30 Hours With Tower Of Fantasy: How Much Fantasy Is Too Much Fantasy?

gamespot.com:

Is more always better? That's the question I asked myself when solving Tower of Fantasy's overworld puzzles, jumping into ruins, analyzing the gacha pull system, reading the character upgrade pieces, looking at the weapon upgrade chips, playing a whack-a-mole-esque agility training course, trying to survive a timed combat challenge, opening the first type of treasure chest, the second type, the third type and--Oh my god, is this a fourth type? Fine, I'll open it--much, much more.

I can sum up my 30 or so hours with Tower of Fantasy with one succinct thought: There's a lot going on. Tower of Fantasy is a sci-fi gacha MMORPG with Honkai Impact 3rd-inspired combat, Genshin Impact-inspired design--and thus, by default, Breath of the Wild-inspired everything: from puzzles to dungeons to overworld tools.

I know some players will say that because Tower of Fantasy is an MMORPG, all these different features aren't meant to be experienced in a compressed span of time, which is fair. But even if you spread out solving ruins, opening chests, and embarking on myriad side quests, there is still a problem: I'm not sure if the game is greater than the sum of its parts.

Tower of Fantasy is ambitious--clearly a lot of work went into it--and it's a sheer feat of human effort to pull all the elements present into one game. Many kudos should go to the developers for creating Tower of Fantasy, but let's take the combat as a case study. The combat is very similar to Honkai Impact 3rd's design. Every weapon has a basic attack, a special attack (that can only be used after a cooldown), and then an ultimate attack with special launch conditions. There's also a counter system between different elements, and each weapon has a Frost, Flame, Volt, or