Genre: Puzzle
Developer: Mistwalker
Publisher: Mistwalker

In a mobile world simply awash with the most absurdly low-quality, mass produced, lowest common denominator, Farmville-style garbage, Terra Battle stands out for its excellent character art, outstanding hand-drawn backgrounds, and polished menu system, all put together in a cohesive way.

Like its graphics, Terra Battle's sound is a positive point. The soundtrack, a combination of work from Nobuo Uematsu, Kenji Ito, and Yoko Shimomura, is outstanding-- its music that wouldn't be at all out of place in a Final Fantasy title. Some of the songs, such as the menu theme, are phenomenally experimental and fit the game's world really well. Sound effects are excellent too.

Terra Battle is yet another one of those dime-a-dozen "match"-style games, where you drag icons around a grid and solve puzzles. It's complete with "stamina", the rejuvination of which you can naturally speed up by spending real money, consecutive day prizes, and all of the other attributes of contemporary cellphone games. The mechanics are marginally more interesting than competing titles, but the whole thing-- ironically-- lacks the same "skinner box" appeal that the whole genre is dependent on to make up for its lack of actual game design.

Terra Battle is what you get when you take a team of excellent artists, perhaps the best video game composer of all time, and experienced designers, and have them try their hand at the kind of-- frankly-- shitty "match"-style freemium game that dominates the mobile landscape. For that style of game it isn't a bad effort, but it's impossible to escape the feeling that having this kind of talent work on this kind of game would be like having Beethoven compose music for a Fisher Price toy piano; what a waste.