Use your Trance ability and become Cloud Strife in order to bring down dangerous foes in the blink of an eye.

If you needed a new reason to pick up your gaming handheld console, Final Fantasy Explorers arrives on Nintendo 3DS along with some other games for almost all of Nintendo’s consoles. For those who wanted to still benefit from some hefty discounts, the Winter Warm-Up sale is still on, up until the 4th of February.

Final Fantasy Explorers will not be extremely new in terms of gameplay if you were already a fan of the Monster Hunter series of games. It’s basically an action RPG where you will fight monsters, get loot, improve your character and join up with other players in order to obliterate gigantic monsters.

Even if the game’s story is somewhat lackluster, the emphasis on Final Fantasy Explorers’ gameplay and character customization is well worth that sacrifice. The game feels like a mix and match between traditional Monster Hunter elements, like going on monster hunting trips in order to get pieces to improve your armor and weapons, with Final Fantasy 14’s class customization.

You can choose from 20 character classes, without being limited to using abilities linked to your specific class. For instance, your class can be a ninja, but you can have skills more attuned to a mage type of character. Because of this, once you enter the game’s multiplayer scene, you will rarely meet up with people who have the exact same character build as you.

An interesting gameplay feature comes in the form of party building. Once you kill a monster for a couple of times, you can eventually add it to your party. By doing so, you could potentially fight a giant monster alongside Shiva that constantly launches ice spells at your foe while Bahamut charges up its trademark laser.

But your character isn’t left there just swinging away with his sword. After a series of combos have been used, a limit break attack will become available, turning you into iconic characters in order to dish out tons of damage. Who wouldn’t want to turn into Sephiroth in order to launch the decisive strike on an enemy, slicing your foes up just like he did with Aerith.

Although Final Fantasy Explorers arrives on Nintendo 3DS this week, one should not expect massive improvements in terms of graphical prowess, given the fact that the Nintendo 3DS is fairly old. The game can be purchased in both physical and digital copies, with the latter being available on the Nintendo E-shop for $40.

Image source:store.na.square-enix.com