Guardian Cross

Guardian Cross

Today I want to present you an iOS Game called Cuardian Cross by Square Enix, which I’ve been playing for some time now. It’s a fantasy card battle RPG with beautiful artwork and created by developer of some of the Final Fantasy games. So you can also find summons and monsters from the Final Fantasy series as Guardians, how they are called in this game. You can catch them and then you can use them as cards to battle other Guardians and also other people or you friends.

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You can get the game for free in the App Store. Unfortunately there is no Android version yet, but Square Enix plans to also make Guardian Cross available for Android users in the future, according to their Facebook Page. The only thing you can buy with real money are super hunting tickets, with which you have a higher chance to get rare Guardians, but you don’t really need to buy them, because you will get them as Coliseum or login bonus rewards, too.

Also if you start to play you can enter an invitation code to receive one limited 4-star Guardian as a big boost to your starter team. Please feel free to use my invitation code for your 4-star Guardian:

EW79133

Because the game might seem a little bit complicated at first, I’ll give you a quick beginner’s guide ^.^:

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First of all you have to capture some guardians, because without them, you can’ t do anything. There are now 4 hunting grounds in total, with each having their own Guardians and special conditions. For the first hunt you will only be able to hunt in Berneside Plains. But don’t worry, you will be given a free hunting ticket and you won’t have a time limit and can catch your first 5 Guardians on the first try. Let me tell you a little bit about the special conditions of each hunting ground:

Berneside Plains: Monsters are slow and they will often yield bonus time or go into the break mode, where you can catch them with just one shot.

Glaverow Volcanic Zone: Level 12 and up. Monsters will be faster, and sometimes a big monster with either one of the 4 mythic creatures of the star constellations (4-stars: Suzaku, Seiryū, Byakko or Genbu) or even Bahamut (5-star). But you can’t really hunt them in one hunt. From my experience it’ll take around 10 hunts to get their HP down to Zero. But for that you’ll get a guaranteed 4 or 5-star Guardian, so it’s worth it.

Storm Reach Snowfield: Level 20 and up. Monsters are faster like in Glaverow, but from time to time there will be a snowstorm which will either freeze all the monsters, so they will be in a break state and you can hunt them with one hit or your triggers freezes and you have to hit the trigger multiple times before you can shoot again.

Deadmoon Desert: Level 30 and up. Monster are slow like in Berneside, but some monsters are just illusions and will vanish if you shoot at them. There are also landmines which you can shoot to cause explosion that will instantly catch the monsters in their surrounding. For that monsters will not go into break mode.

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You’ll always have 60 second to hunt as many Guardians as possible. You can extend the time by 10 seconds each if you catch a yellow blinking Guardian. Before you hunt you should also always check if you still have room for them, because you have a max limit of Guardians you can keep. The limit will rise from time to time when you level up.

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Because the Guardians most often do not stand still, but will move around in weird patterns and because you have a short delay in shooting, it’s always better to not directly aim on the Guardian, but a little bit in front of them. It might also help if you wait a bit after you shot the Guardian, because it will slow down a bit after a few seconds or even stop completely if you wait long enough. But please note that time is running while you wait.

It can take two to six/seven hits until you can catch them. You’ll see the HP bar go down with each hit. Sometimes the Guardian might go into a Break state, then you only have to hit it once more to catch it. But this state will only stay for about one second so you should act quickly.

After the you shot the HP down completely, you’ll see which Guardian you got.

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After that you should go find the next Guardian to hunt. Just follow the arrows on the sides to find the nearest Guardian. If the arrow is filled the Guardian is not as far away as if the arrow is empty.

Each silhouette will give you the chance to hunt another type of Guardian, and if you want to catch a certain Guardian, you should look out for the right silhouette. You should always try to catch slime-type Guardians, because they might be Silver or Gold Slimes. Especially on fridays, when they appear more often. You should also look out for bipeds and hydra-type Guardians, because the higher rank Guardians are usually of these types.

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When the timer runs out, you’ll get your hunting results. You’ll see how many guardians of each star ranking you got and the total, you’ll also get a notification if you got a new card and you can review all the cards you caught by sliding them left or right. If you got a Silver or Gold Slime you can also gift it to one of your friends. Slimes are a great way to level your Guardians, because they don’t have any element type and yield more experience than other cards in the same star ranking, but more about that later.

For any additional hunts you’ll need a normal hunting ticket, which you can obtain after story battles, as a daily login bonus or you can buy them for 50 friend points each.

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For now you should open your Guardians menu. You can choose to enhance your Guardians, to regroup your party/deck or to sell Guardians for GP. First of all you should choose Reorganize Party:

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You should only have 5 (or 6 if you used the invitation code) until now. You can check you current party for Field missions and for Coliseum battles. You may need to build two different parties, because Coliseum battles do have some conditions for you party for example you’re not allowed to use two cards of the same Guardians. For the field missions it’s almost always okay to just use the Recommended Party function and it will automatically organize your party starting with your strongest (stat-wise) Guardian and so on. The field missions were all pretty easy for me, especially if you also clear all the sub missions.

For Coliseum battles you might consider building your team manually, because the people you’ll battle against are much more stronger more clever than the NPC battles. You can also start with your strongest monster to kill the all with just this Guardian to get a domination bonus. Some people also but their strongest Guardian at the end, especially those with really good skills like Cure, Drain, Aspir or Reraise. This will take advantage of parties with their stronger Guardians up front, so they can kill you off, when all your strong Guardians are already down.

Another build I’ve seen is to put one strong Guardian, then a very low Guardian followed by a strong one again and so on. This will keep your average attack score low to lure other people in to battle you. On the other hand your strong Guardians will be able to hit first, because the opponent’s Guardian made the last move, when they killed your weak Guardian.

Later you also have to experiment with all the skills and also elements to build a perfect team, similar to Pokémon. Everyone should experiment for themselves what kind of style they want to play.

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Now it’s the time to head into a story dungeon. You’ll see weaker and stronger enemies you can fight. Their strength will be indicated by letters with A being the lowest and it will rise through the alphabet until Z and starting at A again with even stronger Battles.

You’ll be able to fight field battles as long as you have action points, with is indicated as the flash in the upper right corner. One battle will cost you 5 points. You’ll gain 1 energy back every 3 minutes, with 50 being the max you can have at any time. You can also recover your energy with recovery potions, which you can get by completing sub-missions, by completing one page of your Guardian catalogue, as a login bonus or you can buy them with you friend point for 150 FP each. They will recover all (so up to 50) of your action points.

You can also find treasures in the dungeons, which can contain Normal Hunting or Coliseum tickets or a large amount of Guardian Points.

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Just click on any Guardian or NPC to start the fight.

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The fight itself is pretty easy. You don’t have to do anything, as your Guardians will decide for themself what skill they use. If you don’t want to see the whole sequence you can just hold the button in the lower right corner to speed the whole battle up.

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When you win a fight you’ll earn Guardian points (the amount of it differs from fight to fight) and 5 experience points. You’ll also see how many exp points you need until your next level. There is also the possibility to obtain items as a Hunting ticket and/or a Coliseum ticket, but most of the time you won’t get an item. But be careful, you can only keep 5 of each at a time, so every additional ticket will be lost, so don’t forget to use them from time to time.

On wednesdays you’ll receive double GP from town NPC fights, so if you’re broke, you should do some battles in one of the towns.

In case you lose a fight, you won’t get anything but you also won’t lose anything, except for the 5 battle points. If you try the same battle again, you’ll get an advantage: All Guardians you already defeated before will stay defeated and you can battle the remaining Guardians with your fully recovered team.

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With every Level Up your Battle points will be fully recharged, so you should time the use of recovery potions according to your experience, if you want to level fast. Also the maximum of Guardians and friends you can have at a time will rise every other level.

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After some time that you battled and hunted you’ll notice that your team will get weaker. Now it’s the best time to enhance your Guardians! Just open the menu and check out your cards. You should start enhancing your strongest/highest star-rating card. I can tell from my experience that it doesn’t make any sense to enhance 2-star Guardians. You should even be careful to not enhance 3-star cards to the maximum, because they will be pretty useless when you get 4 or 5-star ranked Guardians. But all that depends on how lucky you are. I was pretty unlucky and had to level even 3-star cards to around level 20 or even 30, until I finally got my first 5-star card and more 4-star card. Just for your information: Tom and me are playing for 55 days now and we both only got 2 5-star cards until now. So don’t be disappointed if it takes 2 to 4 weeks until you might get your first 5-star card!

To level your card you have to combine them with other Guardians you caught in one of the hunting ground. Meaning you have to sacrifice a (lower) card, to make another one stronger. 1- to 3-star cards will get useless in the higher levels anyway, but for now you should combine only 1-star cards to your strongest ones. You can choose to pick only one or multiple cards at a time. If you want to be safe to not sacrifice a card you wanted to keep, just pick one card at a time.

For every Guardian that you use to enhance another, you have to pay Guardian points. The costs will rise with every level to make it harder to level the Guardian in higher level. In addition to that, you also have to sacrifice more or higher level cards to reach the next level. From my experience you can use 1-star cards up to around level 30 to 35, but after that the cost you have to pay to sacrifice a Guardian will be to high for too less experience they can gain from it.

Guardians of the same Attribute will provide more exp when sacrificed than Guardians of another attribute. It will be even better if you sacrifice to same Guardian to another. The only exceptions are Gold or Silver Slimes, which don’t have any attribute at all. They will even give way more exp than the same Guardian. Also, the higher the rank is, the better the exp it gives you.

If you level up the stats will rise and from time to time the Guardian will also get new abilities. Each of your Guardians can only have three abilities, if it learns more, you can choose to change it with another ability or to keep the abilities you have, similar to Pokémon XD.

To further enhance your Guardians, you can also give it Magic Stones, which you can obtain as Coliseum or Login bonuses. They will raise one of your Guardians’ stats or make it possible to let your Guardian learn a new ability. Please not that there is a maximum each stat can be raised through the use of magic stones, but my Gargantua which got all the magic stones still hasn’t reached one limit.

So that’s all for now. I hope I could provide some useful information. If you have any more questions, please feel free to comment or write an email and also add me as your Guardian Cross friend. My name is Meiana. And don’t forget to enter the invitation code EW79133 to receive one beautiful 4-star card right from the beginning!

Good luck!

Greetings, Raya