As much as I want to love this game and it's characters, I'm gonna stop playing this, and I won't recommend anyone else new to hop in unless you really are willing to grind and grind and grind in a game that just has no business having a grind in it.
First of all the story, setting, characters, music and sound direction are incredibly good. I am genuinely hooked on how this game tugs your emotions in every direction it possibly can. It's also incredible how many memorable and interesting personalities the NPCs you interact with have, even if they might not stick around for long. I want more of this. This is good.
However what isn't good is everything else. While other reviews may praise how this game's gacha is incredibly fair and well done, I beg to differ. The game throws pitiful amounts of resources at you if you're not swiping your credit card, and is limited by an energy system that regulates how much you can do in any given play session. What this means is that most of the time, you're scraping together a team from the very limited amount of pulls that are given to you for free with which to get "sinners". Most of the time, those pulls won't give you anything worthwhile, usually just copies of the base units which, if you want to grab something from the pity shop, takes 400 of a certain unit's corresponding copy points. A single copy of a sinner gives you about 15-ish points. There are 12 sinners that you can get in your limited free 10 pulls. Can you see the issue here? And let's not forget that every new "good" unit you get starts at lvl 1, more on how this interacts with the leveling below.
So, leveling. XP you get from battles is negligable, with DOUBLE DIGIT XP amounts for each completed story fight on characters that need THOUSANDS of XP for each level. Your main source of XP are XP tickets from Luxcavation. You get about 6 golden EXP tickets per "EXP excavation" at level 28, which takes most of your daily energy bar. These EXP tickets then account to about a level or two at level 30+ sinners. You want 5, remember, FIVE, well leveled sinners to be able to fight properly. Are you willing to burn multiple days worth of energy to try and get your sinners leveled up from 30 to 35 for Chapter 4?
Then besides leveling there are the sinners' skills, which you can level up by "uptying" them with a currency called thread. Thread, much like the energy, EXP tickets, pity points and pull currency, come in extremely limited amounts, and can be grinded out by doing thread excavations for SINGLE DIGIT amounts with each excavation. This is when every uptie costs 20-80 thread with each uptie. For each Sinner. For each individual variant that sinner has.
Now how does this all tie together? Well let's say you scraped together 1300 currency for a 10 pull. You do that 10 pull, and 9 out of those sinners are copies. One is a rare. That rare LOOKS good cuz it's shiny! And has cool art! Immaculate vibes as everything in this game has! But the last time you got a shiny new Sinner and spent your resources on getting them leveled, they ended up sucking pretty damn bad. So now you have a choice. Do you decide to apply them to the team instead of your base Rodion or Don Quixote that you're using since the beginning of the game? Or do you stick with those base units you've invested all your resources into? After all, there's not really any knowing if a new sinner is worth using or building up until you do so. Nothing in game will tell you in a comprehensible way if you're a newcomer, cuz most of the UI is form over function.
But who cares, right? The combat is extremely easy! 99% of the fights are cakewalks with all you really need to be doing is drawing a line across your screen for the skills, avoid the red "hopeless" clashes, and throw in an ultimate here and there. Bam, done, nothing hard. And then that 1% of fights pops up. And then you realize 3 out of your 5 sinners are barely doing any damage. None of the ones you have leveled are synergizing. You have no resources to level up the ones that DO synergize or pull for new ones. THEN it gets frustrating. THEN it shows just how poorly this game's design is. How this is a game designed pretty much entirely around coin flips, and then doesn't give you the resources to make your coin flips more favorable. It's genuinely so sad to see such potential wasted by an inexplicable incompetence in system design.
Yes, all of these things can be solved by spending money. It is a free to play gacha game, after all, no? But that's the thing. I don't feel like this game respects me, my time, or my money. So instead of being pressured into spending money or grinding till my teeth fall out, I'm gonna just not play it anymore. And I'm genuinely sad that I do not get to see whatever else this game has to offer me in terms of story and music.
My advice to the developers would be to sell some sort of version of this game that lets me pay 40 euro or something, and it removes the energy limit. Just do SOMETHING that doesn't put a massive "pay the troll toll" wall in between the players and the ONE thing your game has that's the main pull, and that's the story. Please.
Anyway thanks for reading I'm gonna go lick Outis' sweaty pits now <3
