Chaos Rings Review: Square Enix Delivers the Goods

App Name:	Chaos Rings
Platforms:	iPhone, iPod Touch
Publisher(s):	Square Enix
Genre(s):	RPG
Release Date:	April 20, 2010
Price:	$12.99
Download

Last month, Zenonia 2 delivered the definitive classic role-playing game experience to the iPhone. Now, Square Enix, makers of the Final Fantasy series, are aiming to deliver the definitive iPhone RPG experience, period, with Chaos Rings. They very nearly succeed, for Chaos Rings is a spectacularly designed and extremely playable foray into the realm of RPGs.

The plot of Chaos Rings isn’t much to speak of.  You choose one of two pairings to play through the game. Each pairing has a backstory, and neither pair likes each other much. Your pair, along with four others, has been kidnapped from their home worlds and taken to a strange sub- dimension, the Arc Arena. There, you are informed that you have been chosen to fight for the amusement of unseen overlords. The winner of the competition wins not only their freedom, but also eternal life. The losers, of course, die–like all good battles for eternal life, in the end there can be only one.

I won’t give Chaos Rings too many points for originality here. The band of strangers kidnapped and brought together to fight for their freedom is a cliché of fantasy and science fiction. Chaos Rings doesn’t execute it poorly, however, and it serves to give the game a satisfying dramatic arc without having to develop an entire game world. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that the characters were all plucked from various incarnations of the Final Fantasy games, and that serves the plot well enough.

The plot serves mainly as a vehicle for the game play. It’s at this level that Chaos Rings excels the most. It’s a turn-based combat system based entirely around dungeon crawling, and it functions as well as any solid Final Fantasy title. Most combats are fairly quick hack-n-slash affairs; bosses, however, require you to dig deeper into your arsenal of items and abilities.

The pair you choose at the beginning of the game will determine how you tackle the bosses and other battles. One pair is more balanced in abilities, while the other features a combat-heavy and a support-heavy build. One thing Chaos Rings gets right is the way these teams work differently to deliver two different play experiences.

The more balanced team, Eluca and Zhano, would seem to favor the casual player. They automatically heal some damage each turn and losing one character doesn’t spell automatic defeat for the other. They’re easy to hack-n-slash with.

The less balanced team, Escher and Musiea, would be the best choice for dedicated RPGers. The team requires more use of the game’s combat intricacies–Musiea doesn’t do much in straight combat, working far better with her special abilities to enhance the combat-oriented Escher; and if Escher goes down, you’ve likely lost the fight. Escher and Musiea also have the more complex story arc, something dedicated players will appreciate.

In a lot of ways, Square Enix really paid attention to their target audience here. iPhone games are, by the very nature of the platform, simpler and more casual affairs then console games. The developers have really been able to squeeze a lot of great RPG play into a streamlined package, one that rewards intensive play while still being accessible in pocket-sized chunks. Might the level grind get a tad repetitive, or the story a little thin, if you play the game for hours on end? Perhaps. But as an iPhone game, it’s just the right level of plot and game play. It also allows the player to choose their level of difficulty before entering each dungeon, so that those more casual players never get overwhelmed with higher-tier enemies.

I also love the control scheme. Various iPhone games have tried a multitude of control schemes for their interfaces—everything from static direction pads to adjustable sizes to pad-less swiping. For Chaos Rings, all you need to do is touch a blank part of the screen and the control stick will appear beneath it; and instead of relying on separate directional buttons (like Zenonia 2 did), it’s a 360-degree control.  This works out really well, especially for we fellows with big thumbs. Combat buttons and menu selections are also larger for the iPhone screen, making them easy to see, read, and hit (another thing Zenonia 2 lacked).

The game also looks good. I mean, incredibly good. It’s one of the best graphical efforts I’ve seen on the iPhone screen. In fact, it looks so good that I have been playing it on my iPad. Even at x2, the game looks nice–a little pixelated, but nice, and the rendered graphics look great on the larger screen.

This isn’t to say that Chaos Rings is flawless. Its required level grinding can get repetitious, for example, and that repetition is made poorer for the lack of dungeon and encounter variety. Rather than introduce completely new levels, Chaos Rings recycles its limited levels with difficulty levels, which means you’re playing the same boards multiple times. Even within the boards, you’ll face the same pre-rendered dungeon corridors over and over, just with the entrance and exit points moved around. This sameness can get annoying and occasionally confusing.

The monsters are limited as well. There are only some 10 or 12 monster types, each corresponding to “genes” you collect (equipping genes gives you special combat powers and other advantages). The programmers devoted just one model to each type, and varied them by changing their colors and manifested abilities. Like the recycled dungeon corridors, this gets annoying and occasionally confusing—is the Slug type that’s slightly greenish the one that’s Gale type or Aqua they? Well, best just to cut it down with my sword anyway.

Perhaps these were choices made because Chaos Rings is an iPhone game. Maybe the developers recognized that the game would be played at a more casual pace and didn’t feel the need to invest more time in that aspect of development, instead fine-tuning the touch controls, menu design, and other crucial iPhone issues. Or perhaps they just wanted to avoid making the file bigger—the app file is one of the biggest in my iPod at 253 MB (most of the rest weigh in at under 100 MB, and many under 50 MB). Whatever their reasons, the result is a game that doesn’t reward dedicated or prolonged play the way a console RPG would.

So, is Chaos Rings the best RPG on the iPhone? That depends. It’s certainly the best that I’ve played in it’s class …but then again, right now, Chaos Rings is really in a class by itself. Of all the games I have played on the iPhone, it comes the closest to recreating a modern console game experience. It’s steep price will certainly turn some people off, which is a shame, and its repetitious design may annoy hard-core players. But for those willing to foot the bill and overlook these flaws, Chaos Rings will certainly impress.

Our score: 4 out of 5.

Chaos Rings is currently available in the App Store.

Chaos Rings for the iPad is available in the App Store.

For a glimpse into Chaos Rings in action, check out the Chaos Rings Video below.

About the Author

Writer@Large Brian P. Hudson is an educator and freelance writer currently living in Dearborn, MI.

 

Best Free Apps of the Day!