Arknights

During my time as a time-poor and money-poor student, I played a fair amount of gachas on my crap phone, mainly this and Girls' Frontline.

It deserves recognition that its F2P friendly (something many gachas cannot be described as!), and that the tower defense gameplay is interesting even though I'm not the biggest fan, plus some issues in execution/difficulty balancing (for a casual gacha, it can veer wildly in difficulty) - and there's only so much experimenting you can do in one session with the inbuilt energy/stamina mechanic common in many gachas.

Everything else ranges from the good (the Art, unsurprisingly) to the meh/whatever (e.g. the Story and Soundtrack), which in gacha terms, makes this one of the 'best' in the genre.

somehow the only gacha game above a 3 on here which im glad because this is the only gacha game i can play and tell ppl i play guilt free. im not as ashamed as i needed to be

i mean this game is practically f2p heaven. super easy to save up but most importantly is that the gameplay is just superb. not super creative in any sense but its somehow manages to make a gacha game fun and skill based which im in awe with. its most fun when you tryhard in high end ccs but stuff like intergrated strats or just general content also is enticing enough to keep u coming back

the lore and general story is honestly really well written. the first arc of the story is really slow though but i suppose the slow burn is worth it

the soundtrack is really overrated though theyre alot more competent than other gacha soundtracks but lord there were only ever a few moments that made me go "wow nice" and alot of it is just really generic stuff i dont get the hype

edit : nvm i took 264 pulls to get spec alter im killung mself

I actually love this game despite my review of it, the art is incredible, the writing is occasionally great, the music is phenomenal, Contingency contract is amazing, and one of the best gamemodes in any gacha game. These are just a few of the things that make the game so great, but it's easier to find problems so that will be the majority of this fucking essay

The difficulty is inconsistent, 99% of the time being so easy you could beat it with your eyes closed, the other times it's so challenging, that you just get obliterated without doing much. When you do finally succeed at a tough, it's incredibly underwhelming. The whole community jokes about using Kyostin's guides to beat content, which is indicative of HG's inability to balance the game's content. The time commitment that the game takes also makes me wonder why the hell the game has the casual tag in the first place, even without considering the gameplay's difficulty.

The biggest problem is the story, a lot of people call it long-winded or something else, but the writing is just some of the worst purple prose imaginable, many scenes could be reduced to about 35% of their original length while still maintaining the poetic style it already had. The story the game actually tells is pretty good, the events are a special case. Most of the events are set at random points that are out of chronological order, so while making a lot of the events potentially fun self-contained stories, it happens to the detriment of the overall plot. Many of the events have some of the best stories and writing the game has to offer, like Mansfield break finally being a relief from the bs that goes on in other chapters. The main group of people the story revolves around, Rhodes Island, is almost like black lives matter for the infected- if black lives matter never did much of anything and was purely non-violence. You need both violent and non-violent actions for a change as big as helping the infected. The idea that actual conflict isn't necessary to make a big change is incredibly immature, and RI embodies it by accomplishing almost nothing related to their own goals, the lives of the infected are exactly the same after the story as it was before. This doesn't mean that I support a group like reunion of course, but Rhodes Island almost goes out of its way to support these hateful and evil characters to the detriment of the infected. I don't blame HG for making this type of narrative as it's a game meant to appeal to a wide audience, and also made in china, so anything that challenges China's doctrine probably won't be getting into the hands of anyone, but that really isn't a complete pardon.

On a more personal note, a lot of people talk about how great this games community is. In my personal experience, I've had almost all negative experiences, elitism, Hypergryph dick riding, etc. Having a different opinion from the community has pretty much isolated me completely.