As we feature Chamoji’s Murasaki7 mobile puzzle game, I have invited my friend who plays games better than me, Reikisha, to review this game for keepsakes. He’ll take it from here – please enjoy reading his review. – Jay
There are an estimated 20 new mobile games released on Google Play and App Store, based on the QooApps charts. Some of these games are developed by popular game companies with a good track record of keeping the player base active through generous in-game rewards during special events.
On the other hand, there are mobile games that has higher chances of falling into obscurity because the game company is either new to the industry or hasn’t been doing enough promotion on social media.
We take a look at Chamoji’s first entry to the mobile gaming industry and see if it has the potential to become a popular game someday.
Murasaki 7 is a Puzzle-RPG developed and published by Chamoji for both Android and iOS devices. The game officially launched on March 19, 2020 and is giving away over $200 worth of free in-game items as a welcoming gift to newcomers.
The game is a combination of turn-based combat and color matching-based puzzles while spicing up the gameplay with an “elemental triangle” system similar to Honkai Impact 3 and Granblue Fantasy.
Players can build a team of up to five characters known as “Angels” in-game. Each angel represents a certain element type along with an active skill, a leader skill, and a legendary weapon effect.
Murasaki7 Playthrough
During combat, players must pair at least 3 similar elemental stones within the time limit in-order to determine an angel’s attack damage. Pairing up two or more elemental stones shortens the time limit, but this allows the players to set up chain combos for increased overall damage and faster mana core gain.
Sometimes, enemies with a special skill can affect the board when attacking, giving the players a sense of difficulty when trying to pull off chain combos every turn.
Aside from its story mode, players can test their team’s strength and quick puzzle-solving skills against other players in the Arena or dish out as much damage on a tough boss in-exchange for rewards in Blitz Raid.
Players can improve their units via Power Up (level increase), Rank Up (star increase), and Awaken (hidden skill unlock + base stat increase). In order to unlock an angel’s true potential, players are required to save up as many angel fragments as they can. These fragments can be obtained by pulling a gacha draw or dismantling a duplicate unit.
Assessment on Murasaki7
Murasaki 7’s gameplay is pretty solid considering that this is Chamoji’s first game as a mobile game developer and publisher:
- I think this game is free-to-play friendly, it doesn’t look like you need to whale to get far in the game.
- The character portraits and effect can be mediocre, but the 3D models they use in battle modes are beautiful.
- You may not appreciate its gacha feature, but the gameplay is great and well-done.
As a free-to-play gacha game, there are problems that may cause its player base to lose interest in the long run:
- Recruiting a unit from the current banner doesn’t feel as rewarding as it’s supposed to be due to the lack of visual cues that informs the player of their new unit/s’ rarity and if there are duplicates among them. Murasaki 7 uses the same animation for both single-draw and 10-draw gacha. Because of this, players would just skip the draw animation to lower their expectations.
- There are five playable characters in Murasaki 7 as of now, but each of them has four different versions of themselves. This way of increasing the character roster is similar to Honkai Impact 3, except that the characters’ other versions are also from the same element type as the original.
- The music in this game sounds bland and lacks variety. To give an example, players will hear the same BGM for all 20 battle nodes on chapters 1 and 2.
- The reason why players usually settle for the Japanese audio in every mobile game (if it’s available by default) is that the English voice acting sounded as if the lines were delivered with no emotion. Unfortunately, that was the case in this game’s voice acting department.
Since the game is still in the early stage of its life cycle, it’s hard to tell whether Murasaki 7 will become popular or fall into obscurity. Despite the problems that the game has at the moment, it certainly is an enjoyable and challenging puzzle RPG that people can play as a time-sinker.
