AYAYA fellow weebs, it’s time for my take on your waifu collecting simulator. Yeah, yours, no waifus here, I’m in purely for gameplay and insane plot of course as a proper refined gentleman.
Instant disclaimer: I don’t like gacha monetization mechanics, game is good and doesn’t force these mechanics on you too much, but since it’s still there please be careful and responsible with spending your money, because game sure knows how to bait it out of you. Now let’s get to my thoughts about the game itself…
First of all let’s remove obvious things – shit’s weeb af, yeah, if it bothers you, then just don’t touch this game with a stick, for me weeb part is whatever, I’m neutral about it – don’t really like it, but have nothing against it really. Outside of weeb style game is quite beautiful and runs well, that part is what matters to me and it is on a decent level, so I’ll take it.
Another thing that is bothering many people is voice acting, especially in English – Paimon triggers many people with her VA, but honestly for me it’s whatever too, I don’t really feel the pain of it too much most of the time and I’m just happy that every somewhat important dialogue is voiced, which helps to actually care a bit more instead of just skipping everything and going full brainless MMO-level of grind (which you will see in Ragnarok Online soon and understand what I mean). Skipping all that stuff/muting dialogues/switching to other VA language (JP sounded quite bad too tbh) is also an option though.
Now another bad thing is monetization, well I guess “bad”, because in the end it doesn’t really push you to actually spend money too much, I played free game for a few days, enjoyed it and didn’t feel like I need to pay for something once. Yeah, sure, at some point you probably might hit some sort of wall that will push you towards paying more (that’s what I heard from people who play their previous gacha game too), but that wall happens waaaay later in the game and thing is – getting dozens of hours of fun out of completely free game without paying once is already a good outcome in my book. What after then? Well, you got your share of fun so you can just say good bye to the game and move on to play something else, live service games consume a lot of time and freeing that doesn’t sound too bad after you got some good experience. Well if you enjoy the game a lot still and hit the wall, while still willing to play it – there are people who play gacha games, including previous one from this studio completely f2p, which from what I hear from them might be quite painful, but doable, so why not. I’d say some reasonable injection of money from time to time is also completely fine if you enjoy the game, did it myself with f2p games before and have no regrets, it was always worth considering amount of time and fun in exchange. Just be sure to be responsible with you microtransactions – gacha games are really a dangerous pit, I know some very fucked up examples of people getting in very bad financial situations from investing in gacha games and this one is monetized really good and aggressively, researching interface, shops and all that quickly shows you how well done all those mechanisms are made to motivate you to throw some money in.
That was quite detailed on negative things, but it’s just a lot of text, in short basically game is weeb, but good lucking and runs well, voice acting might get annoying, but you can deal with that in a way and monetization is quite aggressive, but you don’t need to pay anything at all at least for a long while.
What about positive things now? Well first of all gameplay is actually really good – I never played Zelda games, but this one sure seems like one in terms of some mechanics and open world things. And all that stuff is really well made – there is a lot of stuff to do and it doesn’t feel repetitive yet to me after couple of streams and yeah sure for live service game that amount of time is like nothing, but for just a cozy game that I got for free with no expectations that’s a good result.
One of the huge highlights is the element system – lots of elements that are involved in combat and exploration, allowing you to combo your characters and enemy elements in some effect chains. Multiple characters with their own elements and skills also adding A LOT to combat, this is exactly what New World needs imo (reminder that one of my main issues in NW was 3 skills per character and even though you can switch weapons and get other skills from them they will still be on cooldown anyway) – you have 2 skills per character, but with 4 characters that you can switch you technically get 8, combined with positioning, dodging, using regular attacks etc that makes combat into quite an exciting dance. And during that dance you also combo different elemental attacks and abilities to get some nice outcomes – water skill -> electric attack = more damage, water skill -> ice attack = frozen enemy etc. Combat is a lot of fun, switching characters around and adapting your team to the challenge also adds a lot of variety and increases replayability (and gets you addicted to getting new characters which is tied to gacha mechanics). There are also great boss fights with a lot of mechanics involving elements, weak spots etc, which is also missing from many other “similar” games imho, would love to see more mechanics in F76 and New World for sure.
There is also story, but it’s nothing special – it’s there though and voice acted, so that’s good. There is co-op, that you unlock later and I haven’t tried it – heard it’s kinda meh though.
So overall for me this game is really good and I’m happy to have it right now while I don’t really have a lot of games going on for me to stream – pretty interesting new experience, looks like a lot of people enjoy watching too and surprised I’m playing something like this, mostly positively, so I’ll continue with it until I’m bored or some other stuff drops and for now looks like closest big thing will be Ragnarok Online in the middle of the month (it’s also quite weeb I’d say, so that will be a combo).