Player’s have been diving in to the latest RPG from Hotta Studio and Level Infinite. At least, those that got invited to the Tower of Fantasy closed beta. After putting some hours into the game myself, I believe I have a fair idea of what this game is going to offer and it isn’t quite what I was expecting. From the trailers, this seemed like an action-heavy game with some story bits to give reasoning to the action, but from what I can tell it is the opposite. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it isn’t what I was hoping for.

Gameplay

You’ll spend a good amount of time running around a semi-open world where you have to do a variety of different quests. Some of it just feels like follow-the-leader while some feel important to accomplish. Still, these storyline quests can feel like you are just running around. At least the story is good, so it is worth watching the cutscenes in between quest points.

When doing these quests, you will have a guide path line. When it first appears, you can choose to have it every time or only sometimes. I went with the sometimes option and honestly, I never got lost. If you feel like you need the guide at all times, go ahead, but they do a pretty good job getting you where you need to go even without telling you where to take every step.

Along with cutscenes and talking with light voice line decision making, you will have other things to do while running around. Around the planes you can find various fruits and vegetables that can be used to cook up items. You can also gather fish and other meats to include in your cooking. From there, you find a cooking pot and start mixing up items to find new recipes. The items you make can benefit you with aspects such as healing.

Other than the calmer aspects, you will actually get to do some fighting! Majority of it will be done through melee combat using your sword, but you will get other weapons to use, such as a spear, dual blades, a bow, and more. You will be able to keep three weapons of choice on-hand to swap between and utilize in the middle of battle. These weapons can also be upgraded as you collect material and experience, so make sure you keep your main weapon of choice at its top level.

From the menu they give, it is apparent that they will have quite a bit of unique details for players to utilize while playing the game. Each of these aspects were briefly touched on in the closed beta, but not enough that I feel confident explaining what they do. But know that you can expect some branching out from the usual expectations of an RPG action game.

Expectations

Hopefully, later in the game it gets more action-heavy. Right now, there is just too much story for me and on top of that, some of the characters don’t have a voice actor ready yet. I don’t think having only some of the characters voiced was a hindrance to enjoying the lore a bit more, but I can be certain that I would have rather enjoyed more combat in the beta overall. Even the ruins themselves were really short and that is where the action is at, mostly.

There are a lot of different aspects in the menus that the player will eventually be able to utilize. However, as I mentioned before, I didn’t feel comfortable explaining them because I still feel like I don’t understand the purpose to some things. It would be good for a more obvious expression of these details and in-game aspects to be explained. There was some on-hand experience while being shown them, but for a lot of it, it just felt the same as playing without it, so I didn’t understand the point of it.

Verdict

Tower of Fantasy has a good story and the action is fun, but they put too much game time on cutscenes and lore when the fun is in the fighting. We can hope that this is just a situation for the game being set up in the beginning before going into an action-heavy world, but it didn’t really seem like that. The closed beta has been a fun experience, but I’m more concerned about the final product than I was just watching a trailer.