Makes Casting Fireballs Seem like the Most Boring Superpower Possible
People tend to misuse the term ‘guilty pleasure’. Most of the time, they don’t feel guilty at all, and these people seem to take great pleasure telling you why they love them.
Incremental games, for me, are absolutely guilty pleasures. I feel no pride at all in enjoying them, and the emotion is closer to shame. I wouldn’t presume to recommend them to anyone, as I am confused why I like them in the first place – so, what on earth would my recommendation sound like? While I definitely get pleasure from them – and get excited when a free one pops onto the Xbox Store – I get a strong feeling that it’s not a ‘good’ pleasure. My relationship with them skirts closer to obsession than enjoyment. So, there you go: guilty pleasure.
Falling Out of Love With a Game in Increments
It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot while playing The Legend of Fireball. This is very definitely an incremental game – not to be confused with an idle/clicker game, as there is far more interaction than what that genre requires – but it neglects everything that I’ve come to enjoy from the genre, and focuses on the stuff I really don’t. It’s bad enough that it’s made me retroactively wonder if I like the genre at all. Which is quite impressive, in a way.
Here’s the pitch: you are a dude in what looks like a garage or lock-up. You have the ability to generate fireballs with your hands, but they’re pitiful. You’re pew-pewing at standard items like mugs, lamps and TV sets. For reasons that we will wave away, you get cash for breaking these items, and that cash can be spent on various upgrades and items. Those make you better at destroying items, so the items become bigger, the stages become less of a lock-up, and you start to look more like Ryu mastering a Hadouken than a burped up flameball.
That title, ‘The Legend of Fireball’, makes it sound like you’re going on an aspirational journey of some kind, fighting other people in mortal combat, perhaps. But those expectations should be nudged down a bit. It’s one man’s battle against bigger and bigger objects (all the way up to actual buildings), which isn’t quite as exciting as we were led to believe.
That Auto-Cast Purchase Looks More Tempting by the Day
You don’t autocast those fireballs, which would have taken it into idle territory (although, it should be said, there is paid DLC that lets you autofire, so you can chuck down some cash if that’s your preferred path). Instead, you are actively targeting the item with your analogue stick and firing with the A button. The items drop down, bounce a bit and then fall over, so there’s some skill to targeting them, I suppose.
There’s a stamina bar to limit the number of fireballs that you can spaff at a teddy bear. So, you’re often waiting for the sweaty, out of breath dude to regain enough energy to fire a second flame. Upgrades can increase this stamina bar’s length, or speed up how fast it recharges, but it’s equally likely that you will unlock a new flame item that will gobble up your stamina bar like PAC-Man. Then it’s back to earning stamina upgrades that make this fireball item viable.
This is not an enjoyable interaction. Aiming at an inanimate object that sometimes falls over is just about the least empowering thing you can do in a video game. I felt more empowered cleaning the toilets this morning. The fireball arcs randomly, sometimes completely missing the item – even though you’ve targeted it perfectly – so there’s little skill involved, either. A mega-fireball is triggered randomly (at a frequency that can be improved to 100% with upgrades), so that is ALSO out of your control.
There’s so little enjoyment to be derived from tossing a fireball that it is bound to actually be better with that DLC auto-cast unlocked. But as a base interaction from the free version of the game, it’s deadening. It’s in that sour-spot of requiring attention, interaction and effort, but being incredibly unrewarding if you do so.
Even Watching the Numbers Going up Can’t Save It
Incremental games are less about the action, though, and more about ‘numbers goes up’. It’s about the meta-game of optimising your build and pumping resources into the right upgrades. Surely The Legend of Fireball nails that aspect?
You know the answer. For one, The Legend of Fireball is incredibly slow at giving you the good stuff. It takes a fair few hours to unlock new stages and items to shoot that actually feel satisfying to obliterate. It’s entirely possible to think that The Legend of Fireball doesn’t include these things, as they’re hidden behind a grind that starts way too early, and they don’t feature on the UI. Considering this is a free game, where people will only give it ten minutes or so to prove its point, that’s damning. I am willing to bet that 90+% of players drop off The Legend of Fireball in seconds.
For two, the upgrade loops in The Legend of Fireball are incredibly unsatisfying. To make any kind of progress, you MUST have a build that has a high-level fireball and outfit. They’re basically mandatory for strong progress. But they’re not earned: they are randomly gained from chests. Those chests are either unlocked from a trickle of in-game achievements and challenges, or they are bought with real-world cash. So, you have a choice: either you are lucky enough to get something potent from the ingame chests, or you’re unlucky and you need to spend cash to make the game at all satisfying. Which sucks, obviously.
Upgrades that don’t make the grade
You CAN upgrade a stack of lower-level items and outfits to improve their output, but the improvements are microscopic. You will basically never be able to make a lower-tier fireball that is as strong as the tier above it. In fact, the only way that might happen is if you spend real-world cash, which undermines the reason for upgrading them in the first place. You just buy a better one.
It’s entirely possible to upgrade your character without real-world cash, as there’s an Upgrade system that lets you tinker with fireballs, mega fireballs and stamina recharge. But you rarely feel these changes. Perhaps to preserve the strength of the real-world DLC, they are so incremental that they’re invisible. I’d upgrade them out of duty, rather than any kind of necessity.
One positive, if you can call it that, is that 1000G is yours after about an hour. You don’t have to hang around to 100% The Legend of Fireball, which is a minor justice. Again, I’d love to know how many people stick around beyond that moment. The numbers must be ugly.
More Bad-ouken Than Hadouken
If you’re an incremental or idle fan, we should warn you that The Legend of Fireball is not going to sit on your hard drive like DPS Idle or Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms does. Its premise might be quirky, but it’s got almost no sticking power. Flinging fireballs should have been a true guilty pleasure, but it’s a burdensome chore. The upgrade loops can’t save it, either. It’s too hungry for your cash, too eager to introduce the grind, and too late to sweeten the deal with fun stuff.
The Legend of Fireball made me wonder whether I actually enjoyed incremental games. Was I just compelled to play them? I’m hoping the next one that comes along pulls me out of that funk, because The Legend of Fireball definitely had me questioning the entire genre.
Important Links
Free To Play? The Legend of Fireball Blasts Onto Xbox With Explosive Upgrades – https://www.thexboxhub.com/free-to-play-the-legend-of-fireball-blasts-onto-xbox-with-explosive-upgrades/
Download from the Xbox Store for free – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/the-legend-of-fireball/9MZMF5VJX482/0010
Or download the Hot Edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/the-legend-of-fireball-hot-edition/9NMSHS9JM198/0010
There’s a bigger Deluxe Edition too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/the-legend-of-fireball-deluxe-edition/9N4K5MN61DV2/0010
