Power Rangers Legacy Wars, One Year On

The real beginning of the nWay Redemption Arc begins with my first experience of Legacy Wars after the major mechanical overhaul it got. They took this game to some interesting places.

Huh. Over a year since I’ve talked about this game. For the sake of posterity, you can check out my thoughts on this game when I first played it during its initial release here.

Power Rangers Legacy Wars, nWay’s entirely PvP-focused hybrid fighting/card game for mobile systems has managed to do alright for itself since its launch, sporting a number of esports appearances and even a collaboration with Street Fighter V, of all things, under its belt one year later. That’s brand power for you, I suppose.

Again, more detailed thoughts on the game from launch can be found in the link above, but the short version is that release Legacy Wars was an unmitigated disaster, mechanically speaking. The RPS rules weren’t very strictly enforced, character balance was horrendous, assists were dodging attacks… it was an absolute mess. The game felt extremely random, and I felt nothing but immense frustration coming out of most matches that I played. I deleted the app, and thought I would never look back. It was definitely toxic, but I couldn’t help lamenting the fact that there was no other game like it for mobile systems — Marvel’s Contest of Champions had, by this point, very much set the standard for mobile fighting games, focusing more on an obnoxiously simple control scheme and grindy single-player content, with very little in the way of any kind of meaningful multiplayer options. Anything that wasn’t directly copying it was either something that felt terrible to play with touchscreen controls, or it was Smash Supreme — a fine game, to be sure, but not only is it still in early access, it’s got an extremely odd game feel that places it more on the “card game” end of the card/fighting game spectrum, but that’s for another time. I wanted another mobile fighting game — Legacy Wars was bad, but dropping it had left a hole in my heart. Not even the Tekken mobile game could fill it. Largely because it was a poorly-optimised mess with, unsurprisingly, no actual multiplayer, but y’know.

But, as fate would have it, I happen to be friends with a reasonably strong Legacy Wars player from North America — a man known as Abbock. MVCI Haggar/Dante extraordinaire, Naruto GNT4 evangelist, fellow Kusoge Advent Calendar Committee member, and Dude Who Has Won A Not-Insignificant Amount Of Money From Playing The Power Rangers Game. Somewhat ironically, I’m the one that introduced him to the game, and he had the mental fortitude to stick with it when I couldn’t. It seems to have worked out for him. After various discussions here and there about the game, as well as its eventual appearance on TyroneSama’s Kusoge Vacation Calendar, I was tempted once again and decided to make the plunge back into the terrifying world of Power Rangers Legacy Wars.

After logging into my old account, I was met with an army of Power Rangers in Space Red Rangers tagging me with a quarter-screen Breaker and proceeding to delete about 80% of my life while each of my combos did a pitiful 20% damage at best. Clearly a lot had passed me by. And so, with a sigh, I resigned myself to ditching the old account, as Sleepmode was from an era of Legacy Wars long gone. I completed the tutorial, and gave myself the moniker “Climax Fighter”. Back to square one.

There’s been an absolute laundry list of changes made to Legacy Wars’ core mechanics in the year or so since it’s been around. I’ll try to break them down as best as I can.

THERE’S TALENT TREES NOW

We’ll get the boring collect-a-thon metagaming stuff out of the way first. Zeo Shards and Orbs of Eltar still work the way they used to, but there’s now also a third upgrade material — Essences — which tie into the game’s new Talent system. Oh boy.

By collecting Essences, which vary in rarity much like characters do, you are able to progress through your characters’ talent trees, which grant passive bonuses to your entire team once they’re unlocked. They’re available at different levels depending on the rarity of your character (Common characters don’t unlock their talent trees until level 3, but Rare and higher characters get them immediately), and provide bonuses like extra HP, bonus damage, generic or specific damage reduction, and increased critical hit rates and damage. Each talent requires a certain number of Essences, a requisite amount of gold, and certain characters that need to be unlocked and raised to a certain level. Luckily, the third requirement seems to only include Common characters that aren’t exactly hard to get shards for, but it still amounts to a massive gold sink. I used to never be short on gold, now that’s just the status quo.

That being said, the talent trees don’t lock you onto certain paths. Each talent tree is more like a talent line, with characters having multiple lines with nodes that are unlocked in a linear fashion. In this sense, there’s nothing stopping you from eventually unlocking every talent a character has, and it allows for a small element of personalisation of your characters. I tend to focus on talents that give me extra HP and raw damage, but you may elect to focus specifically on an Attacker class, and instead focus on boosted criticals. There’s a nice sense of something resembling open-endedness here.

THE RPS MECHANICS WORK NOW

One of my biggest criticisms of Legacy Wars on its release was that the RPS rules governing the Ability Triangle were more of a suggestion than anything. The game now enforces a hard and fast rule on these interactions, with Strikes now effectively having super armour versus Breakers from startup, and the same also applying to Breakers versus Defensive abilities. This has had… an interesting effect on the game, to say the least.

The ability for Strikes to blow through Breakers no matter what means that you can just react to a Breaker happening and get the Strikeout. While it does mean that being cornered versus someone with a Breaker or two stocked isn’t a death sentence, it also means that it’s much easier to play a highly reactive playstyle. The game still somewhat enables people to just play like monkeys — the players that dropped money for whichever version of Tommy Oliver just dropped all invariably play via belief in the heart of the cards — but for the most part you can just sit back and react to everything they do. Among some other changes, which we’ll detail later, this helps the game at the higher leagues, since the majority of characters you’ll encounter at that point in the game will be able to threaten you with some kind of combo starter that you can’t reasonably react to. These kinds of tools just don’t exist in the lower leagues, so all you’ve got to do is react to everything your opponent does, respond accordingly, and watch your medal count go up. Maybe you’ll even find a good character in a loot box. Or maybe you’ll find God in there. The two seem to be interchangeable at times. It’s kind of weird how the game seems to sacrifice playability at the lower levels for the sake of making high level play somewhat functional, but there’s something to be said for more useful tools being made available to players the more they get through the game and come to understand it more. Though I highly doubt that much was intentional. Whatever.

THERE’S KIND OF A CONSISTENT MIND GAME NOW (???)

So this encompasses a couple of big changes. The first is that using a Defensive ability now freezes your AP cooldown until you leave its animation, effectively giving you a much longer time until you can start regaining AP when you block or counter something. This is really interesting, as it makes players really consider when it’s appropriate to block. Sometimes you need to avoid damage, but sometimes you can afford to take a couple of hits if it means you’ll be able to really capitalise on your next hit. This was a smart change.

The biggest change to the core mechanics outside of the Ability Triangle is to the multi-hit Strike cancel rules. On release, multi-hit ground combo Strikes were practically useless, as the hitstun on the majority of these attacks is invalid, allowing the opponent to interrupt midway through with a block. Most attacks in the game can be canceled into other attacks, or a dash, at the end of their animation. The majority of these multi-hit Strikes can now be canceled into a dash on their first hit, but can no longer be canceled on their last hit. This is huge, because it now means you can bait people into wasting Blocks, creating an actual mixup scenario. The idea here is genuinely really good, since both players are now playing around the question of whether or not a Block is on the table, as well as each others’ willingness to use them. The execution leaves a little to be desired, though. Since only the first hit can be canceled, the safest strategy (if you’re okay with taking a bit of damage) is to just wait and see if the second hit or beyond occurs when you’re on the receiving end of one of these attacks. Since they can’t be canceled, you just activate your Defensive ability when you see the full animation begin to play out and there’s nothing the opponent can do about it. nWay does seem to be experimenting with this a little, though — Time Force Red and Ninja Steel Blue have three-hit Strike combos where the first hit doesn’t guarantee the second, but the second hit guarantees the third. That way you’re playing an actual mixup game with and against these characters, and it’s genuinely very compelling. I’d love to see more characters work this way.

Also, not for nothing, but there’s a Taunt button now. It taunts. It counts as an action, so you can use it to cancel the end of multi-hits when you normally couldn’t, which serves the functional purpose of allowing faster AP recharging, and also for just being rude. Certain characters also have their Taunt buttons turned into Super Mode activations, which generally give them an EX ability or something similar once their meter is full. It’s pretty neat. Also they just recently made a change where you can’t dash through projectile attacks if you’re at point blank range, which is also a smart change. I think nWay is learning.

THERE’S MORE WAYS TO PLAY NOW

Three big additions help to add to the long-term playability of the game — daily missions, challenges and the brand new Megazord Mode.

Daily missions are exactly what you’d expect. Fulfill a certain objective, get a box with some goodies in it. This is a great way for free-to-play players to stock up on upgrade materials, and generally incentivises people to experiment with characters they may not otherwise play, thanks to missions like “win three matches with a villain leader” and the like.

Challenges are run somewhat like events. Players can attempt challenges as many times as they like while their windows are open, but while the first attempt is free, every attempt thereafter costs 20 crystals. Challenges usually have players building between two and three teams which they cycle through every match, selected from a pool of characters based on a theme. They take the form of either Score Attack or Survival. Score Attack tells players to try and win as many matches as possible, with special Challenge rewards increasing with every win, but it’s game over if you lose nine times. Survival has players trying to rack up twelve wins, with increasingly better Challenge rewards guiding each win, but a smaller loss limit of just three. Challenges are a genuinely fun experience — you often get to try out characters that are limited exclusively to Premium boxes, test your ability to build teams, and gain resources you often need.

And lastly, there’s Megazord Mode. Megazords is a bi-weekly event where players pilot Megazords and duke it out in fights where barely any of the rules of Legacy Wars proper apply and generally nothing matters. It’s a big, clunky mess of people just ignoring being hit by stuff, it’s a complete shitfest and I hate it, especially because this is exactly how giant robot fighting should be. Everyone starts with the Dino Megazord, and you have to unlock each individual part of other Megazords in order to play as them. There’s an energy system attached to the mode, with a max of 20, and bonus energy being granted by loot boxes, as well as just over time. There’s a limit on how much you can play Megazords because you’re always given rewards regardless of whether or not you win. The broad goal of Megazords is simply to deal as much damage as you can, with higher individual damage increasing the rewards you get at the end of each match, and each alliance competing to see who can do the most overall damage by the end of the event. Don’t be tricked into thinking that Mega Goldar might be good. He’s not. He’s terrible, actually. Such is the fate of Goldar, apparently.

Anyway, that’s where Legacy Wars is at right now. I’m honestly impressed. It’s not perfect, but I’m playing it and actually enjoying myself now. With this kind of improvement showing, it’s nice to think that we can only go up from here. We’ll see, though. nWay loves to mix us up like that.