69 people found this review helpful
3 people found this review funny
2
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 448.2 hrs on record (443.1 hrs at review time)
Posted: 25 Dec, 2024 @ 11:23pm

Play it for the story. The story's great, free, and completely unconnected to any gacha mechanics or spending necessity. Truly, I feel like the writer for the main story of this game deserves to be working on a product that takes their quality of work and their skill at weaving a dramatic war tragedy more seriously.

Everything else in the game is pretty soulless. Especially once you've hit the level cap, you're always fighting the same handful of enemies, doing the same grind, being forced to engage with the same rotating events that have no value in the narrative (and often aren't even written to be very consistent in character voice or remotely on theme to the rest of the game) for scant resources to make any sort of hint of meaningful progress or growth. Standard mobile game drip-feed garbage, desperately putting the push for player spending before the quality of player experience.

There's something telling about the most recent holiday event asking new players to invite back all the old players that dropped the game, when it's only 6 months out from release. My greatest hope is that when it eventually becomes unprofitable enough to be shut down, they make an offline port, as some of the more progressive mobile game developers have done. It could have been something really special, after all.
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5 Comments
AFestiveDude (No Delivery) 15 Jan @ 10:24pm 
@Evil Dead. They literally said in the review. The story is great.
Evil Dead 14 Jan @ 8:51pm 
Why you playin' a gacha game if you want story and offline? lol
Ciaran 10 Jan @ 12:50pm 
You’re right about 6 months being a mistake though, my bad. I was just thinking July through December (6 months), not that it's really more like August through December (5 months). Let's not pretend like the game isn't a finished game upon release, though. That's not fair to the developers. It had enough story content to carry me through roughly 300 hours over the course of 5 repeat plays through the Spiral of Destinies. That's not only a full game's worth of content, it's also (at the point of the review) one major story expansion.

I hope this comment clarifies some about me and my commentary, and comes across as respectful of your thoughts and opinions as I intend. This review is mainly intended an advisory (from someone who has experienced everything that the game currently has to offer) that there is good content to be had, but that it's definitively not in the gacha half of the game.
Ciaran 10 Jan @ 12:49pm 
The daily grind that you are required to do in order to level your account, even done efficiently, still takes 60 days. The story content in Spiral of Destinies is good, and that's largely where my time went. The rest of the game is just side stories (Fool's Journey) that start out good before losing steam (~Ch. 10 or 11, I'd say) and events designed to push sales. That the events (the primary level 60 activity) don't even attempt to add to story, build on character, or even add new enemies to fight is really not a good look.

I understand why you'd assume I’m just burned out. You wouldn't be familiar with how I enjoy gaming. I put in 450 hours because I wanted to fully experience what the game had to offer before passing judgment. I normally avoid gacha games, but I'm a long-time tactics gamer, and I wanted to at least give this one an honest chance. At this point, I've done that, and gotten what joy I can out of the game. I've since hung up my gloves and uninstalled the game.
MunchieDog 9 Jan @ 2:40pm 
So you spend nearly 450hrs in a newly released game and you're complaining about doing "the same old grind". Dude, you burned yourself out. The game just released in it's 1.0 format, 4 months later and devs release a massive expansion (and constantly has events like every other gacha).

The game did not release 6 months ago so thats a blatant lie. The game released July 31st, essentially August. August is the 8th month of the year so only 4 months. There are plenty of people that "dropped" the game because they cleared the content they enjoyed in a brand new game that isn't fully realized. Also the push for returning players happens in every game right before the release an expansion, which exactly what SoC did with there brand new expansion.