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Monster Strike is the flagship game from Mixi Inc. that blew up in Japan last year. As with all hit F2P games, copycats started appeared. So let’s switch to a game that is probably more relevant to this forum’s interests.





Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Shooters is the truth. It’s like Carrom the Battle RPG- you make your party of pogs and bounce them around the field to hit the enemy pogs. Every character has stats that affect how much damage they do on impact, how much HP they have, and what skills they can use. The characters can gain experience and unlock abilities they can pull off mid-battle, like giving a character extended bouncing or an AOE blast. It's got the obligatory elemental weakness system where units will do more damage against enemies of a susceptible element. There are even giant boss pogs that take up a fifth of the screen, making them easier to hit but also easier for them to hit you.









Gameplay footage

Just shooting these pogs is fun, man. On Android the game is technically supposed to be restricted to Japan on the Google Play Store but there is a way to get around it. The website APK Downloader will let you download the game's install file which you can open on your phone. If you use the Chrome extension from that site you can even get the Play Store to recognize the game on your account, enabling the game to be auto-updated.

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Now that I’m not half asleep I can explain a bit better what the heck this game is.



You start by assembling a team of units- one leader, two partners, and one standby that will replace your first dead character mid-battle. Every unit has a cost based on their relative strength or potential and your team can’t exceed a 26 point cost. The units have a handful of stats to consider ranging from the typical attack and hit points but also, I believe, stats for how much your character bounces around the field. Additionally you’ve got special abilities and elemental affiliations. Elements work in the typical rock-paper-scissors fashion but since there are five elements in the game and your can only send three people from your team onto the field at once you can’t prepare yourself to be competent against every type of element.

When you start a quest you are then given the opportunity to recruit another player’s leader unit from a list who will join you as a fourth character on the field. The list tends to have some fairly strong units but for every character they kill that’s less experience going towards your own units so there’s some consideration in how effective your want this recruited character to be. If one of these recruited units is from someone on your friend list you get bonus friend points which can in turn be used to buy more units.





When a round starts you and the enemy units are put in random formations on the map. Here you can see my four units on the bottom and the three enemies on top. Units in this game also have varying sizes as you can see with the enemies here. The red marks on the side of the large units are weak points- if you are able to hit that part of the enemy they will take extra damage. You can use your units in any order you want while the enemy units get a turn when their individual countdown timers hit zero (the numbers count after each of your moves). So there are a few considerations you want to think about at the outset of the match:

- What are the elements of my enemies? You can tell my units’ elements by the color of the outer edge of their pogs and by the borders of their portraits. In this particular battle I’m against ared element, a blue element, and a non-element. My blue unit is to the bottom right of the red BOSS so I can strike him right away for an elemental bonus but I can’t hit the weakpoint at all (in fact I can’t hit any weakpoints on my first shot at all). The blue enemy is completely unreachable by my green unit, which is in a prime location to be hit by the red bosss.

- How quick are the enemies’ turns? The uncolored enemy on the left will get a turn right after my first shot while the other two enemies will both go after my second shot. Since the units bounce and push each other around the field you can think about how you want your units to be positioned when the enemy’s turn comes up.

Once you’ve decided which unit to use and where to aim you then drag you finger from the unit outwards to set your strength and let go, slingshotting your unit across the field. Depending on the units’ stats you’ll inflict a certain amount of damage to enemies and either ricochet away or follow enemy as it bounces, hitting it repeatedly. Any allied unit the enemy bounce into will inflict additional damage and everyone will bounce every which way. At any point before you stop you can tap the screen to make your unit stop and place and do damage any enemy within a certain range. This quick stop is useful for hitting multiple enemies right before you stop moving or to put yourself into a certain position for your next turn. It can be tricky to do this quick stop since the units move quickly and can stop on a dime; the uncertainty can make you end your movement far earlier than necessary or miss your enemies completely.

As you hit enemies you build the yellow energy meter at the bottom which can be used for special abilities if any of your characters have one. In the above picture you can see one unit is glowing yellow both in the field and on his portrait which signals I have enough energy to use his ability which you can activate by tapping the unit’s pog or portrait.





When you turn on your character’s ability you can then see the area of effect for the move. Some are circles around the unit while other could be boxes that extend across the field, and obviously the effects themselves can vary. The unit’s ability replaces the quick tap function- you execute the ability by tapping the screen while your character is bouncing, stopping them in place and hitting every enemy in the area of effect. Again, if you time it wrong you can completely miss the enemy and waste your energy.

Dead enemies can leave behind health potions on field (see in the top right)- any unit that hits the potion gets health back. These potions stay in position between rounds so you can try and save them for later battles. Some dead enemies will give you unit drops or item drops which you claim once you’ve completed every round. The enemy units can also have standby units just like you but in far greater numbers so every time you kill an enemy it can be replaced by another until the supply runs dry.

So that’s pretty much how that system works. As you collect units from battles or spending friend points you’ve accumulated, you can strengthen them by sacrificing others. Some units can gain strength as you collect more of the same unit, some units get more abilities or passive effects as they level up or are upgraded with certain items. It’s got the typical kind of F2P progression.

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I will make a more detailed reply tomorrow but DAIS you can look into Mystery Dungeon Shiren the Wanderer: The Rainbow Labyrinth and Minna de Fushigi no Dungeon- Fuurai no Shiren (Everyone's Mysterious Dungeon- Shiren the Wanderer). The Play store pages for these games aren't up anymore as far as I know so you probably can't play them even if you find the APK files but who knows what you'll find?

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Yeah, it is an interesting combat mechanic that still follows the Prime Japanese F2P Design Framework. Japanese F2P games are in an interesting place where they very rigidly follow the design and formulas created in the card battle genre. Recent games feel confident enough to tinker with the exact way you interact with the combat sequences but the subsystems and everything outside of the combat sequences are the same. If you know how to play one mobile F2P game you know how to play all of them. In fact, that's why if you mess around with an English game you can easily play any Japanese game with minimal trouble! You even know what all the menus are!

But this has brought some interesting RPG/Something-else hybrids. Puzzle and Dragons is a great match-3 puzzle game where you are given the perspective of a traditional Dragon Quest-like RPG battle with a puzzle board placed below. Each piece on the board correlates to an element and matching those pieces causes monsters in your party of that element to attack. Quiz RPG- World of Mystic Miz is a quiz game where you are presented with question topics, each one correlating to an element. You choose a topic and if you answer the question right then monsters in your party of that element will attack the enemy.


About Lord of Vermillion III, I was getting ready to write up an explanation of how it works because it honestly isn't as difficult as it seems at first. However after looking at card for LoV3 I realized it's a very different game from its predecessor! While LoV Re. 2 was an action game LoV3 looks more like an RTS. The trading card arcade game genre has a lot of really interesting games too. If you're curious about trying one you can grab Sangokushi Taisen for the Nintendo DS, an adaptation of Sega's trading card arcade game. The top screen is the gameplay screen and the bottom screen is used as the game board where you would place your cards. It's obviously an imperfect recreation but it plays fine and is still a lot of fun.

As for whether there are any copies non-Japanese clones, I'm not an expert so I can't really say. Companies seem more interested in copying games that have proven successful in their native regions rather than elsewhere, so they would probably wait until Monster Strike (a more likely candidate than Jojo) to come out in English before copying them.

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Before getting into other games I figure I might as well explain the game where a lot these game mechanics started.




The first thing you do is form your team, selecting up to five monsters with one monster chosen as a leader whose leader skill will be applied to the entire team. You can see every monster has a cost and your team can’t exceed your current Total Cost stat which will heightens as you heighten in rank. All of your monsters’ HP values add up to make your total HP for the battle and below that you can see your teams strength in each element which I believe are also just summations of your monsters’ ATK- each monster’s ATK going into the corresponding element the monster is associated with. The RCU value is the recovery value, again a summation of your monsters’ RCU values, and this represents how well your team recovers HP in battle. When looking at an individual monster you can see their stats and skills. The SKL (skill) is a monster’s active ability it can use mid-battle. The Lv. is used to show progressively stronger versions of a particular skill and the Turn value is how many turns it takes to charge up the skill before use. So here you can see Aldebaran can do a strong Water element attack 19 turns into a tower, and once you use it you have to wait another 19 turns before it can do it again. If Aldebaran is set as your team’s Leader then every monster on your team that can inflict Water element damage will do 2x damage.





Once you’ve set up your team you can then choose a tower to fight in. The towers are then split into floors, so in this picture one of the towers would be Tower of Giants and it contains floors calls Wrath of the Giant, Giant Guards, etc. As you complete floors you unlock more floors until you complete a tower which will then unlock a new tower with new floors and so on. You can guess at what kind of monsters you’ll fight on floor based on its name which can help you choose your team before going in (you can assume you’ll fight fire enemies in the Red Skies floors of the Sky Dragon of Flame tower). After choosing the floor you’re going to fight on you are then presented with a random list of other player’s leader monsters. You can choose one of them to be additional member on your team for that floor, giving you some more fighting power and even a Friend Skill, a passive ability much like your Leader Skill (I’m not sure if these friend skills are dependent on the monster or if players choose it themselves). After your finish a floor you also have the opportunity to send a friend request to the player you used.

The floors themselves are just a framing for the battles- when you choose a floor you just see the camera take several steps through a hallway and then a battle will start. Each floor will be split into several battles climaxing with a boss. Your HP carries over to each battle so if you’re low on life you can’t rest on your laurels if you win a fight but so do your monsters’ skill charge times. The aforementioned Aldebaran’s skill takes 19 turns to charge- if your fight takes you 9 turns to win then when the next fight starts Aldebaran only has to wait 10 more turns before he can use his skill.



The actual combat is handled like a match-3 puzzle game. You make matches of three or more to remove those pieces from the board, causing everything above it to drop down and potentially creating more matches. When you make a match of a particular element this will cause your monsters of that element to attack- the larger the match then the stronger your attack. For every additional match you make as pieces drop you will add attack power to that element as well as grant combo bonus multipliers to your attack value once your matches have completed. The heart pieces are the Recovery pieces that are affected by your team’s RCU value. Matching these restores life for your party. Each of the enemy monsters have their own elemental affinities and you want to make attacks following the rock-paper-scissors element system you can see in the top right corner, attacking enemies with elements that they’re weak against (you can target particular enemies by tapping them, making all damage from your current turn damage one enemy). So the key to winning is to create combos with your monsters elements, balancing both attack and HP restoration.

Another cool thing about this game is that it’s not a simple “swap one piece” type of puzzle game. When you put your finger on a piece and begin sliding you, you are given a countdown timer until your turn is over. For that entire time you can keep moving the piece, switching spots with every piece you pass. This lets you manipulate the entire game board, creating combos with multiple elements on different areas of the board, setting up ways for pieces to fall in place. This adds an additional element of planning and dexterity as you try to figure out ways to create combos across the board as quickly as possible Furthermore above each enemy you can see their own countdown timers until they attack, decreasing after each of your turns. This lets you plan your long-term strategy for both matching and skill usage.
You can see this in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE9CP9Q07OU




A couple of movement guides I found on google image search:






As you kill monsters you’ll be given both gold and eggs. After battle eggs hatch into monsters that you can add to your team while gold is spent to fuse monsters together, strengthening one monster’s stats. Once a monster reaches its max level you can also pay to evolve the monster to a stronger form which can often times again level to a new max limit and evolve to an even stronger form. The monsters you get from eggs will vary based on the tower in you’re in but will often end up being fusion fodder. The main way to get good monsters in through the infamous gachapon system.

The Egg Machines are your way to summon strong monsters into your team and are modeled after gachapon machines, those things you always see in store where you insert some coins, turn the handle, and out pops some candy or a toy in a small capsule. In Puzzle and Dragon there are two machines with which to summon monster: the Pal Machine and the Rare Egg Machine. The Pal Machine costs Pal Points, points you get for adding friends or selecting friends’ monsters as your extra monster during fights. The Rare Egg Machine costs magic stones, a rare item you get through special events or by completing towers. The Rare Egg Machine guarantees summons of rare or higher monsters and is obviously the more useful of the two but also not usable as often due to the limited resources.

The game also regularly has special events, opening new towers to fight through for a limited time that grant better egg drops, magic stones for rewards, and opportunities to get special monsters only obtainable during the event. You can expect to see cameos from other franchise in these special events.







Puzzle and Dragons is a legitimately good game system. The only problem it has the typical F2P monetization model. Magic stones are rare to tempt you into paying real money to get more quickly. Every run through a floor costs you stamina and you have to wait for it to recharge over real time if you don’t have enough (it also refills when you rank up). I’m sure there are difficulty walls to make you either grind or pay to get more monster summons. I’m sure there are some funky things going on with rarities to make you summon more. But the base mechanics are well thought for a quick mobile game and for an RPG puzzle game.

It has also defined a branch of the Japanese F2P genre with other games copying the party management mechanics and just changing the way you conduct combat (like the pog sliding in Jojo). You’ve also got more literal rip-offs, using the exact same setup but just changing the puzzle matching rules. Even Sega got in on the action with PuyoPuyo!! Quest!


Some pictures of the monsters you can get:

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Little Tail Story official site: http://lts.bngames.net


One thing you have to give CyberConnect2 credit for is their attention to presentation. While most companies are still using (admittedly often time gorgeous) stationary art in their games CC2 has been using detailed 3D graphics for both of their mobile games Guilty Dragon (in the .Hack series) and now Little Tail Story (in the Tails Concerto/Solatorobo series). The use of animated models gives them the opportunity to establish a stronger personality to the combat scenarios and to distinguish its presentation from the cookie-cutter card battle template.

Because it is nuts just how adorable Little Tail Story is. Official classified as a “Dog and Cat RPG”, you control a team of super deformed cat and dog people who have the brightest smiles on their faces and can’t stop bouncing left and right as they go on adventures and yell things like “Let’s go!”, “Look at this!” and “Wan wan!” Even the enemies in this game are smiling and bouncing left and right in combat. Though the character models are relatively simple, they are smooth and accompanied by a rather gorgeous art direction. The game utilizes simple but vibrant colors that make everything pop off of the screen, like the long drill noses on the penguin things or hammer-person’s big hammers. This, along with the exaggerated but smoothly animated animations, makes Little Tail Story a surprisingly pretty game for a F2P mobile phone game.







The game itself is also very well designed. In Little Tail Story you control a team of eight members (seven from your own team plus the one obligatory “friend” guest member). You decide each members individual classes, elements, equipment (head, weapon, armor, and backpack) that affect their standard RPG stats, and their order. When you enter a battle you have your team set in a circle with only three on screen at a time placed a 3x3 grid that can contain enemies lined up in any kind of formation. Each character gets an action time bar (or circle in this case) ala Final Fantasy that has to fill before your characters can take an action, either a regular attack or a skill. The regular attack will vary based the character’s class. The knight will slash the enemy directly in from of it, the hammer-person will hit two enemies in front of it and the one space diagonally, the lancer hits all three rows in front, the shield-person hits the entire front row, and the magician hits all nine squares. These classes have varying base strengths so although the magician has the most coverage it also generally isn’t going to be as strong as the other units and the hammer person does a decent amount of strength in the space directly in front of it but the other three areas it hits take less damage. Skills rely on the skill bar, which has eight units that build slowly over time. Skills will require varying amounts of the skill bar with each class suitably having their own unique set of skills with varying kinds of abilities, both attacks and buffs/debuffs.

Enemies, too, have their own visible action time bars and attack ranges. The legless pumas can hit the square directly in front but the drill penguin things can hit two spaces forward, letting them essentially attack over the pumas, and the armadillos can hit all three of your characters but only from the front row. As per usual there is also the obligatory rock-paper-scissors element system but its effects on your attack strength are enormous. A red knight may be able to kill a green enemy in one turn while a blue knight could take four and that applies to your enemies’ strength as well. Combat strategy is all about adjusting which of your characters are on point on the three active slots based on the enemy layout and positions. If you have a red enemies in the front you’re going to want to move your blue characters into the active space to deal more damage and move the green characters into the back to preserve their life. If a character dies in one round it will be dead for the entire set of battles so losing a character is rather major.









Also recall that I mentioned you decide your teams’ order- this is where that becomes a bit more important. If the front enemies are ordered Green-Green-Red, you ideal want to put a Red-Red-Blue formation in front. But you don’t the exact formations your enemies are going to have ahead of time. You can see in the volcano themed area I’m in above that it’s a fire-themed level but I’m still fighting some blue enemies. So if I’m going against a G-G-R front row and my team is set up as

G-B-G-R-B-R-B-R

well, I don’t have that optimal G-G-R order of characters I can use! I can possibly use G-R-B to have advantage on the center and right squares but I’m putting my left character at disadvantage. If I go R-G-B I can at minimum be at neutral advantage in the center while maintaining advantage on the sides. This decision making gets even more difficult when you have enemies that hit multiple spaces or across a distance. It’s also worth noting that characters only build their action time bars while they’re in the three active positions (I think everyone might build the skill bar regardless of where they are). If you move someone to the back their action bar will freeze where it currently is. So jostling your party and trying to balance your advantage and disadvantage to preserve your characters’ HP is the core of the strategy. It’s a lot fun!

Something I forgot to mention earlier is that you also have a Cyclone bar that builds up as you deal and take damage. When full you do an attack where your entire team runs around in circles, causing heavy damage to all three front squares.

Rather than characters the main thing you collect and power up in this game is equipment. You can however create/recruit new characters and everyone levels up individually, unlocking skills for their current class. Every piece of equipment has a visual representation on the character models, giving you that nice feeling of ownership when you get something cool and helps visually distinguish your characters from one another.


I think Little Tail Story is a lot of fun and definitely has potential to be a standalone not-F2P game if CC2 ever felt so inclined to develop one.