The sky is actually falling in Kemco’s latest retro-style JRPG, Shelterra the Skyworld, and you’ll have to do your part to avert a disaster in the making.
Players are Claude, a regular kid with a talking rock called Ignis, living on the floating continent of Shelterra. However, pieces of this sky world are slowly falling away, and soon the entire place may very well crash down down into the tainted-by-poison Odium land below. Claude figures it probably would be best to resolve this matter after meeting up with the princess Luna of the Orlok regime. The key, he discovers, lies in the power of spirits such as Ignis, who now reside in Artifacts.
During combat, players can summon these spirits to fight alongside them, though instead of simply appearing in a puff of smoke and doing something special, they’ll stick around. The spirits will act on their own choices as set by various tactical options players can choose for them, and stay for as long as players can gain Artifact points by taking their own mundane turns.
Another neat change is how characters will be able to learn skills during the course of a fight. Gaining these skills sounds a little bit like a risk-versus-reward issue though. In order to learn them, you need to smack a foe with regular, normal attacks until you’ve “observed” your foes attack patterns in battle long enough.
Note that, while there are in-app purchases, if you’re the sort who would prefer not to pay cash it’s entirely possible to buy extra content by slaughtering a rare foe called the Lantern. One thing this’ll do is open up the in-game Cave of Trials which have increasingly better rewards.
Shelterra the Skyworld is available on Android now.
