TGS hands-on: Xpec's upcoming mobile fantasy card battle game Fantasy Lore

There are an awful lot of games at TGS about fantasy battles. After all, the Asian market loves them! Taiwan’s Xpec Entertainment is among the many companies putting its hand into what, based on current trends, promises to be a very profitable genre: mobile card-based fantasy battle games. I got to spend a few minutes playing Fantasy Lore, an upcoming mobile title from Xpec in cooeration with Japan’s GREE, while chatting with a rep about the game and its future.

Fantasy Lore puts players into a 3D fantasy world they can explore, collecting cards and using these cards to battle various bosses. I played an iPad demo of one boss battle that cast me as a busty rabbit-eared lady battling a white-haired male assailant, and there didn’t seem to be a ton of complexity. I simply pressed “attack” and clicked on various cards to unleash special attacks. After a few rounds of this, I won. It wasn’t the most compelling mobile experience I’ve ever had, and in the cacophony of TGS I couldn’t speak to the sound at all, but I will say one thing for the game: it looks gorgeous.

It’s also still a work in progress, according to the Xpec rep I spoke with. Fantasy Lore hasn’t been released yet and doesn’t have a concrete release date; the company is hoping that the feedback it gets from gamers during this conference will help it work out some of the game’s kinks for a possible — but not guaranteed — launch before the end of the year. Whenever it does come out, it will be available on both Android and iOS.

Xpec plans to launch the game initially in Japan, Taiwan, and China (it currently only has Chinese and Japanese-language versions), but hasn’t ruled out expansion beyond those countries (especially into other parts of Asia) if it does well. There’s no shortage of competition in the world of fantasy card battle games, but Fantasy Lore has looks going for it, and the game experience probably gets deeper once you get beyond the brief demo section I played.

This article is part of our coverage of TGS 2013. Be sure to keep an eye out for our new gaming-focused site, Games in Asia, coming soon.