When comparing Merchant vs Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, the Slant community recommends Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for most people. In the question“What are the best Android games without in-app purchases/paywalls?” Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is ranked 36th while Merchant is ranked 94th. The most important reason people chose Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is:
To simplify how the gameplay works it is a bit like playing chess where in each turn needs to be scrutinized in order to find the best play on the board. Being that there is a large amount of RPG elements thrown into the game, these choices become even more complicated while also adding a huge amount of options to the game.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Pixel art
The game has a nice retro pixel art style. From the menus to the dungeons or shop there is a very familiar aesthetic to the overall design that would have fit in quite well on consoles in the 80's.
Pro Fun resource management mechanic
The player can sell their loot (gathered from a dungeon) for in game money, to then be spent on needed equipment or can equip their loot to try harder dungeons to get better loot to sell for new equipment. Each action is a gamble and may or may not pay off for the player.
Pro In active development
Merchant is still in a very active development phase, which means there will be plenty of bug fixes and new features and tweaks to the gameplay added.
Pro Dedicated subreddit
Merchant has a dedicated subreddit page where users can discuss the game, strategies and bugs.
Pro Completely free and zero permissions
Merchant is a completely free game that also has zero permissions.
Pro Deep turn-based tactical combat that you can easily sink hundreds of hours into
To simplify how the gameplay works it is a bit like playing chess where in each turn needs to be scrutinized in order to find the best play on the board. Being that there is a large amount of RPG elements thrown into the game, these choices become even more complicated while also adding a huge amount of options to the game.
Pro Masterpiece
This tactical RPG always ends up destroying all other alternatives with jobs, skills, stats, items, story, and enhanced dialogues. If only it had better graphics, it would be mainstream.
Pro For a mobile release, this is a large game with many hours of content, which is often rare on the mobile platform
Being that this is a port of a console game the player will find the length of the title much more than the average mobile release.
Cons
Con Current version has both ads and in-app purchases
Con Wait times
There are wait times in the game for both crafting and adventuring. This makes it impossible to sit and play for any length of time and makes the user have to come back to the game often in order to make any significant progress.
Con Lag/delay of action
When pressing buttons in the menus there is a noticeable delay until the requested action actually takes place.
Con Touch controls feel awkward to use
The touch controls use an on screen dpad overlaid on top of the game. This means fingers move cover some of the game field or action when trying to maneuver.
Con Poor port on Android
There is no immersive mode, which would allow this to be fullscreen on devices that have the Android navigation bar. On top of this the game is letterboxed on both sides of the screen do to it being a port of the port for iOS. There is also no other Android specific features to speak of in the game either.