Hello guys and gals on the forum! I've sent the following email to silicon studio (developer of Fantasica) with some ideas for improvement on gameplay. What are your views? Does anyone wanna chime in and tell silicon studio their suggestions on the game? And does anyone have contacts of the studio other than fantasica_support ... siliconstudio.co.jp ?

Obviously English is not my first language and I apologize if the words seem awkward to you


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(email)


Dear Developers of Fantasica,

* Not sure if English is understood but I hope this message reaches the developers of the awesome FANTASICA.

First of all, thank you all for the work which is the mobile game FANTASICA. I'm a happy player of the international English version of the game (I'm from Hong Kong by the way), and I even paid for several card packs to get some nice cards. I enjoyed the game immensely due to the excellent graphics (masterful arts by Hideo Minaba and other artists indeed), intuitive user interface (UI), and the innovative mix of genre (tower defense + trading card game + RPG). Your game is definitely above most of comparable TCG in the market. This game is by far the most polished and the one with the best potential among comparable casual TCGs. I hereby extend my best appreciation to the efforts of the awesome team behind this game

While I understand the game is going pretty strong locally in Japan, and many events / cards were not even released in the international English version yet, I can see that the game might not fare as well in the international market, mostly due to differences in the expectation of a TCG. Even with casual games, the international audience generally seeks games with better gameplay and they are rarely satisfied by just collecting / leveling cards. The "completionist" attitude is not as prevalent in the international audience than in the local Japanese market. Indeed, many of my friends (from all over the world) tried FANTASICA for a while and their major concerns are as follows -

- tower defense levels are too small / short
- lack of power to influence the tower defense (e.g. no temporary "mines" / "powers" to invoke, ability to change towers mid-battle)
- monsters in tower defense level lack special abilities (most monsters are pretty much the same and has even defenses towards air/land/sea, except maybe for mummies)
- lack of ability to control defense from other players (e.g. order of appearance of defending monster cards, lack of upgrading of defense abilities, such as boosting speed / defense towards particular type of attack, etc)
- hero cards (towers) lack variety in abilities (only poison/slow/knockback/area/atk up are available on a linear scale)

As you can see, they are fine with everything else, except for the core gameplay which defines the game.

I love the game and I would really love to see it grows (and would love to spend more on it!). If your eyes are set upon the international world and you would also like the game to sweep the international market with great success, may I offer the following constructive ideas for your kind consideration -

- improve variety in tower defense scenarios by
> adding new defense mechanisms to be purchased with luna / action points mid-battle (e.g. mines which works on land monster only, abilities like lighning strike, volcanic eruption, tornadoes which has different effectiveness depending on types of monster)
> adding variety of monsters (e.g. occasionally make a monster "unique" and flash in golden hue, and it will have higher health and higher speed. On killing the monster, it drops better loot and xp and even give cards (1-3 star); also add more specialized defences for different types of monsters, e.g. Incubus takes half damage from female towers; Succubus (6*) immune from male towers. and Kraken disables towers for 3 seconds by spreading inks!) - this elevate the strategic thinking required and makes for depth of gameplay
> adding more skills for the heros (towers) (e.g. one-per-battle skills for 4-6 stars card, e.g. victoria does mass area damage beside her; lieselotte does guaranteed critical damage with high cooldown (10 seconds); the list goes on and on! Skills of heros should stick to each card and be trained by "enhance" with specific card (e.g. lieselotte gains skill by being enhanced with maxed Kirill (ninja)) - this improve depth of gameplay and gives high value cards a special brand of uniqueness!

- improve "defence" from other player attacks
> allow ordering of appearances of defence monsters
> adding special abilities to the defence monsters (see above point 2)
> allow further customisation of defence castle (e.g. change of appearance for purchase with luna, adding defences which e.g. disables enemy towers / incapacitate certain elements / attack type)

I hope the above ideas can help you guys improve the games. These are just my 2 cents, I'm sure you guys know what's best for the future! By the way, please also add an official forum for trading cards for the international version. It is really hard to communicate with buyers / sellers right now

This game has huge potential and already has a solid foundation for building upon. I love you guys. Let's all work together for a better future for FANTASICA!

Regards

In game community sucks. Next to no communication with players on a "world chat" level. The card pull is as close as it gets and Trading is difficult enough already. Need to be able to propose both offered and received cards in a single action (by making other players cards viewable in trade). Or allow gallery on profile for players to show cards available for trade. A battle ranking system would be nice with leaderboards for weekly and overall. Would also provide more consistent place for players to gather to trade (#1 weekly players wall has been used in other games)

hopefully can suggest more brave per day. 200 times per day is too little. and hope can add on private message so that ally can communicate with each others more easier and also can discuss tactic without giving stranger knows, it may help that in future come out some event that can play in group. this will bring the game more interesting as well.

I'mma respond to this with my own opinions:

First of all, this game has been in Japan for quite awhile now, and it seems to be doing relatively well here in the US. While I would definitely agree that if the tower defense aspect were more complicated/advanced/etc the game would be cooler, I have a feeling that unless this was changed in Japan they're not going to overhaul the game much here.

In regards to community, I do think it'd be cool if there were clans or guilds of some sort and events that incorporated those. Once again though, unless Japan does this first, not sure it's going to make it out over here, even if we beg them to. I also agree that the 40char limit is quite, well, limiting, and because of it harder to communicate in general. PMs would be cool in a way. I find it quite interesting actually how you can look in on people's conversations, haha.

If I were to suggest an improvement I'd like now, I'd change the UI up a bit. I was playing this game called Angel's Salvation a few weeks back (it's this really cool match-3 puzzler, I believe it's on sale for free now) and it has a really sleek UI. While playing Fantasica I don't notice it too much now, the scrolling for the menu at the bottom could be smoother/quicker. That or the icons could be made smaller so you could reach more at once, or there could be some kind of quick menu available.

Of course I'm too lazy to email any devs or anything, so this is just stuff I would love if it were implemented but probably won't be. x__x

Great suggestions and all, but why try to make the game like every other trading card game? The appeal to me about this game was that it wasn't completely like the other TCG games out there. I migrated to this game from RoB (was in love with it but was completely turned off with the whole issue of hackers/2+ weeks trading ban) --> LoC (same interface as RoB but in the end didn't care for it and stopped questing at Lvl. 10, didn't look as clean as RoB).

Just my two cents :-)

i like the simple tower defense line up since i can multi-task while having the game on in the background.

the only thing i wish the dev's had one was release the game by region rather than internationally

oh and update the menu so that you can select more at once... (i hate swiping 4-5 times to get to some menus)