It’s important to take a game on its own merits as much as possible, but sometimes one comes out that so closely mimics an existing concept — and does such a middling job of that mimicry — that the comparison is inseparable. Practically everything about Final Fantasy Explorers is a low-rent version of the Monster Hunter series (not to mention some of its more accomplished homages, like Toukiden or Soul Sacrifice). Perhaps it’s more accurate to say it takes all the least essential parts of a hunting game while leaving most of what can make them so interesting and demanding firmly behind.
Explorers hands you the familiar task of repeatedly combing its handful of hunting grounds for bountied monsters and new materials to craft and refine your equipment. As you finish out different hunting and material gathering requests, you gain access to new areas to explore and things to hunt — in this case, an island called Libertas and selections from the Final Fantasy bestiary.
It dutifully follows the form of these kinds of games, but with one crucial factor almost completely absent: a deep, rewarding combat system with a high skill ceiling. Explorers has a lot of systems to prod at but few that react in interesting ways. Even fewer feel key to pushing onward to bigger and better hunts. There are lots of classes to choose from, each with their own unique gear to be crafted, but the gear doesn’t feel that essential either. I felt like I could often cruise by without thinking too hard about what I was doing or wearing into a fight.
Classes also have skills to unlock and mess with too, and it feels like its going to add up to an intriguing character building experience early on. It just never quite gets there. There’s a standard array of elemental and protective magic for casters and flashy strikes for melee types, but they lack a lot of tactical or situational punch that would make them worth scrutinizing. Wailing away with any equipped skills is usually fine. The way you’re allowed to mix and match skills from different classes you’ve levelled is a great idea, but it feels wasted on the simple mechanics at work here.
Subsystems like Crystal Surges feel similarly nonessential. Surges activate after you land a few solid chains of skills. This pulls up a few possible mutations for a skill — adding lightning damage to it for example, or briefly increasing your gait after performing it — and you choose one of those to pull off. At the end of a mission, you gain the modified skills you used as base skills to equip. By using surges and continually re-slotting the resulting upgraded ability, you can slowly add several different damage types and modifiers to a single skill.
Like a lot of things in Explorers, it sounds interesting but fails to feel that way in practice. Dealing specific types of damage isn’t all that necessary. Even the simpler joys — the snappy feel of moving and attacking say, or the way you can use captured monsters to bolster your party on the field — fade in their thoroughly undemanding surroundings.
I found it hard to pull any kind of sum-total analysis from Final Fantasy Explorers. It doesn’t feel like a successful attempt at streamlining what is a very complex genre, and its own marks on the hunting game — like marking your targets on the map from the outset of a mission — fizzle in the blandness. Ultimately, it’s just not fun to play. Most of the time, regardless of how I specced myself out or what AI-controlled monsters I brought along with me, hunts devolved into a mindless dog pile. I would just run in, unload my spells in any old order, and dash away. This works especially well if you swap those dumb AI companions for some real teammates online.
Even the window dressing of Explorers falls a bit flat. A colourful palette fills in the flora and fauna well enough, and some of the boss creatures animate beautifully. But for a spin-off of a series long revered for its striking artwork and lively characters, a lot of the places you go and creatures you see look a little blocky and plain. The score fares much better and has plenty of beautiful pieces that breathe some much-needed extra life into the proceedings — it was my favourite part of the game.
Games that have followed in the hunter blueprint have found lots of success with all kinds of different tweaks to the formula. Soul Sacrifice mitigated some of the character-building in exchange for bloodier, frantic fights and a more involved story. Freedom Wars offered a best of both worlds approach with some unique aerial action and a fascinating future setting. That particular competition may not be available on 3DS, but the be-all of these games is: Monster Hunter, the game it tries and mostly fails to riff on. Not that Final Fantasy Explorers would suddenly be a great game without competition, but it doesn’t really help its case either.