Anything can happen in a fantasy world where you are a vampire who has incurred massive amounts of debt, lost your castle to a marauding hero, and now run a weapon shop to slowly chip away at that debt. Hire minion—er—staff to craft and quest in your stead and profit—or else!
https://youtu.be/hs4K_qZEWys
I’ve always been a fan of casual simulation style games and when I saw one reviewer compare Weapon Shop Fantasy to games by Kairosoft, a well-known developer of excellent mobile simulation games, I knew I had to play it.
Weapon Shop Fantasy is played entirely with your mouse. You can choose to play as male or female and select from a handful of pets, whose purpose is to look cute and sometimes yield coins when you click on them.
The game begins with a cut scene that explains the ridiculous situation leading up to you, a vampire, running a weapon shop in order to pay back a whopping sum of five million gold to another vampire. This absurd exchange is the driving force—the “why am I doing this?”—behind the game and sets up the ultimate goal at the end of your mercantile grind. You start with 2000g, lent to you by your debtor as a sign of good faith, and the game walks you through a tutorial. Then, it’s up to you what you make of your time; you’re immortal, after all, so you have the option to work for the rest of eternity.
Naturally, you don’t want to have to work for the rest of your immortal life, so it’s time to put your shop workers to good use.
Crafting, adventuring, completing missions, and selling or equipping the items you create makes up the bulk of gameplay and you’ll spend a lot of time tabbing between your storefront and the adventure screen so that you can keep track of your operations.
In your store, you’re able to..
Make purchases
The gold you earn can be spent on a variety of workstations and Boss Skills. I’ll explain crafting and adventuring a bit later. Boss Skills, while costly, make your life easier and streamline your sweatshop. These include things like bigger queues for your crafting stations, reduced staff wages, increased storage space for the equipment you’ve crafted, and the like.
Craft and Enchant
What you can craft depends on what station you use. There are a total of five stations:
- Furnace (Vit) - Ingots, glass bottles.
- Craft Table (Dex) - Potions, leather and cloth equipment, refined materials like sticks and leather.
- Enchanting table (Int) - Add elemental defense and attack to armor and weapons respectively
- Forge (Str) - Iron weapons, armor, and accessories like rings.
Each crafting station has an associated attribute (listed next to it) that will make crafting or enchanting successfully and with a higher ranking more likely.
Go on Adventures!
Your stables are where you’ll send your workers on adventures, which is how you’ll acquire raw materials for crafting. You can tab between your storefront and the adventure screen using the triple arrow icon on the middle right side of the screen. You can have up to four simultaneous adventures running at a time and there are 8 possible places to send your adventurers, each with their own elemental affinity, materials, and monsters.
Adventures are automated; your would-be hero will fight whatever is in their paths, mine, cut down trees, and eat wild foods which will have positive and negative effects that will last the duration of their adventure. The only thing they won’t do is save their own skins, which means you’ll need to pay attention to their health if you aren’t on the adventure screen, watching the adventure progress.
The game shows the health bar of your hero(es) when you’re on your shop screen and lines of text appear at the top of that screen to warn you of monsters they’ve run into. If your hero is slain, he’ll run back to your shop without any of his loot (unless you buy a Boss Skill that allows for a percentage of your loot to make it back with you), so there’s no shame in turning tail.
The boss monsters and chest monsters (Mimics) pose a serious threat to even the most seasoned adventurers, so it’s best to avoid them until much, much later.
Adventurers will also gain stats and skill exp points from successful adventurers. Skills are tied to pieces of equipment and are divided into active and passive skills. After you've earned enough exp, you’ll have mastered the skill and it will still be available even after you change equipment.
Complete Missions
There are three types of missions:
1) Main Missions. Finishing these gives you bits of the main story. They consist of milestones given to you by your vampire debtor and their conditions will typically be fulfilled eventually through regular play
2) Sub Missions. These are given to you by shop patrons . They’ll ask for specific items and quantities and in exchange they’ll give you new recipes, gold, and even new staff
3) Staff Missions. Your staff will request equipment and sometimes to defeat a specific monster. It’s in your best interest to finish these missions, because the rewards upgrade your employees.
Sell or Equip Your Wares
Any characters can equip a one-handed weapon and shield, or two-handed weapon, a helm body armor, and an accessory.
Whatever you don’t equip can be sold from your shop inventory. The higher the quality, the more the item will sell for.
You can equip anything you make to your employees as there are no class or level restrictions.
The BGM consists of a single chiptune track that loops, but it never really got irritating or overly repetitive.
.Pros.
- Loads of recipes to unlock.
- Simple gameplay that is easy to pick up and put down.
- Colourful pixel graphics.
- The plot and characters are quirky and oftentimes amusing.
.Cons.
- Can get repetitive. I personally didn’t run into this problem, but to each his own.
- The English translation is weak in places.
- A lot of grinding to even hope to have a chance against Mimics, much less bosses.
- A lack of balance in difficulty due, in part, to randomized adventures. If your adventurer runs into a Mimic early on, that adventure is as good as over. Because they are so powerful and can appear at any moment, I found that early on I couldn’t leave the adventure screen for fear of losing everything if I looked away and got one-shot.
.Bottom Line.
If you’re a fan of casual simulation titles, Weapon Shop Fantasy is a solid investment. Even in its current form, you're bound to get your money's worth out of it with the content available and there's more to come--more skills, craftable items, maps, and more fun to be had. The writing, while clumsily translated at times, is amusing. Completing the campaign will take several hours and if you’re like me and you like to unlock every recipe and employee and beat every boss, you’ll get even more out of this title.
Even if you aren’t a fan of the genre, this game will keep you entertained for hours at a time between the more involved titles in your inventory.
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