Blue Archive

I played Blue Archive on its global release for a decent amount of time. I think the IP has a lot of potential, and it's been a smashing success so far, worldwide. So, why do I tell people to stay away when they ask "should I?"

The "game" part of the game simply is not up to par. It's a monotonous grind.

If you've played other gacha games - you can recognize a lot of patterns. The stages themselves are set on a board akin to Battleship - and that's nothing new, I saw that in Azur Lane too. The way you upgrade your characters using "Eleph" - this is in many other games too.

I'm not saying that this means any game with these common elements are bad. But the implementation of some of these patterns is sorely lacking and can't hold it up on its own. Have fun with the equipment grind, you'll be constantly running out of them because the drop rates are abysmal.

It's a shame, because I think the rest of it is great. The soundtrack is full of peppy future bass and has a distinct charm to it - Mitsukiyo is now one of my favorite composers. I don't have many complaints with the story writing and its translation to English. And of course, the characters themselves are easy to fall for, with all their backstories, various interests, and moments to be had. For a Nexon game, they actually really haven't screwed anything up, and I'm glad that's the case.

But I don't think that's enough for me to log in every day, unfortunately.

After playing Blue Archive for around 6 months, I’ve been torn between whether or not this is a good video game. As a gacha game, I’d say it’s a good time sink. Though, keeping in mind that this is a genre with dirt slop standards of ‘quality gameplay’, this would need to offer a fountain of new ideas in order to crawl out from the mobile game trenches. Blue Archive is not the groundbreaking leap forward in gacha gameplay you might be hoping for. However, if you’re crawling out from GFL stagnation (or some other time-sucking gacha game), you’ll find some entertainment to be had here.

As an actual GAME, Blue Archive is often trying to find ways to challenge the player without forcing them to spend all their time grinding nodes for resources. In doing this, they’ve designed a system that rewards players by incentivizing them to complete combat missions quickly and effectively. In other words, this is a real-time strategy game, and you need to finish missions as quickly as possible without any of your students dropping out of battle. Don’t expect complex gameplay, though, it’s as straightforward as ‘timed ability’ gameplay gets. You pick which EX skill you want to use, depending on which students are in your team. Beyond that, your input on their placement and movement is minimal, unless you utilize specific skills that can handle this.

Despite its simplicity, you have a wide variety of skills to pick from, which at least makes the strategizing parts of the game captivating. Most of your thoughts need to go into the student selection rather than during the battles. Because of this, and the structure of the missions, Blue Archive plays more like a puzzle game than it does an RTS game. Your team either works, or they don’t. In that regard, it’s not too far different from its contemporaries (especially FGO, which has a similar character selection strategizing focus). Thankfully, the early game rolls give you a lot to work with right from the get-go. Even if you have a comparatively low number of students, you can clear most of the game with your starters.

However, you can’t clear every challenge in this game without some serious investment in meta-focused characters. If you’re attracted to high-level challenges, you’re going to have to rely on the unfortunate bane of gacha games: luck. Going into Blue Archive for the first time, you have to make a serious decision. What do you want more, the students that you think are fun, or the high tier meta roster? You can’t have both without dropping some rich-boy moneys on the game, though it’s at least fairly lenient in that you can get SOME of both. Compared to other gacha games I’ve dabbled in, this is far more generous with the amount of rolls you’re able to pull, and consequently, the amount of top tier students you can pick up. In short, you WILL get something good.

Ultimately, the whole upgrading and strategizing cycle is not enough for me to sell this to players who haven’t bothered with gacha games in the past. If you don’t like gacha, Blue Archive doesn’t have the gameplay to win you over. On the flipside, you might be wondering whether or not this game is worth playing for the story and characters alone. I have to admit, as someone who is generally unimpressed by gacha game character designs, Blue Archive has a good variety of inoffensive students. And you get a generous amount of character-specific content on top of that! Each character has their own relationship events, lobby backgrounds, 3d chibi models that you can mess around with, and so on. If you have a specific character you like, you’ll have lots of content to sift through, even for the obscure ones.

The actual story is not bad, either! Don’t expect ‘Anime of the Year’ quality out of this, but considering the somewhat awkward student/teacher dynamics and the tendency to dabble with anime cliches, I’d have anticipated a whole lot worse than what we’ve gotten. The story is mainly saved by its fun characters and large network of futuristic fantasy schools. Think ‘A Certain Scientific Railgun’ but with a bigger focus on school vs school politics. With that, you get plenty of dramatic anime fights and feuds, while you, the teacher, are always standing around during the unfolding of events. If you aren’t against a playful, action-packed ‘don’t think too hard about it’ kind of anime story, this one fills its niche just fine.

And no, you don’t have to be a degenerate to appreciate this game’s permeating cuteness. Anyone who’s ever had a pet cat can probably agree with me that the girls of Blue Archive have comparable personality and affection. If the aforementioned ‘teacher/student’ dynamic sounds weird to you, just keep in mind that it doesn’t exist here in any realistic sense, and for good reason! Obviously it would be of extreme sussitude for a teacher to be spending so much time doing whimsical affectionate things with students, so it makes sense to view these characters under a less scrutinous light. Everyone, including sensei, is clearly written as silly cartoon characters. Aside from the small handful of ‘fanservice’ shots that appear over the course of the game, your interactions with these students, both as a reader and as a ‘teacher’ character, are as easygoing as they come.

Except for the Ako recollection event lol, sensei’s kinda messed up for that one

As a complete gacha package, Blue Archive is FINE. If you like cute things, you will probably like the characters in this game. If you want a time-waster game that you only want to spend an hour or two on each day, it’s good for that. If you want a lighthearted story to read through that won’t completely bore you, this one is good enough to pass the time. But as a 'video game', Blue Archive hardly even qualifies as one in the traditional sense. The takeaway is that if you’re a dog kinda guy, and you think cats suck, you should definitely not EVER play this game.

Having played a handful of gacha games, I'd say this is one of the better ones. The story, music, gameplay, and characters are above-average for the genre.

The VN story parts are well-written enough that I actually look forward to reading them instead of feeling like I'm just drudging through. The translation also feels natural, although I know there have been some controversies (some of which I believe have to do with comparisons between the EN and JP versions, instead of the EN and original KR writing). There's lots of character expressions, backgrounds, little animations, and effects which make it more engaging to 'read'. It's mostly fluff on par with a decent slice of life anime, and occasionally has some darker elements but never to an excessively grimdark, overly serious or pretentious degree. If you just instantly skip the story then you're missing out.

The music is really nice, and there's a good number of great tracks, so you're not constantly hearing the same song. I actually acquired the soundtrack, which is something I rarely do for games.

Probably my favorite aspect of this gacha is how little it wastes your time. You only need to do a level once, and when you get 3 stars you can just instantly grind it as much as you want. There are challenge stages, boss raids, and other unique levels which require more attention, but these aren't too bad. Events have separate story and level sections, so you can immediately blow through and grind the parts that get you points and save the event story to take at your own pace. The pvp is pretty ridiculous, but I've managed to stay in the top 100 for a few months so it's not all RNG. There are some essential characters that you simply won't get far without, and I suppose that's like a second-order RNG, but I got all those without spending any money. Speaking of money, I don't find the monetization in the game to be too egregious. For the most part it's just "spend $10 a month to get extra material and a bit more premium currency" with occasional opportunities for a guaranteed UR roll or a pick of an UR character. You get a steady stream of currency so it's easy enough to save up for essential character banners as long as you plan it out.

The characters feel like actual effort went into them, in that they don't all feel like cardboard cutouts. Their gameplay is also distinct enough that most characters have at least some niche use that keeps them relevant. As I've mentioned, they get plenty of facial expressions as well as a unique story for each character, culminating in a live-2D scene with headpat physics. Each character also has unique dialogue for special events like Christmas, Valentines Day, The character's birthday, the player's birthday, etc. I just wish there were more subtitles, since only the main screen stuff gets translated. Some of the voice lines are too powerful for my weeb-level understanding of Japanese. There's also no archive feature (ironic) like in Azur Lane where you can see every voice line in-game. My underrated best girl is Pina since she watches the Sopranos.

So yeah, if you're into this sort of thing, this is probably the best that I've seen for not wasting your time and money but still getting high production value.