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Destiny of Spirits

What is Q Entertainment's Destiny of Spirit?

There's a free-to-play game that sees you collect and duel with spirits on PS Vita.

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As longtime fans of Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Q Entertainment we were surprised to learn a game of theirs was available on PS Vita. Free of charge. It warranted further investigations.

This isn't a new take on musical puzzlers or shooters. Instead, it's a Pokémon style offering that let's you summon and hunt spirit you then use to take over a world map littered with opposing spirits. It's free-to-play so much of the motivation lies in the economy and collecting stones for more summons. There's not a great deal of tactics to deploy inside of the battles, but all the more strategy to play around with ahead of the encounter. Still there is something that keeps us logged in and spending hours on summoning, hunting and merging spirits to improve our deck.

A Global Experience

The game takes advantage of the global positioning of the PS Vita, and while you have to be connected to the server (via wi-fi in our case) to reap the benefits, this is one game you'll want to logged on to on your travels. Hunting for spirits (how you get new spirits without using the summon stones) in new location will give more varied spirits. Spirits are also tied to your region so summoning spirits here in Europe will provide you with spirits based on European mythology, whereas Asian and North American spirits are different. This is something that makes trading more interesting and it also means you'll want to summon spirits when you're on a trip.

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Destiny of Spirits
The campaign or world map gives players are grid to conquer through tons and tons of spirit duels.
Destiny of Spirits
Friends are a great resource in the game, but there's really not a ton of true social interaction to be found.

Spirits

Collecting spirits and using them in combat is at the core of the Destiny of Spirits experience. These spirits are taken from various mythologies and come in four categories of rarity - common, uncommon, rare and super rare (maybe there something even more rare, but we have yet to come across it). You can get spirits by summoning them, by hunting them (using the GPS), by teaming up with friends for a daily free summoning, by trading, and sometimes through combat.

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Destiny of Spirits
You're going to spend a lot of time managing your spirits - setting up parties and merging them

The game currently have guest appearances with spirits from Knack and Gravity Rush that you can summon using the premium currency.

Destiny of Spirits
We spent 300 summon stones and wound up with an uncommon spirit - Eros of the water element.
Destiny of Spirits
We've just levelled up our rare Fire-based Vampire Hunter (who kinda looks like a vampire).

Battles

Before each battle you pick a number of spirits that will make up your team for the battle ahead - a maximum of five spirits can be picked. But you're likely going to be stopped well before five as your squad is also limited by your spirit points. At the start of the game you can use spirits worth 5.0 points - which each spirit costing 1.0 point and upwards - more rare spirits are more expensive (rares tend to cost 3.0-3.5 points). But the good news is that the price remains the same regardless of what level the spirit is so you can potentially level up common and cheap spirits to a point where they are useful and cheap spare units. Your spirit point cap raises as you defeat bosses.

Destiny of Spirits
Wood (green) has an advantage on Earth (brown) so the right most duel is to our advantage.

The actual battle is a duel with three spirits on each side where they trade blows until one side is completely knocked out. On occasion a battle will see you face more than one wave of enemy and you're always tipped off as to their elemental disposition prior to combat so you can deploy your spirits accordingly (it's your typical circle of earth muddies water, water kills fire, fire melts metal, and so on). But you can't choose exactly how you want your spirits positioned and you don't know how the opposing spirits are positioned (each spirit attacks the spirit in directly opposite in the rows), so there's a certain element of chance with each encounter. If the align perfectly you could be in for a cake walk, if not you're could take a beating.

There is also a skill bar that builds during the battle and you can unleash these as you see fit. You can also get bonus attacks (requiring some quick touch reflexes) from friends. The battles typically last anywhere from a minute to a few minutes depending on the nature of the encounter. Spirits defeated aren't lost, but they're out of action for a while and HP is recovered five points per minute so a decent spirit with 1000 HP takes a while to recover if severly hurt. Then again you'll quickly grow a stable of a couple of dozen spirits so you can play in the meantime.

Destiny of Spirits
A common sight as we've started to take over the world map.
Destiny of Spirits
We had a completed meltdown and picked all water spirits against Earth and lost soundly. Never again!

Complexity

Destiny of Spirits may be easy to get into, but there is a lot of complexity to be found as you scratch the surface. A lot of the systems are a little counter-intuitive. For instance there is a "luck system" where your fortune changes each day. One element is more powerful that day and you can get a great blessing (you'll earn way more summon stones), average luck (pretty balanced experience) or bad luck (we've not experienced this yet). The three currencies in play - premium (used for advanced summons, speeding up HP regeneration, adding more of the other currencies, extra spirit or friend slots, etc), summon stones (used for summoning new spirits), and spirit stones (used for merging spirits and loaning in an additional spirit from a friend/compatible player for one battle). The fact that you don't level up at all through combat (you merely earn summon and spirit stones), but rather by merging the spirits you have - is a strange choice, but it works rather well once you get into it. It makes every spirit meaningful in some way, even it's a weak common that you have no interest in ever using.

Destiny of Spirits
This metal-based Zlatorog was the first spirit we maxed out. Using a second Zlatorog we were able to raise its level cap from 15 to 25, making it a much more useful spirit.

Server Issues

During our time with Destiny of Spirits, about a week or so, there has been a few hick-ups on the server. It was down for maintenance for a stretch of a handful of hours and at times it has been difficult to get the server to respond in a timely fashion. It's potentially game breaking issues in a game where every single action requires communication with the server. What's positive about this is that on three separate occasions we've gotten apologises and a complimentary bag of premium currency (Destiny Orbs) as compensation, allowing us to summon advanced spirits from the likes of Knack and Gravity Rush.

Destiny of SpiritsDestiny of Spirits
We quicly spent the premium "Destiny orbs" on a character from Gravity Rush.

Addictive but somewhat pointless

There are plenty of weak sides to Destiny of Spirit. The social integration could have been much deeper (now your friends list is basically as social as dealing with NPCs), the longing for rare and super rare spirits is somewhat off-set by the fact that in order to break through their max level you need a second of the same type (we're actually happier when we get a rare duplicate than a new rare spirit as it will be of more benefit to our deck to strengthen an already maxed out spirit), and the battles aren't as interactive as we would have liked them. Still the game is very addictive as it is, and we can't help but log in several times a day for as long as an hour at a time. Clearly, Destiny of Spirits is doing something right. The daily change in fortune and daily bonuses are certainly a great way of keeping us hooked.

Destiny of Spirits
Slowly but surely more this parallel spirit world turns blue Is that Atlantis in between Europe and the Americas?

Anyway, Destiny of Spirits is a free download and you'll get 35 premium Destiny Orbs to help you out in the beginning. So if you want a time sink that is strangely addictive on your PS Vita - give it a try. It's probably a game that would have been more successful on mobile, but still it has a decent player base consisting mainly of Asian players by the looks of it.

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