Adventure to Fate: Battle Arena JRPG Review

Adventure To Fate: Battle Arena is a combat-focused free-to-play RPG that offers lots of customization options, gear, crafting mechanics, and more. Although the title might suggest otherwise, this is not a game with any sense of adventure. Instead of exploring new lands, meeting new characters, and solving puzzles, Adventure to Fate opts for almost 100% turn-based combat, for better or for worse.

It sets itself up as some sort of tournament in celebration of an event that happened 100 years prior. Players create an adventurer to enter the tournament by selecting a race, class, crafting specialty, and name before entering the first of a series of battle arenas that comprise all of Adventure to Fate's environments. From here they can look at their character sheet, use items, visit the shop, craft items, or enter a battle. Upon entering a battle, players need to fight to defeat their foes using abilities and items to create a strategic advantage in order to advance.

Because of this combat focus, the cycle of playing Adventure to Fate is solely "prep for battle, battle, prep for battle, battle, etc" in an endless loop. As more battles are won, players gain materials for the purpose of crafting new items, gold for purchasing new items, and experience that allows them to level-up and gain new abilities. After a certain number of battles in one arena they can then move on to the next one, which shifts up the enemy types and some of the tactics they'll need to use but the basic gameplay loop is still the same.

As players advance and get more gear, they can place gear in a shared chest that allows for new characters created from other save slots to use some of the more advanced equipment. This adds some replayability to the game and makes progression with new characters feel a little less grueling.

Although there's nothing inherently wrong with a combat-focused game, Adventure to Fate feels a little empty by being so hyper-focused on just combat. The rooms for each environment are so spartan and the number of things to do between battles is so limited that unless players really love the combat, there isn't much here to enjoy. Banner ads run across the bottom of the screen all throughout battles too, which can be distracting, but they're also easily gotten rid of through a $0.99 in-app purchase.

That being said, for players that do enjoy the loop of gaining loot and leveling-up, Adventure to Fate: Battle Arena is a completely distilled version of those mechanics and thus might be a great game to pick up. It really just depends on the type of player that's looking at it. Some may see an oversimplified "fill the meter" slog, but that could be exactly what someone else is looking for.