Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is a mobile game with a story that, quite frankly, it doesn’t deserve.
Having such a historic franchise in the first half of the name and complete nonsense in its second half, FFBE is a gacha-style game that sucks your money up through predatory practices and the general fear of missing out, but is somehow not only enjoyable to play, but genuinely compelling at times in its narrative.
Let’s back up for a second. Gacha (pronounced gotcha) is an onomatopoeic term from Japan that references the sound such a machine makes. You know those things at the grocery store that you pop a quarter into and twist the dial and get a random sticker or temporary tattoo or those little sticky hands that get covered in dust real quick from a plastic capsule? That’s a gacha. And in FFBE, you put money into the app, push a button and cross your fingers you get the character you want.
You never do. Sometimes you might, but you never really do. Developers Gumi and Alim offer some free currency here and there to get you that sweet, sweet taste of twisting the dial and getting a unit, but that’s a good feeling and the free stuff quickly runs out and you’re left in a psychological state of wanting more of that saccharine pleasure.
It’s absolutely terrible and I wouldn’t ever suggest that someone begin playing this game.
That said.
While plenty of mobile games attempt to tell somewhat of a story, mostly through plots that are cliché and boring and hard to follow, most of those narratives are usually very loosely tied with a detached feeling from the rest of the activities for players to pursue and are generally poorly done. That’s not the case in FFBE, at least for the most part.
The themes and issues depicted in FFBE are surprisingly mature and treated with the respect and gravitas that are delightfully unexpected from a mobile game. At times, it really does almost feel like you’re watching a classic Final Fantasy story being told, rather than a mobile game’s. That never really shines through in the gameplay, unfortunately, but it’s something.
An ever-evolving app with frequent updates, FFBE features an overwhelming amount of content that is either difficult or grindy and repetitive - sometimes both – each the expected fare from a mobile game. But it also features two seasons worth of story content that spans two different worlds or universes or something, It isn’t exactly clear. Regardless, the first one takes place in the world of Lapis, following the protagonist, Rain, and the second occurs in the land of Paladia, following Rain’s good friend and sidekick-turned-main-character, Lasswell.
The first season focuses largely on just fighting some mysterious villains who appeared out of nowhere, swearing revenge on everything that exists because of a war that happened long ago that you know nothing about, all culminating in fighting the big bad guy in a tale that’s generally been told before. There’s not a lot to really unpack with season one’s story stuff.
But season two? Oh goodness, you’ve got some serious things going on.
In order to fully appreciate it though, it’s important to note that FFBE has a major issue of simply having way too many characters. It’s downright remarkable, and at times frustrating, when yet another character, or eight (!), suddenly appear and become recurring parts of the storyline. Partly because it deviates from the story that’s being told with even more extraneous plot devices and characters who are, at first glance at least, one-dimensional, and because you know these characters probably only really exist to dilute the pool of good characters and units that you can potentially get from your twist of the virtual dial.
That being said, at one point in season two, you’ve been stumbling across this familiar, but assuredly different, world of Paladia, which is ruled by the evil Emperor of Aldore. It’s stressed that this is a bad dude who rules with an iron fist, squashes rebellion with impunity and maintains labor and prison camps to keep political opponents, like the Children of Hess, out of his way, impoverishing villages and towns who won’t bow down.
As you travel the world map fighting monsters in this turn-based mobile game, there’s an inordinate amount of cutscenes that interrupt the flow of the game for the sake of a narrative that almost feels like it’d get somewhere if it’d just get to the point already. And then it kind of does. A little late, but it does.
You come across a man hilariously named Mombert and his four, presumed, children – Darish, Honor, Maemae and Redge.
They’ve got a plan to attack the emperor, who is apparently guarded by some forcefield-like magic called a paling. Without knocking down the paling, he’s essentially invincible. You’re asked, and you do so because this an adventure without choices in its plot because it’s a mobile game, to accompany them to erect some magical fields to counteract the paling. There’s four of them.
So you click your stages that cost a specific amount of ever-increasing energy that regenerates one every five minutes to beat up some monsters, maybe get some dialogue boxes to tap before you do that and continue on. Finish all the levels on the stage, there’s usually five, and you might get a new cutscene that continues the story. Sometimes one pops up as you progress the stage, as well.
You can either choose to simply wait until you have enough energy to continue the storyline, which awards that free currency to perform gacha pulls, use energy-refilling items which are more frequent than you might think they’d be, spend the currency used to perform pulls or dump some real-life dollars into the game to keep seeing the story being told.
Regardless of how you choose to continue, it comes the time when the first anti-paling thing is to be erected. One of those four children – you don’t know their ages because they are just sprites on a mobile device screen, but it’s implied that these are young kids – goes forward to do what they gotta do.
Oh! And before this, Mombert has been suspisciously silent and less-than-forthcoming about the particulars of this plan of theirs. Also one of the kids made him a necklace or something out of her favorite flowers. So, you just know something’s about to go down, right?
And you’d be correct.
One of the kids enters this temple-looking structure and goes off screen. Suddenly, things start shaking and glowing and one of your plethora of characters on the screen starts freaking out, saying something like that “kid’s life force is shrinking away!”
Mombert gets cornered once it’s clear what’s going on.
The plan is for these kids to sacrifice themselves, one-by-one, to reduce the emperor’s barrier so that he can be struck down.
Think on that for a second.
It’s intense for any video game to include children in combat scenarios and situations, it’s practically unheard of, especially ones implied to maybe be in their early teens. But to broach the theme of children sacrificing themselves so openly is bonkers, especially in a mobile game.
And I don’t know if it, for lack of a better term, works, but it sure does get your attention and tells the player “hey, we’re dealing with some serious things right now, you better pay attention and not hit that skip button in the top-left corner of the screen during these cutscenes.”
Your entourage isn’t OK with this – there’s got to be another way! – but Mombert and his remaining kids explain that this is their choice, what they want to do and why they came together in the first place. Who are you, a bunch of outsiders blind to their struggles, to suggest otherwise? And that’s apparently good enough for our heroes. They promise to continue escorting them along the way and to not interfere with the mission anymore than they already have.
A second pair of kids begin talking with each other in another cutscene, discussingt how they know they’re about to die and that one of them wants to confess that they like the girl of the group. Both kids, it turns out, like this girl, but only one confesses it to the other.
And then he dies. Willingly.
And then it’s the boy who was confessed to and the girl that both boys liked talking together and the girl confesses that she liked the boy who had just sacrificed himself. It’s almost comical in how absolutely tragic and downright melodramatic this game suddenly gets. The boy, instead of declaring that he liked her, chooses instead to tell her that the other boy liked her back. Telling one of the main characters who was listening in on their conversation, the boy said he’d rather make her happy as his last thing he does before he, also, willingly sacrifices himself for the greater good.
When it comes time for the girl to sacrifice herself, the jig is up and it’s revealed, though none of this was foreshadowed, that this was a plan 40-years in the making - that Mombert and those four kids tried to assassinate the emperor when they were all much younger.
Turns out, those four kids weren’t actually alive when they sacrificed themselves; they died in that failed attack four decades ago and were “visions,” a concept in the game that basically has people being a sort of magical automaton of a person. That’s also how the game can justify putting characters from other Final Fantasy titles into FFBE. It’s not really Cloud or Tidus in your game, it’s a vision of a hero from a land far away, told in tales.
Still! This game sacrificed four kids in front of you and then decided to say, oh, well not really. Except, they were totally still children the whole time while you were playing.
The story continues from there and uh, things don’t go as planned because this is the halfway point of season two, but it really sets up the plot and quickens the pace of the narrative.
Just how bad is the Emperor of Aldore?
This bad. Bad enough for this to be the best plan at taking him down.
Death and its finality is a major theme in FFBE – loads of nameless NPC sprites die or are implied to have died during the course of the game, taking a toll on the characters, evidenced through dialogue boxes. But it gets turned up to the maximum at this point in the story.
But that’s not the only theme this mobile game tackles:
It touches on brotherhood and what that means between the two major main characters, Rain and Lasswell;
It looks at friendship and how this enormous cast of characters develops relationships and supports each other;
FFBE spends time focusing on romantic love and the difficulty of expressing one’s feelings, as seen through two characters in particular, but other characters also have crushes – some are humorous in their presentation, some seem genuinely sincere and sweet;
It discusses personal growth, shown mostly in Lasswell becoming the main character and through his tutelage under his samurai warrior master, as well the story of a former slave who was saved and became yet another character along for the ride;
It approaches the idea fatherhood and what that means, as both a parent and as a human being;
It dabbles with the idea of insecurity and feeling inadequate or not strong or good enough;
And it dives into the concept of power and its apparent need in order to bring about change, as well as its ability to corrupt. People need more strength and power in order to mete out their idea of justice, but those with power are the ones who put things in such bad shape in the first place. There are so many characters who struggle with this.
And this is all from a mobile game! It’s ridiculously impressive and ambitious for FFBE to go after so many difficult themes and generally hit the mark. But it’s impossible to sing only its praises. While I mentioned earlier that I’d never suggest anyone begin playing FFBE because of its developers’ business acumen, it’s at least worth glancing at the story, I think.
I don’t know if the story that’s being told is good, but it is certainly more than you’d expect. And it’s commendable for a game that feels like a cash grab a lot of the time to give enough of a darn to actually try to tell a coherent, cohesive and compelling story that it just doesn’t deserve.