Destiny Child

 Destiny Child
     This is not a game about a popular former female music group.  I realise the name is a bit confusing...  This is basically a CCG with a plot/story line, full audio dialogue and tons of extra optional playable content.  The graphics are great (Though I could do with less breast bouncing), the game play is simple but fun and the characters fun to watch as they progress through the story (I recommend clicking some of these thumbnails to view the larger image so you can read the dialogue).

     This app has a lot of optional content and constantly has new events spawning up so I'm not going to dive too deep into the content of the app.  I don't want this to be a novel.

     You play as a demon who has accidentally signed himself up for a competition (The Archfiend Contest) where he must gather an army of childs (soul fragments taken from humans) to battle other demons for the throne of hell.  Your day job?  You work as a cashier at a convenient store... and you were only trying to pay your rent on your phone when you accidentally signed up.  This whole thing is really more of a hassle than anything else to your character but you have some pesky succubus guiding you through the process and forcing you to continue with the contest.  So onward to collect your army of childs...

     Each scene has moving character avatars, a full background, text dialogue and voice overs which is amazing.  The voice overs would be more amazing if they came in multiple languages but I suppose we'll make due with Japanese only.

     The game even has a fully animated anime intro you get to see when you start the game for the first time.

     There are several parts of the game to play but the main areas to keep up with are as follows.

Story: This continues forward with the plot.  You go through story line and battle story based NPC groups of childs.  Users collect new childs after winning boss battles and collect items and gold among other useful loot and experience.  Don't forget to collect completion rewards at the bottom of each story segment (3 per segment).

Night World: This is where you complete your daily quests.  Not all of them need to be done.  Really none of them are necessary but they can be very useful for levelling, evolving, and acquiring certain items.  At very least I recommend always doing the Exploration, which allows you to send childs on adventures for hours and come back with gained experience.  These childs can still be used freely even when they are sent off on exploration.  Event Dungeon is also very useful.  The contents change daily so check back every day and collect rewards you need specifically such as gold, evolution items for specific types of childs or level up material.  Devil Rumble and Underground are optional really.  Devil Rumble gives you 5 plays a day and resets after a week.  Underground is a great way to get experience and items by using all of your childs.  Don't try it until you have a lotat your disposal though.  Scenarios can be found here as well and is a way to watch any plot you've already gone through.  Rebirth Labyrinth is a recent addition but I'm not sure if it will be permanent.  it's a good way to win costumes for you childs.

Summon: This is how you acquire more childs outside of actually fighting and getting them as drops.  It is essentially a gacha style system.  You can get childs, equipment and more from here.  A fun feature when getting child drops is if you draw a 5 star child you get a cute little animated sequence.  You can choose to spend money on in game currency for this but I've been playing this since just after its global launch (Global launch was December 2018).  If you play casually you still earn enough for at least one gold draw 10 a day, one crystal draw 10 a day and your free draw one that resets every day.  That's at least 21 every day, easily.  But be careful, users have a limited amount of slots available so you'll have to pick and choose who to keep.

Mailbox: Always check this daily to collect everything you earn from logging in.  You also get friendship coins from your mailbox if you have added friends.

Items:  Really only needed for using your free tickets and getting rid of things you don't need.

My Room: This is where you earn rewards for just doing the regular game play you are already doing.  if you've earned a reward your My Room tab will have a dot by it.  make sure you collect them daily or you'll lose them.

Child:  This is where you can see every child you have.  You can sort them for easier browsing, evolve them, combine them, upgrade their skills, create teams and more.  i find myself spending a lot of time here just to make sure my childs are as upgraded as they can be and getting rid of ones I don't need who take up space.

Friend: This is where you can give friendship coins to your friends, add friends, delete them, accept friend invites, etc.  Friends in this game are useful because depending on the user's main avatar, you can use them to give your team special buffs when you fight.  It is important to choose a useful child for your avatar for this reason as well.  This will help you to be more useful to your friends.  I find the most useful ones are childs that give a buff to all other childs, not just type specific ones.

     Now that the important areas have been covered I want to explain a little about the actual gameplay.  In order to battle against other players such as the Devil Rumble PVP or battling NPCs such as in Story Mode, you'll need to know how to put a team together, how to use abilities and how to upgrade your child.

     The childs come in categories, both battle type and elemental type.  Water, Wood, Fire, Light and Dark are the elements and Debuffer, Attacker, Healer, Defender, Support, Combine are the attack types.

Water > Fire > Wood -  Light >< Dark (These two are weak and strong against one another)

     If you are going up against a team with a lot of fire, you may choose to switch to a heavy water based team for example.  Though most groups will be mixed and you will need to use your own strategy to effectively power through.

     The attack types should be pretty clear.  Defenders are your tanks, they have heavy defense and absorb a lot of damage while being slower at attacking.  Debuffers remove buffs from the opponents, while supporters will buff your team.  The only odd ones are the combine types which serve as sacrifices for your group.  If used correctly, they can be very useful.  It is best to have a mixed group but it is good to choose the combination that works best for you.  My main group has a healer, two defenders, one support and an attacker.  Sometimes I switch out a defender for a second healer if I need to.

     In a battle there are three ways to attack (Though you'll likely turn on auto attack so you'll only manually need to know the last way).  A tap attack which, a slide attack or your big attack which is your drive skill.  Each of your 5 battle childs have circle portraits at the bottom of the battle screen, your enemy above.  When a child's portrait is surrounded by the colour strip you can tap it or slide it.  Sliding it will begin to fill your drive gauge which can be seen running along the side of your health bar at the bottom under the portraits.  When the gauge is full a little skill bubble pops up under your childs.  this is when you can use a drive skill which does heavy damage.  But you need to time it right for the best effect.  A bar will fill up quickly and you need to tape it when it's in the centre of the charged part of the line.  The centre will give you a Perfect, near it is a Great, a bit farther off is Good, and too far off is Bad.  Depending on your score you'll fill the fever gauge (Yes another gauge).  If you're good it will take 3 drive skill attacks to fill your gauge as a perfect gives you 40 percent. a great gives you 30, a good 20~ (This one depends).  Fever time is when you jut place your finger on a child consistently and leave it there until fever runs out.  That child will continually attack the enemy and do tons of damage quickly.  In stages with 3 levels I try to do one drive skill per level so I can do the fever on the last (and hardest) level.

     Your childs have other abilities but they are passive.  The tap, slide and drive skills can be levelled up (to 10 per rank).  If you use a child often, level it's skills up fully as soon as possible.  It will cost you onyx (Which is also used for awakening) but this is pretty easy to come by.

     Your child will level up as you use them but you can also use the Combine button in their profile to level them up further (Up to their max level).  When you combine, you will use Level-Up Material childs which look like little slime blobs.  Using ones of the correct elemental type will give you the best results but you can technically use any elemental material to level up your childs.  A child will only level so far before it needs to be evolved.  Evolving a child will reset it to level one but it will be a higher star count.

2 Star Child - Max LVL 20
3 Star Child - Max LVL 30
4 Star Child - Max LVL 40
5 Star Child - Max LVL 50
6 Star Child - Max LVL 60

     You can only get a 6 star child by evolving a 5 star child.  Evolution can only happen when your child is at it's max level and you have enough evolution material.  You will also need to sacrifice other childs of the same star level to evolve one.  For example if I have a level 40 four star child and all the material I need to also sacrifice 4 other 4 star childs to evolve this one.  I will lose the four sacrifices but my evolved child will become a 5 star lvl 1 child.

     You are also going to want to awaken your childs.  This can be done by spending onyx and continuing to level them through use (Or exploration or combining).  When you finish awakening a child it will get a new costume.  You will also be able to equip an accessory along with the weapon and armour.

     Also... equip weapons and armour to childs you use... But remember to remove them if you decide to get rid of that child.

     I have already gone into more detail than intended.  So I will leave you with this... This is a fun game that you can spend a lot of time on so be careful not to get addicted.  The story is fun and I recommend paying attention instead of skipping through it.  The graphics are so detailed and amazing, plus you can change the home page background and child to customise it to your liking which is amazing. The fact that all the dialogue is spoken word is brilliant but it does make the file size for this app pretty big so users might want to be sure they have the room to download this before starting the download (You'll need to download a packet when the app starts for the first time which is far bigger than the app file size).  Also, I do not recommend this for children... this is a teens and up app.  The fact that there are bouncy breasts and succubi mentioned in this review should be pretty clear signs of that.  Only real complaint is that it can take a bit to get used to all the elements of the app... it can be pretty overwhelming at first.

     Here are some other resources for how to play the game.
Blue Stacks
Gacha Games
Fandom Dot Com
Rating 4.5/5

• Free
• Seller: LINE Games
• Category: Games
• Size: 74.8 MB
• Languages: English, French, Thai, Traditional Chinese
• Copyright: © LINE GAMES Corporation. & ShiftUp Corporation.

You must be at least 17 years old to download this app. Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes

Jimi-Kare : My Quiet Boyfriend

Jimi-Kare : My Quiet Boyfriend
     I actually didn't think I was going to like this when I downloaded.  I noted that the graphics looked cute but generally any app with 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' in the title tends to be fairly unimpressive to me.  However, I actually enjoyed this one... But somehow I feel guilty for liking it...

     First off, you play a girl who is in high school.  You're classmates with your shy childhood friend who is a male who has seen his share of bullying for being a cry baby.  As a child you used to defend him, though that was several years back.  You don't really interact with him much nowadays until the two of you were chosen for a school contest.  As you'll be asked to perform on stage together and need to be charismatic and fashionable, you decide you need to make some adjustments to your old friend.

     This is the basis for the game... each chapter is you making another minor adjustment to how the poor guy looks or acts.  First his hair, lose the glasses, change how he wears his uniform, etc.  But this is where I take a bit of issue.  I feel so sorry for this poor guy.  The female character that represents the player's character is the worst.  She is bossy, demanding, doesn't seem to care about the poor guy's feelings and seems to care more about this contest than she does about him.  She is basically a terrible friend.

     Now I said I feel bad for the poor male character who stars in this app story... But more so in the beginning of the app than the ends... There are four possible endings one can get while playing through.  Most chapters don't split off or has choices but there are 2 choices that will happen toward the end that determine which path you will go down.  Though I feel for this guy and secretly wish he would just tell this girl to leave him alone, depending on the ending you get... things can actually get pretty dark and this guy gets a bit hard to... sympathise with.  Especially the dark ending... Which is actually part of my guilt... I liked this ending too much considering morally I really should not have...

     The game play is pretty simple.  You read through the story bits, 3 per chapter, and in between you tap speech bubbles.  The speech bubbles are how you get experience.  The experience fills the meter in the top left which is how you inch your way to new bits of story.

     There are two types of bubbles.  As your little mini shy friend wanders around the screen he murmurs sad things.  If you tap those speech bubbles you get 1 experience point for each one.  They pop up about once per 10 seconds.  You can tap the cheer button at the bottom of the room he is in to create positive bubbles.  Tapping these gives you 2 experience points.  Each chapter requires more and more experience to complete.  The room can hold 12 bubbles at once.  If you let them stack up this high, no more can be added till you pop them.  They will continue to fill up even if the app is closed.

     Aside from bubble popping, experience can be earned through the scratch card at the top centre of the screen.  You can have up to 5 tries at once.  It takes 10 minutes to refill one try.  The scratch card has 6 scratch spots.  But after each scratch the scratched spots are no longer visible and the options shuffle.  So you can't open all the slots on a single scratch card.  You can earn 3 experience points, 30 experience points or a detox drink item.  I find the top middle spot to be particularly lucky... But that's just me.

     There are a few consumable items in the app.  You can choose to spend money on them but you really don't need to.  You can play for free and still beat the app with every ending in under a week.  The money you spend earns you Gems, which are in game currency only available through purchases.  120 Yen grants you 20 gems.  Bigger purchases are also available.  The items are:

•  Detox Drink which can be purchased for 3 gems (This can also be obtained through finishing chapters, the scratch card or completing achievements) and grants you 20 experience.
• Fever Time which is 8 gems (Can also be obtained through completing achievements) and makes poppable bubbles appear faster for 10 seconds.
• Mutter Booster which is 120 yen and increases the amount of negative murmur bubbles allowed from 12 to 24.
• Double Exp which costs 120 yen and doubles the experience earned from each bubble tapped... which honestly isn't a great boost.

     The boyfriend character changes in appearance as you progress through the story.  Some versions are only obtainable through certain story paths.  If you want to collect them all you need to finish with each ending.  If you want to double check which you've collected you can do so by tapping the Collection button at the bottom of the app.  You can also view the still images you unlocked through your play throughs from this area.  There are 14 stills and 10 unlockable Nao chibis.

     The in game achievements can be found in the Quest area.  There are 35 achievements to unlock for extra experience or consumable items.

     There are a lot of things I like about this application.  The graphics are very well done and certainly keep me coming back.  I am addicted to unlockables so the fact that there are different graphics I need to keep playing through to unlock has a certain appeal for me.  I like the story even though I hate the female character so much.  I have a habit of skipping dialogue through some games like this but this one actually kept me reading.  And here I thought I didn't care about teen drama... Who knew?  Even the murmur bubbles and cheer bubbles can change depending on how the story is progressing.  It is this attention to detail I greatly appreciate.

     On the downsides the low amount of experience you get from bubble tapping can be a real grind... Tedious screen tapping has never been my favourite thing to do.  There is an ad banner on the screen but it isn't in the way.  Occasionally an ad popup will occur or a popup will occur to ask if you'd like to watch an ad for 20 experience but these aren't too often.

     All in all I think this is a pretty decent app.  Simple, attractive and fun to read.

Rating: 4/5

• Free
• Seller: SEEC INC.
• Category: Games
• Size: 57.7 MB
• Languages: English
• Copyright: © SEEC INC.

Rated 9+ For the Following:  Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence

Pokemon: Magikarp Jump

Pokemon: Magikarp Jump
     This is a really cute game.  It is easy and perfect for casual gamers.  The concept?  Magikarp, possibly one of the least popular Pokemon from the popular Pokemon franchise, is the only Pokemon you are allowed to use in this game.  You compete against other Magikarp trainers to catch and train the most powerful, highest jumping Magikarp in the world.

     I actually really like Magikarp.  One of my favourite lines from the animated series was "Magikarp is a Pokemon Goldmine", which I say... probably way too often.  One would not think this phrase could be used as often as I use it... but it can.  I even had a Magikarp deck back in the 1990s when the Pokemon Trading Card Game was popular.

     For those who have not seen it yet... behold... the beautiful Magikarp Song...



     Alright, enough about how great Magikarp is.  in the app you play an androgynous character who you have no ability to customise or name.  This is a bit of a down side in my view.  I am all about customisation.  However, there are other elements of the app that allow you some creative freedoms.

     You can only use one Magikarp at a time.  In the beginning of the game you can only use 'Old rod' to catch your Magikarps so you're more likely to just get a basic looking Magikarp.  However, as you play and get access to stronger rods you can get higher chances of obtaining more interesting Magikarp patterns such as a grey, pink or even purple colour.  That being said, at any point in the game you can get lucky and catch a shiny golden Magikarp, even with the worst rod.

     Alright, you have a Magikarp... now what?  Your goal is to earn Jump Points and compete against other trainers in a Magikarp Jumping League to jump higher.  Random bits of food will drop into your Magikarp's habitat (Which is where you keep it when not training or in the league).  Tapping or swiping these bits of food will cause Magikarp to swim over and eat them.  Each of them will add to Magikarps JP (Jump points).  You can also train him up to three times before you need to replenish your training points.  These training sessions also increase Magikarp's JP.

     You start off with two different ways to train.  The Sandbag Slam and the Jump Counter.  These training sessions can be levelled up in order to give a bigger bonus of JP each time they are performed.  More types of training sessions can also be obtained but they are locked based on the level of the trainer.  You should get access to a new training method to unlock ever few trainer levels up until you reach level 84.

     When you click the Train button the training method chosen is randomly chosen from those you have available.  Also random is how well your Magikarp performs during that particular training session.  A Magikarp can do good, great or amazing.  Clearly the better your Pokemon performs the more points will be earned from the training session.  The fun bonus for players is that each of these effort types will display differently at the end of the session.  For example below you can see the Sandbag Slam training session.  One image shows a Great Effort while the other shows Amazing Effort.

     After a training session sometimes a random event will be triggered allowing you to interact with NPCs or giving you choices that can have both positive and negative outcomes.  These choices can supply you with coins, diamonds, items, trainer experience, extra training points or JP.

     More training methods and food can be purchased from your Magikarp habitat.  To do this click the lower left button that says Town.  Food and training sessions can be upgraded or purchased with coins you earn while playing  Coins are earned very easily in this game so you should be fine to always get whatever is newly unlocked as long as you don't go on a crazy spending spree.

     Aside from the Coin Shop there is a Diamond Shop where users can purchase Friendship Items, Decorations and consumable Items with the diamonds they have acquired.  Diamonds are much harder to earn and save so be careful and choose wisely when buying things with them.  I suggest sticking to the Friendship items and Decorations as they will help you in boosting and growing your Magikarps more than the consumables will.  Especially since the consumables are one use but the friendship item and decoration boosts can be used over and over again.

     The last area of the Town section is your Records.  This is where you can access your Pattern Dex, Event Dex Hall of Fame and your Status.  Pattern Dex will show you what pattern types of Magikarp you have raised, as well as how many of each of them you have had in the past.  it will take a long time to complete this as some of the patterns are only available with rods you achieve later in the game.  Event Dex is like the Pattern Dex but it shows you what events you have uncovered.  It also gives you hints on how to unlock other events.

     Hall of Fame shows you your great accomplishments in the app, such as the victories over different leagues.  The Status section shows you the information on the current Magikarp you are raising.

     League is at the bottom right of your main habitat screen.  This is where you compete against other trainers.  Don't worry if you lose a battle.  You can do more training and come back later.  The exception to this is if your Magikarp reaches it's power limit.  Then you will have to compete until you lose.  Once you lose your Magikarp will retire and you will catch a new one that will grow stronger.  There are 13 League sets, each with stronger Magikarp to face and new better rewards to achieve.  Some League wins will result in a friendship item.  Friendship items are how you add Pokemon friends to your habitat.  Each one has a different skill they use to help your Magikarp out.  they can also cheer for Magikarp during league battles which give him a 5% boost in JP.

     The Menu button in the main habitat screen allows you to decorate your habitat, customising it with decor or even themes.  You can use consumable items you have won or purchased here as well.  You can see your achievements and reap the rewards from achieving them, adjust your settings (Sound, language, Data Backup, Notifications, How To, Credits, Support, etc) or make purchases using real money

     Real money can be used to buy more diamonds and Exchange Tickets.  Exchange tickets come with every purchase of Diamonds.  The Exchange Tickets are used to get rewards such as consumable items or coin purses.  There is even a reward called Diamond Miner which will give you diamonds for free without you needing to do anything or spend more money.

     These are all the basics of the game.  there are more details I could go into but let's not write a novel about this app...

     I think this application is super cute and fun.  I love the graphics and the game play.  The music and sounds are cute, the art is really clean and colourful.  I would like to see some more customisation options available and I think if you catch non-Magikarp Pokemon in the pond (Which you can do) you should get them as friends you can put in your habitat.  Otherwise, great app.  I recommend this to any classic Pokemon fan.

Rating: 4/5

• Free
• Seller: The Pokemon Company
• Category: Games
• Size: 145.8 MB
• Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese
• Copyright: © 2017 Pokémon. © 1995-2017 Nintendo/Creatures Inc./GAME FREAK inc. Developed by SELECT BUTTON inc.

Rated 4+