The Shrine

For mobile. Anybody a Phantasy Star fan? I played PS3/PS4/PSO so I guess I'm somewhat of a fan. This game is obviously a ripoff of FGO which originally makes me feel pretty bad about it because FGO has like literally the worst gameplay ever in a RPG, similar to how all the Summoner's War clones thought copying the part that sucked in SW was what made it successful. Thankfully Sega did revamp the system so that it's a halfway okay turn-based RPG. However, the really baffling thing about this game is that other than that there's a Dark Falz as the bad guy, there's literally nothing that resembles Phantasy Star in this game. No catgirl with claws. No cyborgs. No laser weapons of any kind. It doesn't even take place in the Algol system. And forget anybody that might be remotely related to the Phantasy Star games. Instead you have a bunch of totally generic dudes that join up to take out Dark Falz. I mean, it's not bad to have an original story, but you'd think if you're making a game that at least in theory relies on the game recognition you'd have some stuff that resembles the source. The world appears to be a typical high-fantasy game, which of course is totally NOT what Phantasy Star is about since it's supposed to be in a fairly advanced scientific world (the only reason it's not more advanced is Dark Falz periodically annihilated most civilizations).

Speaking of which, maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the big bad in the PS series Dark Force? Is Dark Falz some kind of ancient evil god in a culture I'm not aware of? I believe sometimes it also shows up as Dark Phallus.

Anyway, the game plays like a halfway decent turn-based RPG on mobile, but there's already a lot of that, or you can actually just play a real turn-based RPG for $10 or whatever anyway. It's not a bad game but I'm having a hard time finding anything to care about because it's literally some generic high fantasy RPG that's got a Phantasy Star name slapped on it.

With Genshin Impact coming out in a week or whatever this one seems pretty moot.

I saw a lot of hype for Genshin Impact but it looks like just some wannabe MMORPG. Gameplay reminds me of Guild Wars 2 which wasn't a bad game but also nothing special. At least regular combat looks like you just employ the elite Daggerfall 'attack while moving backwards' strategy. I guess at least it looks pretty respectable.