Virtual Journal #12: FFBE: War of the Visions
Tag: Virtual Journal »
Summary
Jotting down the years of memories from playing War of the Visions, just after the game’s end of service.
Content
A few months after the closure of the global server for Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, it was finally time for its spin-off, War of the Visions, to embrace the same fate.
Playing the game for around 5 years, it was one of the first gacha games that I’ve ever tried. They got me with its possible connections to one of my childhood games: Final Fantasy Tactics.
I still remember the excitement from when the game was announced, patiently waiting on the day of its release to download it, and having to settle with experiencing it the next day because I kept encountering installation issues, haha.
Mont and Sterne, the royal twin siblings of Leonis, went off their own paths to overcome fate’s challenges, encountering new friends and foes alike in kingdoms ridden of conflict, and eventually finding themselves in front of an ever bigger calamity to face.
I enjoyed watching every scene from WotV unfold through its turn-based combat system (Possibly heavily borrowed from The Alchemist Code, which I haven’t really played). It had height and positional advantages, elemental weaknesses, job-based skills, and even a summoning mechanic; Things that gave joy as I strategized through the game’s many stages.
The narrative was delivered through small 3D dioramas in a unique visual style, having a sketched artwork kind of feeling to it. Topping it off, the scenarios are all wrapped in orchestral music that just makes you want to march outside with pride and achieve great things.
It was interesting enough to scratch the itch that I’ve had since completing FFT years ago. Every week, I looked forward to new characters or story chapters, even making a guild called “Mom of Light”—Inspired by FFXIV: Dad of Light—to participate in casual raids or battles with my siblings and other guild members.
There were even times where I would just leave my phone running for hours, trying to grind for resources to make time-limited items, or to simply get a slightly higher personal ranking on a leaderboard.
I ended up leaving the game after a while as I caught up with the current story at the time. Primarily wanting to play due to the narrative, the pace that it was released in felt a bit slow to me, and I eventually lost interest.
Events and resource-gathering started to feel repetitive and unneeded once you’ve played for a while, and since I was only playing casually, min-maxing the systems for competitive play wasn’t really on my mind.
Looking at WotV’s job system, it also didn’t really have the one thing that I missed a lot from FFT. It was pretty much non-existent in this game, with each character having a finite set of jobs with limited customization.
Wandering around the gacha game space, I dipped my toes into other games in the genre, like Blue Archive—featuring its sleek UX, stellar soundtrack, and cute characters—or Arknights—one with a more serious aesthetic, interesting tactical tower defense system, and a promising story.
Somehow, despite spending weeks or months in some of them and honestly enjoying what was offered, I found myself still going back to WotV. I suppose its overall tone and casual game loop was just more in line with what I’m looking for.
I was able to appreciate more of its systems, looking at them with a different mindset after learning more about how they’re done in other games. I came to love battles that automatically play out like in the weekly 3-party arena, even joining cooperative stages with random people from time to time, and without realizing it, WotV became my daily afternoon break from working on game projects.
Community wikis like WOTV-CALC contributed a lot to a better experience. They allowed easier party improvements without needing to do a bunch of calculations and testing for the best character and item combinations. There were also creative people like Auronnj and ReadyPlayerWill that made the game more entertaining with their character and stage guides, as well as videos which made the weekly news easier to digest.
As time went by, complex updates for the game kept piling on: Stats for certain attack types to penetrate defenses, stats to counter said penetration stats, level cap changes, sub-vision cards, truststones, reincarnation, range-based stat modifiers, and many more.
Thankfully, I played the game long enough to have good characters and not worry about it for the most part. I’d just go through my favorite characters and party presets at least once whenever a new update comes, tweak them a little, then once I think it’s good enough, forever forget about it, haha.
Rather than the stat management that kept changing until it got confusing and I can no longer recognize it—or even the main story, my primary reason for playing, which I ultimately started to skip due to my very relaxed play style—it’s more of the side stories and collaboration events that kept me going for so long.
I liked being able to create more memories with certain characters, especially those that didn’t have a lot of screen time in their respective games, without needing to spend too much time. Some collaboration events even had mini stories where the characters interacted with the original WotV cast. It’s a pretty fun read.
The satisfying clutch wins through Reflex passives, the inevitable Agrias mirror battles, or just showing off favorite characters through the companion system; These simple moments will forever remain with me as I say goodbye to War of the Visions. I might have several issues with the game, but it succeeded in presenting a fantasy setting that took my interest and made me stay.
I wish I could’ve watched the WotV stage play, since I feel like it would make me appreciate the world more… Hopefully I’ll get to see the story in some form again, maybe in a different game. For now, I’ll just go and rewatch the whole story somewhere, and look at how the JP server is doing from afar.
(Maybe there'll be a new Sosha unit eventually, haha.)