable mash of MMO questing with Genshin-esque combat, all soaked through with gacha stuff that makes it very difficult to pin down.
And it’s a world that’s rather lovely. It’s this sort of idyllic land of rolling hills and blue waters, dotted with quirky towns cobbled together from futuristic junk. Briefly, I entered some snowy fields during a story mission and I’ve seen hints of some crystalline mines on the interwebs too. I own this Rubik’s Cube hovercraft that lets me get around quickly. I have a jetpack that acts as a boost up to high spots or a glider of sorts. I have a jet-board that lets me skim across the seas. A little stamina bar tells me when I can’t clamber up a surface anymore. I’m a conveyor belt of waifus, able to hack and slash my way through hordes of enemies.
And yet, most quests sling this dynamism into the dirt in favour of jilted MMO fare. “Could you inspect those lamps?“asks a kid dressed like a cybernetic samurai. I press F next to some lamps and that’s that. Another time I break some folks out of a prison, and interspersed between fun, frenetic combat bits, I’m disguised as the enemy, jankily moving between markers and dodging cones of vision. It is lessMetal Gear Solidand moreMetal GearViscous. When I press F to free them I don’t know who’s more relieved it’s over.
