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Also at Macworld this year was ZigZaGame Inc, the developers who are bringing Adventure Bar Story to the App Store. We’ve already gone pretty in depth with Adventure Bar Story in our hands-on preview, but another title that they were showing off is their Pokemon-style game Dragon Island.

Dragon Island has you exploring a huge world, battling and collecting over 200 different species of monsters. Each one can be evolved several times, and you can even collect recipes which will allow you to combine two different creatures to create a new hybrid version. Also, you’ll be able to battle bosses and claim their spirits in order to summon them in future battles.

Another interesting feature is that there are no healing spells or items in the game. You can return to the main town hub to heal, but if you’re out in battle and one of your creatures dies, then they’re gone for good. I kind of like this as it adds an element of suspense and risk, and should affect how you go about tackling battles and completing the many dungeons in the game.

To balance this, even though you can only battle with 3 monsters at a time, you’ll be able to bring more than that with you as you play. So if you do end up losing one, another monster from your queue will take its place. As you level up in the game, you’ll gain the ability to carry more and more monsters with you.

An example of 3 evolutions of a dragon

The world which you can explore in Dragon Island is massive, with tons of points of interest to discover. These include towns, forests, random battles, and dungeons. When you come upon a dungeon, it is randomly generated and turns the game into more of a rogue-like, and there will be one infinite dungeon where you can grind and discover monsters and items, as well as compete on a leaderboard for how many floors you can descend.

Finally, the battle system will be a traditional 3-on-3 turn-based affair. Each monster can have up to 4 skills, each assigned a special swipe gesture. Although your character doesn’t get involved in battles himself, you can still level him up as you would in a normal RPG, and then his stats will extend to the monsters under his control. In this way you can influence how you will play the game despite the massive number of different monsters in the game which are actually the ones doing battle.

I was blown away when I saw Dragon Island in action. The amount of creatures in the game, coupled with the ability to evolve them and level up your own character has the potential for just a ridiculous amount of customization and strategy. Along with a huge world to explore, a storyline, tons of items and abilities, and even an infinite dungeon, there will be plenty to keep you busy in Dragon Island. Be on the lookout for Dragon Island to hit in the coming months, or check out the thread in our forums for even more discussion on the game.

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Brad Nicholson said it best in our preview of Dungeon Crawlers [$1.99]: “It’s the video game equivalent of a mullet, reserved and business-like, yet fun-loving and goofy.” I’d add “A little bit awkward in any situation,” for both the mullet and the game. It’s a quirky strategy RPG that invests heavily in tropes of old, glorifies the Ghostbusters, and isn’t quite ready for prime-time.

Don’t get me wrong; fans of traditional SRPGs will find a lot to love if they give Dungeon Crawlers a chance. It’s a funny, charming, and mostly well-crafted game. You’ll run into a few glaring omissions, and you might have trouble with the game’s high memory footprint, but rest assured that Ayopa Games and Drowning Monkeys plan to address all of that soon. No matter how much I enjoy myself, though, I keep coming back to the same problem: Dungeon Crawlers is just way too ponderous.

The mix of dungeon crawling and strategic combat works well. Basically, you poke around a dungeon floor by floor, fighting baddies, finding secrets, and occasionally solving puzzles. The game slips into turn-based combat mode the moment you enter an area with enemies. A movement grid is laid out on the floor. Enemies take their turns, one by one, and then the heroes take theirs. It’s a good formula, but every bit of it is too slow.

Enemy turns take too long, and can’t really be sped up. Every movement and attack feels a bit slower than it should, and everything has to happen in turn. Sometimes it feels like no one has any idea how to land a hit. In combat that already feels too slow, a whole round spent with weapons missing harmlessly (or landing glancing blows, a common problem) is dull, dull, dull. It would shorten the game, but combat would be a lot more fun if the developers cut out the weak hits, lowered everyone’s miss rates and let you fast-forward through enemy turns.

If only they could apply that sort of trimming to the rest of the experience. For example, you start with only three of your four heroes: Payter, Aegon and Roy (if you’re thinking Ghostbusters already, those should sound familiar), and each gets just one ability initially. For the first few levels combat is mindless. Payter walks up to an enemy and slashes it. Aegon casts Magic Missile from further back. Roy heals whoever is wounded. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a fine way to start, but the game takes far too long to start filling your arsenal with new friends and abilities.

It’s a shame, because I doubt many mobile gamers are going to wait the hour or two it takes for things to start getting interesting. Try to be the exception, because it’s worth it. Even though Dungeon Crawlers has a limited roster of characters, its encounters get both challenging and strategic. Much of the strategy is in learning to carefully position your party members. Payter, for instance, eventually learns to stun the enemies that surround him. Predicting where the enemies will move, you can put him in just the right place to get surrounded. Then you can line up Aegon to hit the grouped up baddies with an AOE, and keep Failston blocking the way back to Roy. Mana isn’t a consideration, but action limits are, so healing is a once-per-turn affair. If a character falls, they’re out of the game until the next floor.

Failing isn’t a a huge deal, since you can always restart from the beginning of a level or an encounter. But that decision really hurts when encounters start lasting for half an hour or longer. You should be able to offset this by using the coins you collect to buy potions in a tight spot, but you can’t. A shop is coming, as are IAP coins for the poor adventurer with a wealthy player. The game can already be completed without the store, though, so the IAP will be optional in the extreme.

Unless, that is, you try to plow straight through. Dungeon Crawler’s loot system rewards the explorer. You won’t find much if you just stomp around killing enemies and opening chests, and your equipment will quickly fall out of date. If, on the other hand, you manage to find the levers that hide secrets in nearly every level, you’ll be at the tip-top of your game. The game could use a balance tweak or two to keep less-curious players geared enough to fight, though. The loot is all pre-determined, and it really hurts your chances if you miss a few secrets.

Even with all the frustrations and issues, I really dig Dungeon Crawlers. If you’re a sucker for references, this game plays with a ton of them – from the blatant and encompassing Ghostbusters theme to jokes about things the younger crowd might still understand. That’s on top of an engaging adventure tale that does its best to keep you interested in slogging through fight after fight. The characters, the music, the level design and environments – all great. You get the idea: the game would be fantastic if only it were pared down, cleaned up and sent out much more streamlined.

Until then, a cautious recommendation will have to do. If you’re looking for an old-school strategic romp through some very traditional dungeons, you’re in the right place. But these aren’t play sessions you can cram into five minute smoke breaks. Dungeon Crawlers is built to last – for better or worse, you’ll get hours out of it. If you’re a sit-back-and-be-patient sort, you’ll be just fine.

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Big swords and slow-motion make us feel good on the inside, so we’re obligated to share this trailer with you. Before you gander at its splendor, here’s some context: this is a side-scrolling action RPG from White Whale Games. It’s called God of Blades, and in it, users will “assume the role of a nameless spectral king” against a horde of demon dudes. From what we can tell, the action model breaks down to whacking demons with overly large weapons until they fall down. It sounds cool in theory.

No word on release other than “soon,” and we’re not 100 percent sure what platforms it’ll appear on or, hey, even its price. We’re guessing these kinds of things will be announced on the studio’s Twitter or Facebook in due time.

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Star Warfare: Alien Invasion [99¢] is a first-person arena-shooter from Freyr Games, which features wave after wave of relentless attacking alien creatures. The aliens emerge from holes in the wall and from underground, or come flying, bounding or waddling straight towards you from all sides. And once you’ve shot them, the next wave arrives immediately. It’s almost as if you don’t even need to explore, as the aliens will come straight for you.

The single player campaign includes five maps, each with six levels of increasing difficulty to unlock (30 levels in total). A progress bar indicates how many of the enemies have spawned and if you survive to the end, your reward is currency to spend in an in-game store. The sixth level of each map is a “survival” level.

In multiplayer mode, you can team with up to three players online (via Game Center) to engage in a co-op boss battle, or to play co-op on a map you’ve already unlocked. The incentive for fighting bosses is that you earn greater amounts of gold. Unfortunately, these bosses are not accessible in single player mode, although you can set-up a 1 player room online if you want. Playing co-op with teammates makes the boss battles easier, and so does upgrading via single player mode first since the gear you earn in single player mode is also available in multiplayer.

This is a dual stick shooter, with the left stick for movement, the right for aiming and shooting – and there’s no option to change this, although you can tweak sensitivity. The dual sticks are located one third of the way up the screen on each side and can’t be repositioned. To look around, or turn around, you swipe the background with your finger. You can also use the right (fire) stick to turn, but that’s slower and wastes bullets.

There are 26 weapons to unlock and purchase, including assault rifle, shotgun, laser gun and machine guns. The heavier weapons, like grenade launchers, decrease your speed while other powerful weapons like the RPG consume more energy. Each weapon has power, fire-rate and energy attributes and can be upgraded through 8 levels.

The catch is that some items are purchased with money earned in-game, but other weapons and bags (including the cooler ones) are purchased using a raw material named “mytheril” which seems to only be available through in-app purchases or for getting bonuses for playing online regularly. But aside from this premium currency, even the weapons sold for regular in-game currency get very expensive, making the weapon upgrading more difficult than it feels like it should be.

Also, If you run out of bullets, you end up running around the level unable to do anything as there’s currently no melee attack or ammo pick-ups. You just have to die or quit, having wasted the remainder of your bullets, which is frustrating, although the developers advise they may possibly introduce a weapon with no ammo cost. The in-game store also sells space suit parts (helmet, chest, hands and legs) which can improve your hit points, power and speed. Other available items include first aid items, forcefields and the ability to revive after death.

Star Warfare: Alien Invasion is a pretty good first-person shooter for a dollar, despite the expensive weapons, emphasis on IAP and need to buy bullets with in-game money. The developers are planning a minor update with new equipment and maps, and a major update with a brand new game mode. If they can also balance out the in-game currency systems in regards to weapon upgrading and ammunition usage, then Star Warfare might be able to extend beyond just being an average to above average shooter.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Buckle up; Adventure Bar Story appears to be pretty radical. I just spent a good chunk of time with a pre-release build of the PSP port, and while I do have a reservation or two about its virtual controls, I couldn’t be happier with the overall port job and its core play, which is satisfyingly genre-bending.

Imagine if your everyday 16-bit JRPG hooked up with a management sim. In Adventure Bar Story, you control a young girl attempting to save her bar from being stolen or bought out by a renowned and rival neighborhood restaurant. In order to prevent this, she’ll need to learn how to cook, buy or gather ingredients in RPG-like zones complimented by random battles, assemble the ingredients into a dish, and then profit.

Mechanically, there’s a lot going on. In order to cook food, for example, you need recipes and the right tools for the job — blenders, pans, and so forth. The Item Shop stocks new stuff every day, but you can also get recipes from talking to NPCs or even experimentation. The cooking UI has several layers, but they’re all straightforward.

Dungeon diving — and I’m using that loosely here since the first few zones are set in fields — has several components. There’s the turn-based battle system, which packs in all of your usual RPG trimmings such as special attacks and in-battle item usage. But there are also food drops littering the ground that you’ll want to pick up at the risk of random encounters, and a leveling system, that, in a weird turn, has nothing to do with battle. Eating what you make levels up each character. Battle just earns you battle skills. Progression to new areas seems to be contingent on in-game cooking goals.

The entire experience is split into days and months. A typical day goes a little like this: I run to the item store to stock up on curing potions, and then I travel to the latest dungeon in order to pick up all the free food. When I get out of the zone, I shoot over to the bar’s kitchen and start looking at what I can assemble. After I make the food, I take a gander at which ones will give me the most EXP and then I eat a few to power up my dudes. After that, I select the dishes I want to serve and open the bar.

There’s some nuance to everything. The ingredients that you pick up aren’t always main ingredients; rather, they’re just component parts of a single ingredient. Wheat, for example, has to be used with a blender to create flour. Flour and water make pizza dough, and so on and so forth. Customers also appear to like different things more on different days, so there’s a little more to becoming the next great bar.

I’m so high on this because it’s the best of every world. I’m not spending hours and hours senselessly grinding, and I’m not cooking fake food until my eyes bleed. The mix of action and simulation feels right. The pacing is good.

Also, if I didn’t know this was a PSP port, I wouldn’t have guessed. This game feels and looks good on iPhone. The team has added a lot of touch-centric stuff to the UI, which goes a long way in making it relatively friendly to the platform. The virtual d-pad is a tad too touchy for my tastes, but it’s not an end-of-the-world problem, and more than likely, it’ll get ironed out well before the game is released.

One thing that’ll ruffle some feathers is the IAP. You can buy in-game jewels with real money, and with them, you’ll be able to buy special “rare” or “import” weapons, recipes, or even ingredients. The IAP doesn’t feel necessary, and heck, it’s not even a part of the core experience — it’s a bolted on, iOS exclusive feature that compliments the full PSP offering.

We’ll get much more evaluative in our official review, but I definitely think this is a game you should keep your eye on. Tentatively, it should see a release on February 28th at $.99. The usual base price will be $2.99.

UPDATE: We got some word on the IAP, so we changed some wording around. The complete PSP game is all here without the need for IAPs, according to the developer. Neat!

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JRPGs are a tough sell these days on iOS. Typically ports making their way from other systems, most seem characterized by substandard touch control integration and shoddy English translations. Fantasy Chronicle [$2.99] thankfully only suffers significantly from one of those two issues. While the translation is certainly lacking, the core gameplay and controls make this RPG an enjoyable experience, assuming you’re into a lot of grinding.

Fantasy Chronicle follows the story of Light, a mysterious youth adopted by a small village who begins his training to join Holos Over, the hero guild charged with ridding the world of evil. During his adventure, Light encounters strife, grief, revenge and nearly every other RPG cliché under the sun. While the story isn’t going to win any awards, it does just enough to advance the narrative and keep you playing, which is more than I can say for some of the other games in the genre.

One area that Fantasy Chronicle does a great job with is its battle system depth. Players control a maximum of three main characters at any time, and each of those characters can employ the aid of a guardian beast – monsters that have their own stats and special moves and can share the damage incurred by the character they are attached to. In addition, you can also set various tactics for your guardian beasts which impact the amount of damage they share with their companion.

I also enjoyed the material/crafting system that Fantasy Chronicle employs. Every enemy you defeat has a chance to drop some kind of raw material that you can later use to create or upgrade your weapons and armor. Upgrade your equipment enough and you have an opportunity to convert it into a different item entirely (assuming you find the crafting book for the new item). Soon after the intro, you also meet an NPC that’ll automatically find certain material for you depending on what locations you tell him to search. It’s a neat little addition that lets you supplement your materials to make the crafting experience a little less monotonous.

Control-wise, while I don’t think Fantasy Chronicle does a particularly good job with its touch controls, the virtual D-Pad controls are very responsive. I particularly liked the optional control toggle that lets you quickly switch between touch and D-Pad controls whenever you wish (this is particularly useful because the D-Pad is huge and blocks a lot of screen space). It’s a feature I think more games could use.

Like many other JRPGs on iOS, Fantasy Chronicle suffers from a mismanaged English translation. Casual conversations between characters feel disjointed, and there’s a lot of story (and non-story) related dialogs that are borderline incomprehensible. It’s never a good sign when I get to a story section and I find myself trying to speed through simply because I don’t really care too much. Granted, I’ve seen plenty of games with a more horrid translation than Fantasy Chronicle, but considering its RPG roots I’m always a bit more critical of an element I consider essential.

The biggest issue I think Fantasy Chronicle contends with is eventual tedium. Each region that you explore has a town acting as the central hub with quests, with a few surrounding areas inhabited by baddies. Typically, you’ll enter the town, get a few quests with mundane objectives usually involving kill nearby enemies, and then you return for more quests. Do enough and you’ll unlock a story-based quest that expands on the narrative. Eventually, you’ll get to progress to a new region with the quest hub and you get to do it all over again.

Because of this type of mission structure, Fantasy Chronicle tends to feature a great deal of grinding with not a lot of story reward. You’re going to grind for mission objectives, resources for crafting, and for experience (although the last one not so much). Missions typically take you back to the same areas again, and when you’ve found yourself over leveled for those areas, the experience becomes an exercise in how fast you can push the attack button during battles.

There are undoubtedly some JRPG fans out there that embrace this style of play. Considering that Fantasy Chronicle gets a lot of the underlying gameplay and controls right, I’d actually recommend it to those types of gamers as a title worth checking out. However, if you’re looking for something a bit less formulaic or a game with more emphasis on story quality, Fantasy Chronicle may not be the RPG you’re looking for.

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An episodic JRPG seems like a hard sell – how do you cut a genre built on the backs of immense sagas and marathon weekend play sessions into bite-sized chunks? Apparently by writing cliffhangers into each narrative focal point and developing for iOS, where mobile users might appreciate a light-weight, turn-based trek through RPG Maker heaven.

Armed with a built-in audience, a new publishing deal with Konami, and a multi-tiered business model, Ash II: Shadows [$2.99 Silver Edition / $4.99 Gold Edition] should have been a sure thing for SRRN Games. The UI is cleaner, the sprites more detailed, and random encounters replaced with on-screen enemies – Konami cash put to good use. I have the lasting impression, though, that SRRN’s business concerns have impacted – if  not downright dictated – some of its design choices.

The first – and so far, only – chunk of Shadows lasts about five hours, during which time players are exposed to enough world-building and character introductions to feel the full weight of the cliffhanger that introduces the inevitable second chapter. Creating a coherent narrative arc in a relatively confined – by JRPG standards – space means that Shadows employs rather brisk pacing, both narrative and systematic.

I haven’t played the original Ash [99¢ / Lite], but I enjoy feeling like a newcomer to the world, and Shadows does a good job of dripfeeding players relevant information without getting too bogged down in exposition. The interpersonal relationships are full of sharp, punchy dialogue that achieves a great amount of characterization in very little time.

Indeed, Shadows puts a premium on action – Damien, a disgraced Aghausian rebel, and his ragtag band are constantly questing and exploring, and they spend very little time actually discussing their options or thinking rationally. It’s nice to avoid hearing them labor every detail of exploring what they call “a magical fairy continent,” but Shadows can feel ill-plotted and haphazard as a result of its breakneck pace.

The upside is that, by constantly offering something new to see and learn, Shadows‘ narrative elements can keep players hooked where its systems fall short. Like most things in Ash, the systems are relatively basic and cribbed from larger, more-established franchises. The basic components of the game are a paper-rock-scissors elemental system, a weapon proficiency meter, a queue that maps out the order of the turn-based combat, and skills which are gained by leveling up.

At its best, Shadows is a game about balancing power for precision. Players balance equipping their characters with weapons that carry a high proficiency with ones that come with elemental bonuses. Combat is an exercise in trying to manipulate the queue to your advantage, in trying to get as many turns as possible without letting the enemy in line – it’s just too bad that all the best attacks come with heavy queue penalties.

These are basic RPG conceits, but there’s potential here – they’re common because they work really well. The problem, quite frankly, is that the game is too easy. This is ostensibly in response to the first game’s difficulty, but because each battle ends so quickly, I never really have to make any tough choices or fully take advantage of the mechanics in place. When Shadows lets me one-shot my way through the first five hours, it leaves an entire combat system unused and unexplored. (There’s also IAP to, god forbid, buy XP-boosting equipment.)

The larger point here is that Shadows‘ story works well with the game’s episodic structure and the gameplay doesn’t. As a five-hour mirco-RPG, Shadows provides a satisfying narrative arc. It’s ok to take it slow if your game lasts 80 hours, but this one only lasts five –the systems feel underdeveloped and stunted. There’s a disconnect in Damien’s experience as a player-character and my experience as the man behind the scenes. On the bright side, though – there’s no grinding necessary, which lets me get back to the story all the quicker, and there’s nothing stopping SRRN from re-balancing the game before Chapter 2 is released.

That’s the thing: there are still five more chapters to play. Ash II: Shadows comes in two packages, gold and silver. If you buy the gold version, all future content will be free. Silver buyers get the second chapter free and a discount on extra content.  There’s also a “bronze” version in the works – the first chapter will be free, but subsequent content will have to be purchased. Since the rest of the game hasn’t been priced yet, it’s impossible to know how the silver and bronze packages will shake out.

This is a quandary: I like the story and want to see more of it, but I want the systems to get more engaging before plopping out more cash, especially because it’s so easy to see that the fundamentals are already in place. Ash II: Shadows is an improved game over the original in many ways, but until some tweaks are made and we see how the rest of the episodes shake out it’s hard to gauge if it’s ultimately an overall better experience.

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Stolen Couch Games‘ tactical RPG Kids vs Goblins has been getting a lot of traction on our message board for good reason: it looks hot. In the game, you’ll control three kids with up to 80 different spells on a quest that’ll see them exploring a total of seven unique environments. As you’ll see in the new trailer below, the spell system takes a cue from Magicka; it encourages users to combine individual spells and then exploit the combined power in order to progress and beat up waves of bad dudes. There seems to be a fair bit of standard action RPG-ery, too.

Kids vs Goblins is being published by Crescent Moon Games, and is expected to hit the iPad first later this February. In the game’s message board thread, the publisher has noted that Apple has it in its hands right now, so it’s just a matter of approval. We’ll continue keeping our eye on this one, for sure.

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Dungeon Raid [$.99 / Lite], a match-3 that TouchArcade President-in-Chief Eli Hodapp freely argues is the greatest game ever created, has been updated on Android. You probably don’t care about that considering this is an iOS-centric web site and all, but here’s the twist: in a tiny celebration of the fact that DR has made the platform leap, the iPhone version’s price has been reduced to $.99 from $2.99. Neat!

The RPG component is what hooks people as hard as Eli Hodapp. The integration of items, abilities, equipment upgrades, and character classes is seamless and super clever; they end bridging a gap you didn’t even know existed in the well-worn genre. Our glowing review, which pours over all of the game’s fine details, is available here if you’d like to learn more before taking the plunge.

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Adventure Bar Story, a Recettear-like RPG that originally released in Japan as Adventure Bar of Wonderland Portable on PSP, is being localized and fitted for iPhone and iPod Touch. Zigza Game, the studio behind this new effort, revealed its intentions to do this over on our message board, and even dropped a few new screenshots to stimulate the community. We’re including a much less, er, eye-melting PSP selection below.

Knock out the “item” part of Recettear’s title and insert “bar” if you want a decent idea of what you’ll be getting into with Adventure Bar Story. The goal is to have the best bar in the kingdom; To accomplish this, you’ll need to dungeon crawl and harvest the component parts of a variety of monsters to win cooking and drink contests. You know, just like in real life.

As of right now, the title is not slated to incorporate iPad support. That’ll be a thing the studio evaluates based on sales. Pricing, by the way, has yet to be confirmed.

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