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Fire Emblem Heroes F2P Armor Emblem challenge – Day 5

My focus on Day 5 has been the bound hero battle, Cecilia & Lilina. It’s tempting because the reward has more than 10 orbs in total. I know it’s not hard if you have 2 dancers. But I only have one Olivia. So I went draw blue from the hero fest, hope to get a Ninian, or another Olivia (therefore the red draw).

Not bad, I got a Linde, high speed blue mage. I don’t even have her in my main account. But she won’t help in the bound hero battle.

I first finished the lunatic difficulty one, with 2 out of 4 tasks. This is my video. The 4th hero is not used at all, so you can add Sharena and Alfonse to finish task. Both of them are 2 star right now.

When it comes to the Inferno one, I had little choices. I don’t have enough feather to get more powerful heroes. I don’t have past grand heroes to copy the strategy online. So I studied my box and plan to use Olivia, Brave Lyn, Ike and Brave Ike. Amelia won’t help here unfortunately. I don’t have a brave bow, or it will be easy too just like my main account. So I will need to merge skill desperation. I have only one Mae, and a 5* Shanna. I need to prove it works first before I try. So I tested it with my main account. My main doesn’t have Ike, so I used a Ryoma instead. It turned out this red char is not important again. I only used its reposition and final hit to the ranger.

So my main account did it with the restrictions. However I still can’t copy because my summoner support is not level S yet. My Lyn’s atk is way off. My main has 52 atk (because she has a +atk IV). My sub’s atk is only 47. I will wait until I raise my summoner support to S, and get an ATK+2 seal (3 is too expensive impossible now). And I may also need an Spur Atk 2 to hit 52. I’m not sure if I have time to do this.

And finally this is my new heroes from the hero fest banner, so far box size is 95.

Fire Emblem Heroes F2P Armor Emblem challenge – Day 4

The Amelia banner has finished. I stopped at the 10th Amelia and didn’t draw more from it, since I don’t want to waste my pity rate. For every 5 draws without a 5*, IS will increase the 5* rate by 0.25%, which we call the pity rate. And whenever you draw your next 5*, it’s reset to 0, so the 5* rate is back to 3% or 5% in hero fest. That’s why it’s recommended to always focus on one banner until you clear its rate. As a F2P, if you know you won’t drop more than 40 orbs on one, you’d better skip it and use the orbs in the next banner to build up pity rate. I had about 10 left, so I turned to the hero fest banner.

The best heroes in the banner are Ike who can distant counter, and Ninian who can dance. Dance is the best skill in the game. You want as many different dancers as you can up to 6. Both colours also fit my criteria: 5% red or blue. So until the next great banner is up, I will keep drawing until I got a Ninian and Ike.

Luckily for me, I got Ike on the 4th draw. Although it’s IV is the worst: HP-SPD. Well, I can’t complain as a F2P. Still happy. Here is my end of day 4 box. I draw 4 more and also inherited a reposition skill for my Brave Lyn, which means I have one less Barst now. Reposition is the second most useful skill in the game right after dance / sing. You can get it from Barst or Selena at 3*. It’s recommended to feed Selena 4* together with Triangle Adept to tome users. So I fed Barst to Lyn.

I did this skill change because I plan to finish the bound hero special task to earn some orbs. I will write more about it next day. Also because of the bound hero challenge, I used all my stamina potion to level Ike and Olivia up. I also used some dueling crest to level up. It’s a pain to level up a dancer. She’s still Lv 35.

And of course I challenged Arena. At this level (tier 1) it’s easy to go up so nothing to post here.

Fire Emblem Heroes F2P Armor Emblem challenge – Day 3

So I’ve been playing with the new account I created 3 days ago. Whenever I had 9 or 13 orbs, I would go summon from the short haired girl banner and drew only green stones. If there were none green stones, I either drew blue or red, to keep a balanced pool myself. I also tried to raise heroes of all colors instead of only green.

I upgraded my castle to the third level with 8 orbs in total. So now it’s green carpeted, and it boosts EXP earned by 60%. I will upgrade to the highest level eventually. But now I need to use those precious orbs to draw as many Amelia as I can. Frankly, I thought if I could get 4 this time, that’s be good enough. I can get the rest of the 11 in future Amelia up banners. Maybe three times in total.

But guess what? Now it’s 12 hours from the banner is closed. And I have managed to draw 10 Amelia! Yes that’s a +9 Amelia. Only 1 from the highest you can get. I consider myself super lucky.

F2P drew 10 Amelia in FEH in the first 3 days.

Here is the number of draws at which I got a 5*. Same line means they were drawn in the same batch.

3: Brave Ike, 4: Boey (1), 
8: Amelia (1), 
9: Brave Lyn (Free draw at 100% rate)
15: Amelia (2),
16: Amelia (3),
21: Boey (2)
31: Amelia  (4),
45: Amelia (5), 
51: Amelia (6),
52: Shanna
58: Amelia (7),
66: Amelia (8),
69: Amelia (9),
79: Amelia (10).

In this total 87 heroes, I got 8 in game / for free. The rest of the 79 were got from this banner or the free draw of other banners. I have in total 15 5 stars now.

How did I get the orbs to do the 79 draws? Just by playing the game normally. I’ve been clearing story mode and got some Voting Gauntlet orbs. So far I haven’t got any problem wining the battles. I raised 3 Amelia for now because I need more to finish the armored quests. I have also got 10 from linking this to a Nintendo account. That’s all. In most of my summons, I saw 1 green stones. Sometimes I saw 2 or none. Only rarely I saw 3 at the same time but I only opened 2 since I didn’t wait for enough orbs. A rough estimate is that I used 380 orbs in total to get 10 Amelia. The best IV I got so far is Spd – HP.

So if you are F2P, you may still dream about getting the highest score tier team in Arena. You need to know this: you only need to raise 3 heroes in Arena, as the 4th one is for a bonus hero. In Arena assault, you only need 4 to set yourself at a high score level. The rest of your 7 teams are not used to do matching. With this in mind, a F2P player should focus on getting all real 5* you need. That include the 11 one character in your team, for me it’s Amelia. You should totally choose this based on the banners when you do re-rolling. But you should always prefer Armored (+1) over Cavalry (-0.3), close fighting heroes over ranged (-1). Other good choices are Hector, Brave Ike, Ike, Ryoma, Ayra etc. Besides the 5* char in your team, you also need those providing high score skills. So far Hector is the only one that’s not replaceable because he has the distant counter skill that is inheritable.

It’s funny that whenever I wished: give me a Hector, give me a Hector, I got an Amelia instead in my lucky draws.

There are still some hours before the banner ends tonight. I may still draw but due to stamina limitations, I won’t get many more orbs. I guess maximum 2-3 draws. I’m so tempted to pay and get the last Amelia. But I will keep it as a F2P experiment. I want to see what I can do without paying. Honestly, +9 Amelia will get you enough points in matching already, since Amelia has the highest base values. It’s still better than +10 Effie.

Fire Emblem Heroes F2P Armor Emblem challenge

Is Armor Emblem only for whales? As a F2P, I will challenge this statement.

I’ve been playing FEH for a while. It’s a good strategy mobile gotcha game developed by Intelligent Systems based on Nintendo’s IP fire emblem. The player community in general consider it’s a F2P (free to play) friendly game.

I guess one of the reasons people feel comfortable without paying is that one of the strongest team one can build is widely available. People call it the horse Emblem. The three core members are Reinhardt, Brave Lyn, and Cecilia. Brave Lyn can be chosen for free. The other two are not give start only, so the chance of drawing them is large. The forth position can be any good red cavalry unit. Eliwood is a cheap option who can be obtained at 3 starts.

However when it comes to Arena, this F2P team won’t be in the same league as those pay over thousands dollars a month. Don’t get me won’t. There horse team is still the strongest. But IS matching mechanism ranked armored units higher, and +10 unit even higher. If you want highest score, you need to play with mostly armored units at 5* +10. Do far people believe it’s only possible for whales who pay a lot in the game, it those who started the game very early who have accumulated enough.

Here just for fun I want to challenge this argument. If I give up on having a deep box, but focus on just one team used in Arena, can I build my F2P team of 5* +10? The highest score one is Amelia who is up in the short haired lady focus summon. So I’m going to try to get my +10 Amelia, +10 Effie(available at 4* also), +n future Grand hero armored – I know I missed the Black Knight but many they will re-offer it in future. The forth one will be a bonus unit.

I started a new account for this so that I can reroll for at least one Amelia. I will try to keep my path to a high score armored team in diary here.

The rules I set for myself are:

1 get as many Amelia in the beginning. Min 2. If I don’t get 11 in the remaining 3 days, I will hold onto my orbs to spend on the next Amelia gotcha.

2. Draw only for Amelia, Hector, and hero feast blue and red because they will be at 5% instead of 3%.

And in picture is my chosen account after re rolling for hours. I was lucky to get 3 Amelia already in the first 20 draws.

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius Review

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, or FFBE, is a Final Fantasy spinoff mobile game about to launch in world wide including North America. It was launched in JP in October 2015. Although it’s not available in Google Play or the App Store yet, you can pre-register, or just download it from QooApp.

People who played the Brave Frontier before will find the game familiar. They are from the same developer A-Lim. Compared with FFRK, FFBE is more of a traditional turn based RPG with collections. There is a story line in it, although it’s not very attractive. And you can do exploration which is like a dungeon crawling. The exploration part is not particular fun though, because sliding on the phone to move is just awkward. A controller is much better for this task.

The game isn’t really about exploration though. It is still a F2P game with tons of FF characters waiting for you to summon use hard to earn in game currency Lapis. You can of course buy lapis with real money.

FFBE has a better graphics than FFRK. Character development is fun. You bring them in battle to earn EXP. Besides level-up which is relatively easy with the EXP dungeon etc., you will consume a lot of time earning trust if you want a really strong team. Each character comes with some reward for you after earning 100% trust. Once obtained, you can use the reward on any characters. Sometimes it’s a skill, or a strong weapon. It seems easy, but the trust is not easy to earn. You can earn about 0.1% trust in battles randomly. Expect to earn the 100% trust in 10,000 battles.

For lucky or heavy IAP players, there’s an easy way to earn trust. You can upgrade a character with other unit. If you use the same one, regardless of rarity, you will earn trust fast. 2-3 of the same unit can net you about 10% trust.

So you see, the developer did all the things to make you spend money. To some extend FFBE’s developer overdid it that they got lots of complaints in App Store / Google Play for the Japaneses version. People mainly complained about how ridiculous the drop rate is to obtain their favorite characters. There are 5 levels of rarity when you summon a crystal. In the paid pool, it’s guaranteed to be 3 stars. However 3 star characters are mostly useless. You want the diamond crystal, which is 5 star. Square Enix didn’t announce the stats, but based on my experience in several days of re-rolling, the rate to see a diamond crystal is only about 1%. And seeing a diamond crystal doesn’t guarantee it’s a real 5* rarity either. Some characters can be upgraded from 3* to 5* or even 6*. You may see a diamond crystal, but it turned out to be Kefka who can be obtained from a blue crystal which corresponds to 3 star characters. My advice to you if you want to start playing this game, is to ensure you have a good start. I learnt this a hard way that I eventually abandoned my old account, and started rerolling at the current event, in which Lightning has a higher rate to drop. So far, Luneth and Lightning are the well known best characters to start. They can use dual wield, have the best stats and boosts or elemental skills.

You can check the JP wiki for characters ranking to decide which characters to develop. To save you some time translating Japanese, I can tell you the top 5 characters here:

オルランドゥ, Orurandu of FFT	12.5	5~6 stars
魔人フィーナ, Majin Fina of FFBE	12.5	5~6 stars
エクスデス, Exdeath of FF5	12.0	5~6 stars
ライトニング, Lightning of FF13	12.0	5~6 stars
ルーネス, Luneth of FF3.	12.0	5~6 stars

Note that the best rated characters may not always be good for new players. Some of them requires trust to shine. The best starting characters are Luneth and Lightning. It’s best if you can get an account with 2 of Luneth, Lightning and Paladin Cecil. Cecil may not have the best attack stats, but his trust reward (120 ATK duel wield weapon) is a must for Luneth or Lightning. Cecil can be star 3~6.

セシル

10.5

星3～星6

Well, once you have a good start, enjoy the game! More tips coming soon. Please check back.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper brings you back to the FF worlds – a review

FFRK is a mobile game on iOS and Android made by developer DeNA Games using Square Enix’ IP. It is a casual F2P (free to play) game which nicely resembles past Final Fantasy games. The developer makes money via IAP which allows players to draw relics for their FF heroes.

In FFRK, you enter the pictures of those final fantasy records with a team of 5 to defend them. You recruit heroes along the way, make them stronger, and then fight to preserve more records. In order to fight, you need to consume stamina, which refills 1 every 3 minutes.

As most F2P mobile games, there’s no ultimate goal or ending to this game. Developer periodically release new challenges as well as new characters and relics. You as a player gain satisfaction by conquering all that are available, or raise your favorite FF teams. Either way, you want to make your heroes stronger and stronger. There are 3 ways in the game to make them stronger. 1. Level up characters, 2. create and level up skills, 3. improve equipment. The first two need stamina, which can be bought with in game currency mythril or real money. The third one need good weapons and armors, which can only be obtained by drawing relics. Mythril is quite limited, so many users ended up paying money.

Gameplay: ATB based battle system. It’s like the one used in FFXIII. In my opinion, it’s the best choice for final fantasy fans who are used to, or even prefer turn based battles. In simple cases, you can click the auto button to let your heroes use basic attack. In more challenging cases, you often need to decide carefully what skills to use, as they are restricted resources. That gives you the incentive to keep improving, therefore more battles, and more enjoyments.

Graphics and BGM: the game uses retro style pixel art. You can still recognize the heroes if you are familiar. But I prefer higher quality graphics, given that final fantasy games have always been the best in graphics in their own time. But I understand if they want to keep the footprint small for a mobile game. The BGM on the other hand is fantastic. They used the original FF music with the pictures. So nostalgic.

Performance: I bet this game is made for iOS first. On iOS it runs smoothly. It still has places where loading takes some time, but that’s when the client is talking to server. Btw the game requires internet connection to play, because all actions must be synced with servers to prevent hack. On Android, it’s another story. It’s super lagging on Android 6.0 on my N5X. In fact, it has the worst performance among all the mobile games I’ve played on Android. However on Nexus 6 which runs Android 5.1 it’s as good as on iPhone 6S.

Free to Play: I add this category to rate mobile games because many people are interested to know if they can play the game without paying for long. Free games aren’t all the same. Some games allow you to obtain all the things in game, but if you are impatient, you can pay to speed things up. Clash of Clans is a good example in this category. Some games integrated gambling. Once you are deep into the game, it’s hard to resist the urge to keep gambling, which requires real money. e.g. Puzzle & Dragons. FFRK is like the latter, but at least it grants you access to all characters in game, and it gives out mythrils generously (about 50 per month thanks to daily login bonus and event dungeons). With the free draws, you can get a decent team already. But for completionist be prepared to pay for big because DeNA releases new and better equipment every week.

Conclusion: I would recommend all Final Fantasy fans to try out the game if they like mobile games. Although there’s no story in the RPG game, you will have so much fun in raising your favorite heroes. For other people, if you like RPGs, and enjoy researching for different strategies to win, the game is worth trying too unless you use a low performance Android phone.