Recent reviews by Plantszaza

Beautiful pixel art and entertaining gameplay.
Also, you can pet CATS. That's a bonus.

Sword of Convallaria feels like two games packed into one.
First is a gacha game, and second is a Roguelike SRPG.

I'm going to talk about the Roguelike part of the game first. Because I feel like this is the game's main selling point.
From this point, it will be called SoD. (Spiral of Destinies)
You can access SoD after a somewhat lengthy tutorial.
SoD requires a key to play and will need another key when entering a new chapter.
You can get them for free by simply logging in every day. They expire in about two weeks after getting them.
Though I have 18 keys that won't expire, you can reach three endings with that many keys alone. You will also receive a beacon while playing that lets you start the run at later chapters instead of starting from the beginning.
You can bring a few characters you obtained from gacha to SoD, but their level and equipment will not be carried over, only their skills.

SoD is unique from the gacha mode in a few ways.
- New characters can be recruited in the Tavern using in-game golds or from some event. They can have a Legendary rarity and skills they don't normally possess in Gacha mode.
- They can learn skills that make them more powerful.
- Every character has stamina that decreases every time they participate in battle or do dispatches. They lose more stamina if defeated in battle. If their stamina gets too low, they must rest before they can fight again.

The gameplay loop in SoD is
Check around town in case there is an NPC or merchant to talk to -> Do a quest -> Send people to rest/training -> Check varied facilities in town and see if you can do something -> Proceed to next week -> Repeat.

There isn't anything you can pay to win in SoD, other than the gacha characters you brought. You can challenge yourself by not taking those OP Legendaries in.

If you make mistakes, you can use the backtrack function to revert it.
If you run out of backtrack counts and eventually lose the stage, you can try them again. But the characters you sent still lose stamina though.

And the story is amazing too. There are several choices to be made and the game will tell you which will have consequences.
I have only reached one ending from Iria's path so far, but I was captivated by the story to the point that I cried.

...And now for the gacha game mode.
It's pretty standard. Gacha for characters, level them up, get equipment for them, clear difficult stages, grind, grind, grind...

Legendary has overall 2% rates. There are two kinds of banners.
The Debut banner is where newly released character have their rates up. There is a 50% chance that the Legendary you summoned will be the rates-up character. If your summon count hits 180, you're guaranteed to get the Debut character of that banner. This pity count carries over to the next Debut banner.

The Destined banner featured two rates-up Legendary characters at the same time. Each has a 75% chance to appear when you summon a Legendary from the banner. You are guaranteed to get the rates-up Legendary you have not obtained when your summon count reaches 180. This pity count is shared with all Destined banners.

In addition to banner-specific pity count. If you have summoned 100 times in any banner without getting a single Legendary, you are guaranteed to get one.

It's not necessary to summon duplicate characters either as you can farm their character shards once a day.

...There's also equipment gacha but there is no reason to gacha these because they have no rates up and you can farm them or get them as a reward for free.

As for the number of gacha currencies you can use for summoning.
Counting the only permanent sources but not the one-time rewards.
You will earn enough for 30 summons a month.
Counting the limited-time events and other one-time rewards you can boost that number up to around 50-70 summons.
This might sound harsh for this game that's currently going at a fast pace and releases a new Debut banner every two weeks.
But there are video guides out there of people clearing the highest difficulty stages in the game with low-rarity characters.
So the game is quite F2P friendly, and the developer makes sure to give players free stuff often to accommodate them with the game's pacing.

There is also PvP.
Friendly PvP is purely for fun and ranking PvP has you fight against the Defending team controlled by AI. You can't lose ranking score in any way so everyone can get the highest ranking rewards should they try.

And now I will list some small issues I have with the game.
- Combat maps are not rotatable, they instead give you the "move" button to precisely move a character to a tile obscure by other objects.
- Outside of the auto-battle, You must hold a button at all times to enable the x2 speed. It should have been a toggleable button.
- When a dialog is too long to fit in the box, it automatically scrolls. There is also no backlog to reread previous conversations.
- Most of the translations are fine, but some dialogs and descriptions feel awkward to read.
- You can push the enemy off a cliff but you cannot use pull skill to send them into the void???
- The shard farming stage gives only a small amount of shards per day and is divided among the characters that fight in the battle. The more you deploy, the fewer shards they get. And each of them can only get a maximum of three shards.
- Stamina is capped at 240, takes almost an entire day to recover from empty to full. Every stage costs either 30 or 40 Stamina to play. Leveling up only gives 20 stamina. The only good thing is that once the story stages have been cleared, you can replay them for free. There are also free stamina potions that can help with stamina shortage problems.
- Once you beat a farming stage with 3 stars, you can skip it to spend stamina and get rewards immediately. But a normal skip requires you to send a few characters with sufficient levels and ranks. After skipping, those characters cannot be used for skipping for 3 hours. There is an item that lets you skip without the restrictions. But they are limited, will expire, and cannot be used on event farming stages.
- When you rank up a character, you are offered to choose one of the two new skills. Once you choose, you have to spend a rare resource to unlock the other skill you didn't choose.
- Damn bro, I gacha'd Beryl and now I have to gacha for her costume?

Overall, it's a great game. Great music and voice acting too. (There are Japanese, Korean, and Chinese but I only listened to JP voice lines.)
I give it 8/10

My rating reference:
0: I hate it.
1-2: It's bad.
3-4: Some improvement and it would be ok.
5: It's not bad, but not good either.
6-7: It's ok.
8-9: It's great.
10: I love it.

Story: 5/10 Story? There are very few of them. It's not worth talking about it.
Gameplay: 8/10 It's exactly that fake mobile ads game with NSFW. The puzzle isn't too hard and doesn't overstay its welcome.
Scene: 7/10 Pixel animation with a bit of female protagonist voice for each enemy.

My rating reference:
0: I hate it.
1-2: It's bad.
3-4: Some improvement and it would be ok.
5: It's not bad, but not good either.
6-7: It's ok.
8-9: It's great.
10: I love it.

Story: 6/10 The story is simple and provides good enough context for you to enjoy the scene. There are a few translation errors here and there but it does not bother me from enjoying the game.
Gameplay: 6/10 Avoid the female warrior and male villagers while you search the village for a way to capture her. The character moves rather slowly but the game provides 2x speed mode. Combined with pressing the Shift key, the entire game can be completed very quickly.
Scene: 10/10 There are 14 scenes total, and all female characters in these scenes are voiced and have animation, Pretty high quality.

Gacha for Character.
Gacha for Awakened Character.
Gacha for Operator
Gacha for that Character/Operator for 6/8 times to unlock their max potential
Gacha for Character's Exclusive Equipment
Gacha for Equipment Substat
Gacha for Equipment Set
Gacha for Equipment Latent
Gacha for Ship Extra Passive
Gacha for Menu Decoration
Gacha for (Collab) Costume
One character even has to Gacha for her skill to do something.

This game is Peak Gacha.
Gacha:Side

I recommend you to listen to "Schizophrenia"

At the time of this review, I have just finished Chapter 3, Act 3.
Yes, I am slow because I insist on getting an S rank on every stage in the Challenge+ difficulty.
Here are my reviews.

My opinion as a Girls' Frontline player:
The story is packed full of Love and Hope. The story writer did a great job on it.
You can enjoy this game's universe lore even if you have not played any other games made by this company. The game puts enough relevant lore as you progress. (If you care to read all of them.)

My opinion as an average player:
I love the art style, and the chibi is adorable.
Music is a banger.
There are two kinds of stage types: Standard and Puzzle.

The Standard is those regular battles and "Regular battles, but you can Stealth" missions.
You have a wide variety of items to aid you in combat. These missions are flexible and only differ in the degree of efficiency of the strategy you use.
I have only played on Challenge+, so I can only comment on that. It's like this: "5 enemies are within attack range, ten more are on their way, 15 reinforcement with several elites a few turns later." And it will get worse the further you progress into the story. At least people who play on Casual can level up infinitely, and people who play on Standard have to deal with fewer Elites than me.

The Puzzle stages are those "Stealth" missions where you must follow an exact pattern or fail the stage.
I don't see issues with having to load save often, as the people I talked to complain about.
That might be because I'm retarded, and I have to do it on almost every stage, or I'm biased because I played the Bakery Girl (2013.) The stealth missions in that game are much worse than in this game.
There are only a few of them compared to the Standard stages.
After the devs patched it, most of these Puzzle stages allow combat after exposure (with greater difficulty than the intended path) instead of instant mission failure. I prefer to stick to stealth in these missions, but some people may find it more enjoyable to go gun-blazing.
These Puzzle stages are more predictable anyway. Doing the same action will always lead to the same result. Meanwhile, in Standard missions, the enemy may decide to move to a different spot even if all your actions are the same, and you have to improvise when your character misses her 98% hit shot.


I can guarantee you that this game is worth 25$
It's fun. There is plenty of content to go through, and the devs remastered the 2013 version of the game and made it playable inside it as well.

Also, I bought the Deluxe edition and received extra supplies.
To tell you the truth. The number of items you can bring to the mission remains the same. I can still fail the mission because of my skill issue, so the advantage gap is manageable.

She's cooking.

Terraria itself is already great.
Terraria with MODs is even better!

TAX. THE. RAT.