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Over the past few months I’ve been steadily forced to admit that iOS isn’t inherently opposed to what we would call "real games." At least not in one category, anyway.
Maybe it’s because these games aren’t getting as much notoriety as Words With Friends, but I haven’t really seen that many other people point out how well suited turn-based role-playing games are to iOS devices. It makes perfect sense, really, and I’ve been playing a few great examples, both of the Western and Japanese variety.
The reasoning is simple: RPGs have been mostly menu-based throughout their history, so they’re perfect for a touch-screen interface. Even ports of turn-based RPGs originally made for consoles get around the issue of buttons.
I try to avoid iOS games with virtual D-pads and buttons because of the lack of tactile feedback and responsiveness. But the only thing you need virtual buttons for in turn-based games is character movement, which isn’t a hassle when literally everything else in a game is in menus.
Lastly, handheld gaming is the one area where I actually prefer that RPGs be turn-based. While turn-based combat feels slow and antiquated on consoles for me now, on handhelds it adds to the convenience of letting me multi-task. Having those games on your phone has nearly perfected their convenience and accessibility, letting me stop and get in a couple turns whenever I feel like it.
The first RPG I got into on my iPhone was a free game called Undercroft. If you remember the older first-person PC dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder or Lands of Lore, or even the first two Elder Scrolls games, Undercroft is basically that, but on your iPhone. It’s amazing how elegantly the game manages to pack in all the essential elements of the RPGs in the same family as Skyrim.
With around 20 hours of gameplay according to the game’s iTunes page, it’s a hell of a package for the price of free, with plenty of sidequests and dungeons to explore. Even if it was once a paid app, it’s still a lot compared to most of what sells on the App Store. The combat even feels a bit more challenging than most Western RPGs we’re playing on consoles now. Undercroft’s only "downside" is that it looks like a computer RPG from 1994, and I think that was deliberate.
Another iPhone game very similar to Undercroft but a bit more robust is The Quest. Playing a demo for a little bit already has me impressed with what seems to be a decently thick storyline and a full-blown conversation system. This game even got three expansion packs and a gold edition for $8. Like Undercroft, Quest also looks like an early '90s WRPG (complete with original Doom-style 3D graphics), if you can hang with that sort of thing. The real kicker for me is that the game was built for portrait orientation, meaning you can theoretically now play a "full" classic-style RPG pretty much anywhere as long as you have one hand free.
Another RPG of the same type that should be coming later this year with fully modern graphics is The Legend of Grimlock. At the website you can see videos of the PC/Mac version (which will come out first) which basically looks like an early '90s RPG in terms of play style but with today’s graphics.
Every time I mention RPGs on iOS, I’m usually reminded of an iPad game called Avadon: the Black Fortress. Unlike the aforementioned titles, Avadon seems to be an isometric game reminiscent of Baldur’s Gate (or Dragon Age), but turn-based. Visually, it may not look like much, but it’s one of those games that knows it needs to make up for that with good writing. There’s a demo for the PC/Mac version on Steam.
On the Japanese side is, of course, all of Square Enix’s ports. The only one that I’ve played so far is Final Fantasy Tactics, which has come over pretty much intact, if not with a bit of a learning curve. The game’s interface on iPhone isn’t ideal, but it works after you get used to it, and it’s not stopping me from getting absorbed in the game. I’d still like to see if it would work better on iPad, though. Despite that, it’s still pretty insane that a game like this, with potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay, exists on the same platform where everyone is playing Angry Birds.
One last original game I decided to try out is Guardian Saga, which is basically a clone of the original Dragon Quest right down to the battles depicted in first person and some of the sound effects. The only big difference is that you can save anywhere. Everything about it works surprisingly well, especially because it’s on my phone. I started to get the sense of how real this game is when I first looked at the world map, which looks comparable to that of any old-school Final Fantasy game. The game world even feels decently developed, too, so it’s not like this is some throwaway clone.
All these games have me convinced that, if they tried, the developers of major console RPGs could probably make good spin-offs of their current games (or even ports of their older games) work on iOS. If Square can do it, why not Bethesda and BioWare? A bunch of kids today are getting into gaming through iOS instead of consoles, and depending on what happens, the platform could become an ideal new gateway into RPGs for a new generation.