Fortias Saga: Idle RPG

I installed Fortias Saga because of the "idle" label on its store page. I figured it was the kind of game you switch on and leave running while the characters fight by themselves, dropping in now and then to collect rewards. The first stage showed me that's not quite it: there's a five-minute countdown in the top corner, and the game makes you steer your character around to collect five gems before time runs out. By the third stage I had lost twice in a row, ten loaves of bread each time, and that's when I saw clearly where the game intends to make things hard.

A stage here is a race against the clock, not a stand-up fight

Each stage drops you into a small patch of map with a virtual joystick in the bottom-left corner. You only steer one hero; the rest of the team follows and fights on its own. At the top of the screen are two objective boxes, usually five logs and five gems, and a red arrow at the edge of the screen always points toward whatever you're still missing. All the fighting is automatic, so the real challenge is taking the right route. The maps aren't that small either; on some runs I spent nearly a minute just walking from the woodcutting spot to the gem-digging spot.

Each stage's three stars are awarded for three separate things: defeating the boss, finishing with more than twenty percent HP, and killing at least three monsters. Winning a stage in the first chapter pays about 5,700 Gold and over a hundred Gems, plus ten potions and a bit of XP. That sounds like a lot, but you'll see right below what swallows all of it. Chapter one is the Verdant Outskirts, and every stage in it gets its own little title, from aggressive slimes to uncovering mysteries.

Between runs, the game returns you to an idle hall where the whole team fights monsters nonstop, money keeps dropping, and a reward chest counts down from over forty minutes. That's where the "idle" in the name actually lives; the stages themselves still need you at the wheel.

Sixty-three heroes on the roster, and I unlocked five in one session

The lineup has eight slots, but at the start only the first two are open. Each stage also demands a minimum power level, so you can't just throw anyone in. Heroes are ranked by rarity, from Common to Rare to Super Rare, and each has a role: melee, tank, magic or healing. Just dropping one healer into an empty slot took my team's power from about 2,900 to nearly 4,900, so that empty slot is worth far more than you'd think.

Heroes come from the summoning gate in the Tavern, which has four separate pools for heroes, gear, Gods and Spirits. Your first single pull is free, and a ten-pull costs exactly ten tickets. The game also keeps a pity bar that runs up to a hundred pulls for the truly unlucky. I did exactly one ten-pull and got Miriel at the top rarity, but that was luck, not a rule of the game.

The Town is what really eats your Gold

Beyond the stages there's a whole top-down town with ten buildings, including the Bakery, Gold Mine, Academy, Tavern, Airship Dock, Black Market, Shrine and Forge. Each building has its own level, and those levels produce real stats rather than decoration. Raising the Tavern to level two nudged the chance of a Rare hero from 30.38 percent to 33.77 percent.

The price of one such level is fifty thousand Gold plus a hundred and fifty logs. You also have to wait for the Town Hall to level up first, and wood only drops from stages, exactly five logs per run. The wood alone means thirty runs for a single level of a single building. Multiply that by ten buildings and you can see why the game calls itself idle. Besides the ten buildings, the town also has a quest board, a daily check-in spot and a seasonal event area.

When the bread runs out, your session ends

Every stage costs ten loaves of bread. Lose and hit retry, and that's another ten; retries aren't free. At character level one your bread store holds a hundred and fifty, which is fifteen runs if you never lose. Lose a few times and that number drops very quickly, and this is where the game has a fork in the road ready for you: put the phone down and wait for the bread to come back, or open your wallet.

The second bottleneck is even more annoying: the potions used to level up heroes. Taking Miriel from level one to level six ate seventy of mine. Meanwhile each won stage pays back exactly ten, and level seven asks for fourteen when I had only ten left in my bag. Plenty of Gold and yet everything stands still, and that feeling is exactly what sends people looking for a mod.

The mod undoes the exact knot that stopped me

Once installed through VipMod, a red MOD button appears on the left edge of the game. Tap it to open five options, the most important being Freeze resources. Turn it on and drag the two sliders to choose how much Gold and how many Gems to pin, then fully close the game and reopen it so the switch can take hold. The MOD button sits over a corner of the screen and sometimes covers the label underneath; you can hide it, and it comes back when you restart the game.

I pinned fifty million Gold and reopened the game, and the top bar showed exactly 50M. Then I went straight to hero upgrades and tapped eight times in a row. Miriel went from level one to level five, attack jumped from 189 to 389 and HP from 1691 to 2375. The Gold box stayed at 50M through all eight taps, while the potions in my bag dropped from eighty to twenty-four. So this is real spending, not a pretty number painted on the screen.

Three more things to know up front so your expectations are right:

• The three speed-up levels, ×2, ×4 and ×8, all do exactly what they say, but the stage countdown races ahead just as fast.
• I didn't get to try Free paid packs even once, because the tutorial kept the way into the Shop hard-locked for the whole session.
• Bread, wood, summon tickets and potions can't be pinned, so you still have to earn those four the old-fashioned way.

Speeding up a timed stage is setting yourself up to lose

The first time I turned on ×4, I assumed I'd clear stages four times faster. In reality the five-minute clock also ran out in just over a minute of real time. I lost stage 1-3 twice in a row because I forgot to turn it off, so the right way to use it is when replaying stages whose routes you already know, or while the team fights on its own in the idle hall, switching it off before you try a new stage.

Also remember that everything in this game goes through your account on the server, including the number you just pinned. Don't set a sky-high amount and then go fight in the Arena or the World Boss. Keep it moderate and the mod does what it's meant to do, trimming the grind, rather than turning you into a different player.

How it plays

The top-down pixel art is very easy on the eyes, and the hero portraits are properly polished, so unlocking someone new feels worth the effort. The game also keeps your progress between sessions, so quitting halfway and coming back costs you nothing.

The annoying part is how long the tutorial clings on: it locks every button except the one it's pointing at, so for the first few chapters you're barely free to move between screens. On Google Play the game holds 4.3 stars from more than 10,600 ratings and over 500,000 downloads. In-app packs range from about one dollar to about a hundred dollars per item.

So who should play it

If you like RPGs with a big cast and enjoy exploring maps while building your own town, this one is right up your alley. It doesn't demand quick reflexes, only that you take the right route and know who deserves a spot in the team. The first few chapters hold your hand a bit too long, but once you're past them the map opens up nicely.

And if you gave up exactly when the potions and bread ran dry, the mod above unties most of that knot. Gold and Gems are no longer something you count coin by coin, and the only thing to remember is to flip the switch before entering the game; turning it on halfway through does nothing.