Final Fantasy Record Keeper has swallowed my soul, AMA

[Aria Genisi]

it's not currently in maintenance or anything but i'm in kind of a holding pattern of playing the game atm so feel free to ask away

[Perrydotto]

What do you like the most about this game versus other similiar games?

[Aria Genisi]

What do you like the most about this game versus other similiar games?

well, the big deciding factor compared to other gatchas is that it feels a lot more kind in general. There's a lot of very useful relics out there, and it's easy to just play with what you got, provided that you can make a complete team with it. Like, there's all sorts of crazy and wild power creep out that there that can make early content easier and give you a winning edge on the latest regular content, but it's also just always surprising on how far you can go without the Absolute Latest And Best.
On top of that, there's systems to help get you started and even just get better access to useful relics for your characters. Like, newbies will get to pull and pick older (but still useful) soul breaks that will help them get started, any dupes you get (as well as just clearing events) will give you Anima Lenses which can be cashed in to get particular slightly older relics to get a much needed boost to your teams for clearing certain content or even just to complete your collection. Hell, every 15 days of logging in nets you a ticket that's a free bonus pull on these regular banners that could net you something you want.

It's really fun, and it does require both preparation and strategy, but it gives you a lot of means to do better in the game, and unless you're going into the absolute hardest, most recent content, you can often find ways to get by with what you got and find ways to use your not-optimal nonsense parties, even if it's kinda making it harder on yourself.

[Aria Genisi]

The only thing that kinda gives me pause atm is that the future of high end regular content is a little iffy

There was a huge focus on making and running Elemental Teams for the longest time, thanks to Magicite Dungeons, which was all about building mono-element teams to fight hard bosses to get magicite, from which you build a deck of passive buffs out of, with an active skill that you can invoke twice per battle (with the magicite sticking around for a while afterwards to perform abilities and attacks). After three levels of Magicite Dungeons, it peaked with Dark Odin, which is effectively the Final Boss of the magicite content.

Then they released 6* magicite fights, screwing things up badly.

See, a big thing about previous fights is that with enough power and enough persistence, you can get away with clearing hard content with teams that aren't up to speed with whatever the current power creep is. Yeah, it might be very hard, but with enough of the right pieces, the right passive buffs from magicite, and knowing what you need to do and when, you can still do more with less. There's a lot of options you can do with non-optimal characters and generalist characters that can use their moves to lean into particular elements if you don't have enough dedicated characters for a given element.

6* magicites threw all of that in the dumpster by the inclusion of this enElement gimmick. Basically, there's a buff that your characters can get that infuses them with an element, aka an enElement. It buffs elemental damage that the character uses that is of the same element as the buff. And you can further increase that damage through certain soul breaks allowing you to stack that buff. The problem with 6*s is that it made enElements mandatory in order to deal any usable damage. If you try to deal damage with a character without one of these buffs, it's massively reduced, to the point of "you're literally just wasting your time even trying". It basically means that generalists and characters that otherwise don't have an enElement buff becomes effectively worthless as a DPS for these fights. And even when you do have a source of enElement on a character, some of these 6* magicite bosses can dispel that buff, making them a potential liability if they do not have a solid, reliable source of reapplying the enElement buff.

In JP, they did eventually undo that to an extent, where characters can deal actual damage to the 6* magicite bosses without that buff (although still not nearly as much damage as a character with any level of enElement), they're about done with the 6*s, and have already moved onto different content, so we'll still have to see where it goes from there. Meanwhile, here in Global, we're still stuck with the shitty 6* gimmick, about 3 bosses in and kinda stuck spinning our wheels a bit with the only actual new difficult content being this superboss level nonsense. And I could get behind this superboss type nonsense, if it wasn't the only new type of that content out there currently, and if it didn't have just this bad bad bad BAD gimmick that sucks

[Quanta]

I always felt that FFRK dropped the ball when it came to their endgame content. Hearing about how impossibly hard this 6* shit is doesn't particularly surprise me since Torment dungeons and other endgame content also followed that kind of "Only the best of the best can handle this" line of thought. It's trash because that relegates anyone who can't match up to it (i.e. non-whales) to just doing the same old content over and over again, which gets boring after a while as progression moves into the new content.

[Quanta]

Question: Do you think FFRK is doing a good job of getting new and returning players up to speed?

Another question: Has FFRK made it any easier for players to use their favorite characters over the latest hotness in the current meta? Do they have a spark system in place like other gachas have employed for getting desired equipment?

[Aria Genisi]

Question: Do you think FFRK is doing a good job of getting new and returning players up to speed?

Another question: Has FFRK made it any easier for players to use their favorite characters over the latest hotness in the current meta? Do they have a spark system in place like other gachas have employed for getting desired equipment?

Q1: Yes. The somewhat recentish (as of last year or two) required intro tasks that you must complete to unlock all the dungeons. By completing these tasks, you get a bunch of resources as a reward, along with special relic draw selects that give you older, but still vital and useful relics to get you started with, like everyone gets Tyro's wall SB, you can select Shout, etc. In addition to that, the Anima Lens shop lets you buy a great number of extremely key relics by using the lenses you get awarded by clearing events (and to a lesser extent, by drawing dupes), such as Tyro's Divine Veil Grimoire, aka Godwall. I'd say it does a pretty good job.

Q2.1: There really isn't a particular meta in the game. It's just, you use relics for who you have for what the team trying to do. You can use your favorite characters, but at a certain point, you do need to actually put together usable teams, and that relies on what each character can do and what relics you have for them. The anima lens shop does give you a lot of leeway to pick what you want, provided you have the lenses and it's in the shop. And you can go pretty far with what gets into the lens shop, though there's still stuff that you have no real choice but to pull for. Speaking of which...

Q2.2: I don't know what a spark system is, but there's not really an easy way to get a particular relic you want on a given banner, save for just making pulls and hoping for the best. There are regular Realm/Elemental banners that cost 15 mythril for the first 11x draw on each, along with free pull tickets that you can earn and spend on those banners, the daily draw is worth pulling every day where you have the potential to grab basically any non-event limited relic so if you get lucky, odds are good that you can get something useful, and the anima lens shop does help with a good number of important stuff.
But again, if you want a particular relic on an event/pickup/fest banner that isn't lensable, you don't really have any choice but to spend the mythril making pulls and hoping for the gatcha to be kind.

[Quanta]

Spark is the GBF term for it, but yeah, it's basically a way to target a particular item on a banner. You accumulate currency called sparks when you pull (1 spark per draw) and when you get 300 sparks, you can choose an item of your choosing off of the current banner. Sparks not used get converted into stones when the banner ends, and these can be used to purchase basic items used in crafting recipes and the like.

[Aria Genisi]

Spark is the GBF term for it, but yeah, it's basically a way to target a particular item on a banner. You accumulate currency called sparks when you pull (1 spark per draw) and when you get 300 sparks, you can choose an item of your choosing off of the current banner. Sparks not used get converted into stones when the banner ends, and these can be used to purchase basic items used in crafting recipes and the like.

Ahhhhh, that's interesting.