Hello everyone! As promised in last week's post, I'm going to be reviewing Spirit Stones and Age of Ishtaria. This week, Spirit Stones.
Since last week's article is verrrrry long, I'm going to do a quick rundown of what Spirit Stones is for anyone who doesn't want to know all of the details. Spirit Stones is a turn-based, card collecting puzzle game with a fantasy based storyline. You collect and power-up cards to fight monsters and complete quests to progress the storyline. It limits how much you can play with different types of stamina and offers more difficult dungeons, big bosses that everyone fights against, and a player versus player system. I would recommend referencing the different sections of last week's post for more details if anything in this one is confusing. Everything there is broken down into aspects of the games for easier reference.
For starters, I'm going to talk about what I liked about Spirit Stones before getting into the aspects that could have been done better as well as the ones that ultimately led to the game's end. One of my favorite parts of Spirit Stones was collecting cards. They had a wide range of very nicely done artwork on them and it was fun seeing the changes as I evolved them. The puzzle aspect of the game was a lot of fun, albeit difficult at times, because it added a level of difficulty and helped me to become better at strategizing while playing. I enjoyed trying to power my decks up and beat stronger and stronger opponents. Overall, I really enjoyed the game and spent quite a few hours playing it.
One of my main frustrations with Spirit Stones was the overly difficult player vs player battles. More often than not I ended up having to fight a very high leveled player instead of someone closer to my own level. Additionally, occasionally I would randomly be unable to do battles and I had no idea why because the explanation was vague and I couldn't find any further information on it. Another one of my gripes is that many of the levels were overly difficult, giving objectives that could only be fulfilled if all of the stars aligned and it was also your lucky day. While I enjoyed powering up my cards, it was a bit difficult and quite expensive game-currency-wise to collect enough of the same card to evolve it completely, then try to remember what combinations of fully evolved cards made a new card, and so on. (I eventually looked up the wiki towards the end so I wouldn't be wasting my in-game currency evolving cards I didn't need.)
Overall, I enjoyed Spirit Stones quite a bit despite my frustrations with it and I was really sad to see it go away. However, after reading other's comments on the "We're discontinuing the game" post that was made, I could see that the development team had neglected quite a few bugs that essentially broke the game. I hadn't taken any part in the team gameplay, which is where the bugs were, so I never saw that aspect of the game, but I had noticed that there wasn't ever a new event or much in the way of updates to the game. I would give Spirit Stones a 4/5 from what I played in it and had recommended it to friends prior to its discontinuation.
Have you ever played Spirit Stones? Let me know in the comments below!
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