One of the weirdest iPhone apps I have ever written about or played, Voice Fantasy isn’t so much an app game as an app experience. It’s telling that even though it was developed by RPG development house Square Enix, it’s listed not under the Games category of the App Store, but under Entertainment.
I suppose that’s because although it is sort of an RPG, Voice Fantasy isn’t really much of a game. Instead, a player records his or her voice into the game, and a character is created based on the pitch, tone and volume. Your friends can also create characters, leaving you a roster of different characters, saying all sorts of strange things.
Once you have a character or two created, you can have two user-created characters face off, or have the two of them team up against an unbeatable AI opponent. Voice Fantasy doesn’t have any classic RPG tropes like leveling up, so unless you have the perfect voice, you’re stuck with whatever built-in imperfections your character came with. This, combined with a computer-controlled opponent that is way too strong, means the single-player game is fairly worthless.
The head-to-head fares better as a novelty. Watching a battle where your or your friends’ voices are pitch-shifted in all different directions as they repeat the one phrase they recorded in the game is rather hilarious. The battles are over fairly quickly, which probably makes the joke last longer than it should.
Strangely, the player doesn’t control any part of the battle. Once you’ve recorded your voice into the app, your job is essentially done. The rest of the app is like an RPG battle simulator that you very idly participate in. Three bucks seems like a steep price to pay for something you barely get to actively play, but maybe that speaks more to my expectations that this would be a game experience and not an entertainment one.
It’d be hard to recommend this as anything more than an oddity, but if you want to see what sort of weird things Square Enix comes up with when it’s not making epic sagas on home consoles, then I suppose this is the app to get.
