A colossal disappointment – Terra Battle 2 Review

While I appreciate Mistwalker’s attempt to mix things up in its follow-up to 2014’s Terra Battle - which, despite occasional frustration arising from its timed unit dragging mechanics is easily the best f2p RPG I’ve played - the changes mostly range from pointless to outright terrible. You’d think outsourcing development to the studio responsible for the Bravely Default series would have turned out better. While the original game’s interface was well thought out and easily navigable, the sequel changes the world map so that players need to locate their destination, (whether it be a mission or an item shop) on the map instead of simply selecting it from a menu, which would be fine except that for some reason there’s no way to view your characters’ stats or change their equipment without exiting out to the main menu. Most RPGs in the last twenty years have offered a convenient means of comparing your current equipment with what is sold in the store, but here you’re looking at a 10 second wait time to get back out to the status screen, and of course if you do buy anything you have to collect it from your mailbox since this ridiculously convoluted process wasn’t inconvenient enough already. If this were the game’s only such annoyance it may have been forgivable, but unfortunately it’s merely one example of the game’s consistently half-baked, poorly implemented systems. The dev team has also embraced the annoying mobile RPG trend of having you add another player’s hugely overleveled character as a guest in your party, allowing (or forcing) you to choose one at the beginning of each mission. I’ve always felt like this diminished my ownership of my gaming experience until my own characters start to catch up, but TB2 takes it to an absurd extreme - the game is balanced so that your party is completely reliant on the guest’s damage output. At one point I had to restart a mission because I mistakenly chose a healer (The menu doesn’t tell you what the characters actually do, except what you may be able to infer from unlabeled pictures of their gear) and the swarms of skippable trash mobs, which number in the hundreds on most missions, were nearly impossible to kill. The new mission structure, which has you dragging your party around a bland overworld map, is mostly remarkable for how often they are inadvertently split up when trying to move around large enemies and environmental objects. The sometimes clumsy feeling of dragging characters around a grid was my only real gripe with the original TB, and here it’s a considerably larger part of a vastly inferior whole. The fact that Mistwalker has already announced its plan to begin development on TB3 should tell you something about this game’s prospects. Thankfully they’ve continued to support the infinitely more polished TB1 with regular updates despite its shrinking player base, so I’m inclined to see this debacle more as an honest mistake than a cash grab. If you’re considering playing this game, do yourself a favor and just play TB1 instead if you haven’t already.
Review by BryanS1985 on Terra Battle 2.