Tower of Fantasy: The Promising Failure

Tower of Fantasy has been out for a few months now. The future-focused open-world RPG was supposed to take the world by storm and be the next big thing. But, as the months go by, I find my interest fleeting more and more.

With the release of a new Free-To-Play MMO, of course, my group of friends wanted to check it out. Add on top of that, the fact that everyone was calling this game the “Genshin Impact killer” made it obvious that I had to check this game out. Tower of Fantasy was promoted as a futuristic MMO Open-World game that decides to mix gacha mechanics into it to turn a profit. This would mean it would switch up the formula from Genshin’s more history-based lands and lore.

Before Tower of Fantasy was released, it was promoted for a while and gained a large amount of community support by racking up over 4 million preregistrations.

So, what was so great about this game that it made loyal Genshin players jump onto the servers to check it out?

Customizability

When you first get into the game, you can select a premade male or female character to get through the beginning segment until you get to the customization options. I would say that Tower of Fantasy’s customization is pretty good, especially for a free game. You can go in-depth on things like height or the colors of your clothes. You can choose the bangs separate from the back of the head, add on top of that how you can pick different colors for the top and bottom sections of the hair along with the highlight color, and you can make sure your character looks pretty unique. The eyes are where you can get kinda lost in the options, with choices for shapes of the pupils along with multiple colors, I spent the most time in this section. Along with all of these, you can also use sliders to help make your character’s face just how you want it.

All these options made the character I created feel like my own. Even after hours of playing Tower of Fantasy, I never found another character that looked super similar to my own. This was one of the things that first caught my attention when more information about the game was released. I have always loved games that let you make a character rather than just giving you a predesigned one, so seeing the level of options that this game gives you was very exciting to me.

Story/Plot

At launch, every day that passed in real-time would unlock another section of the overall story/plot line. I do like that the game did not just throw you into the deep end with hours and hours of story right off the bat. When I was playing, the story was decently interesting for me, a person who is not huge into stories compared to combat. With so many games having non-memorable NPCs, Tower of Fantasy had me enjoying learning more about the characters that helped you as you progressed the story.

Weapons

After getting used to the combat in the game, it felt great! Unlike other gacha games that I have played in the past, this game lets you pull for different weapons instead of more characters. You still get more characters in a way with Tower of Fantasy. Essentially, you pull for weapons used by warriors in the past and you can use the character skins for each weapon you unlock. I like that I can get new and better weapons and not have to stop using the character that I spent so much time creating, but if I want to switch things up, I can use one of the skins.

While roaming the world, you can equip up to three weapons at a time. Those weapons include a lot of the usual weapons like bows, spears, guns, scythes, and many more. They will come in three levels of rarity. R, are the basic pulls that you will get many of, they are the blue pulls. SR are the purple pulls, these are ones that you can enhance if you get multiple copies of the weapon. And finally, there are the SSR weapons that are among the best you can get and will be gold. Each weapon has its own playstyle and certain ones will lean to main DPS while others are best in support positions.

Leveling & Growth

Similar to how they drip-fed the story, Tower of Fantasy instilled level caps that increased each day after the launch. This was nice for people like me who started the game a day late, putting me hours behind most of my friends. I didn’t feel like I was super behind because they could only get so far in the game before they capped out on levels or story quests. This level cap allowed me to catch up to them rather quickly compared to other games where it took a few binge sessions for me to catch up.

The EXP needed for each level seems to increase by a large amount, making every level after around 20 feel so much more rewarding. The game gives you plenty of level-up materials for your weapons, and the assertion materials are easy to come by if you do enough pulls.

One interesting feature that I never thought about but love is how the game takes into consideration level differences. It will probably be a common issue of you and your teammates being different levels, add that to the fact that enemies will have their levels match your own, how do you think this will be handled? Well, while playing with my boyfriend who was three levels higher than me, he mentioned that all of the enemies were scaled to his level, but on my screen, they were my level. Tower of Fantasy does an amazing job of letting you play with your friends no matter the level or skill difference by making the enemies that you specifically fight match your level, while your teammates fight enemies that scale to their own level. This might be one of my favorite features in the whole game.

Open-World

I love how lively the open world of Tower of Fantasy is. Those first few days playing, I spent a lot of my time just aimlessly wandering around the area to see what this new game had to offer. It was very easy to see that the developers wanted to stuff the grounds full of plants that you can shoot with fire or blast the dandelions off in order to snag a black nucleus or have a camp full of enemies for you to try out those new weapons on.

So, if I can ramble on about all of these great things that the game has to offer, why did I stop playing? Well, I honestly don’t have a great answer. I played the game for a few days the week it launched, and then I just lost that drive I had during the pre-launch time. I enjoyed my time in the open world, but somehow, my brain kept going back to my first impressions of Genshin’s open world, and somehow, Tower of Fantasy did not give me the same feeling. I can’t even explain why because it should have thrilled me to have all of these new things to explore, all of the wishing I can do because they actually GIVE YOU PULLS. There was just nothing that pulled me back, no character held my attention enough to say, “I wanna know even more about them!” It was always, “Oh, that’s a cool character,” or “Wow, I like their design.”

So, do I think the game is worth playing? Yes. If you enjoy open-world games that has a storyline you can experience with friends, you will enjoy this game. I have a friend who skipped playing Genshin Impact, only to be head-over-heels for Tower of Fantasy because there was a bigger focus on guilds and teamwork. It could be a great source of socialization, which was something that she looked for in a lot of her games.

I have not opened Tower of Fantasy for a few months at this point. Part of me does want to jump back in and give the game a second chance to grab my attention, but nothing has given me that final push to see if it will happen.