The ONLY Gacha Tier List You'll Ever Need [An Inside Perspective]

Hi Hello How are you doing I very much enjoy gacha games, and if you’ve clicked on the video, I’d wager  you do too. On the offchance you don’t, me too. For those of you not in the know, a gacha game  is a game where you unlock characters through gambling using in-game currency; its namesake,  gachapon, is those toy capsule machines. There isn’t really a defining feature outside of this,  and gameplay varies greatly from game to game. You have tower defense, you have tower attack, you  have Brea

th of the Wild, so as a turbovirgin, I am the most qualified to objectively rank each game. So I looked up existing gacha tier lists on tiermaker and uh…wow. A grand wizard must have  made this. However, if you take a moment to glance over this tierlist, you’ll find an abundance  of anime-inspired gacha games. I don’t care about these, and generally, neither do the  developers, so we won’t be ranking those. As a side note apparently tiermaker needs  access to my Twitter, why. So we’re going full

scuff today. Editing colors in darkmode  chrome glazed my mind over so be grateful anya. Here we are, I’ve compiled the 19 gacha games  that I’ve played in chronological order. I’ll be grading these games based on three criteria:  core gameplay, longevity, and paypigging. Starting with Kantai Collection, Kancolle.  This is what I’d consider to be one of, if not the godfather of gacha games, featuring  anthropomorphic shipgirls. Wow, my admiral’s quarters is a bar. Kino. The gameplay centered  a

round resource management, you would use fuel, ammo, and the like for ship construction as  well as sortieing fleets. Most entertainment was derived from events, where you would need  to clear incredibly difficult maps in order to get a chance to drop event ships. I  just realized I actually have Gangut, which absolutely made my day. Compound this with  the fact that Kancolle is probably the only gacha game in existence to implement permadeath, and  you’ve got a recipe for great gameplay. One of

the ways Kancolle keeps players in the gameplay  loop is EXP; since fleetlocking exists in events, you need an actual armada of strong leveled ships  to complete events on the higher difficulties. Grinding exp is mindless, but also simple; even  after they reworked 3-2 to counter submarine farming, I still ran it because old dog and all  that. Furthermore, the game is free to play, and not at all pay to win. The only shame is that  if you play a couple events, then you won’t have enough free ka

nmasu slots available to hold your  event ships and the regular construction ships. With such a glowing repertoire, you’d assume  this is an easy Ultra Rare, right? Well, I’ve been using the past tense for a reason:  Kancolle is a gacha game that actively does not want to be played, at least outside  of Japan. Originally you needed to win a goddamn lottery to create an account, which was  a massive pain. Then, you needed to install an extension to circumvent playing overseas, then  there was an

executable you needed to download, you get the gist. Becoming able to just log on and  get footage of this game took me 3 grueling hours of hammering away at it, and the damn thing just  decided to fucking work for no discernable reason. The true programmer experience, I guess. Anyway,  SSR as a result of the pain to make it work. Next is Clash Royale. Normally I wouldn’t even  consider this to be a gacha game, but I saw it on a different tierlist so why not, I guess.  The gameplay is PvP tower

defense, with cards being unlocked and upgraded via chests. There’s  many interesting card interactions in the game, but mostly victory hinges upon player skill and  the ability to bait out essential cc cards. For context, I’ve had the same deck comp from day  1 with very little tweaks, so you can play any gimmick you want and you’ll be barred only from  the highest echelons of ladder. That being said, the game doesn’t have very much to do once  you’ve hit Legendary Arena. And although you can p

lay whatever deck comp you want, the meta  rears its rather ugly head at those highest rungs of ladder where gameplay is optimized.  People frequently complain about cards like, say, Mega Knight, or Electro Giant, or perhaps  even Royal Giant, but as the resident Pekka enjoyer since day 1, that is a pure skill issue. Since Clash Royale is based off of Clash of Clans, the Clan system has been ported over. As  someone who’s led a clan for four years now, the clan system is a complete nonconsidera

tion.  In an open clan, people are mostly there for card donations, which is just a way to accelerate  the standard gameplay. In a clan with friends, the game itself isn’t adding any value  beyond those card donations anyway. Luckily, Clash Royale is completely accessible to  children, which means that you don’t need to pull out the credit card to be a winner.  Of course, some time ago they added upgrade books which completely circumvent the entire card  collection aspect of the game, so they ar

e trying to milk their playerbase. But if you’ve spent  money on Clash Royale, that’s miserable. U tier. Fire Emblem Heroes. One of the best mobile games  on the market period, even outside of the category of gacha games. It features, as you should have  surmised, characters from the various Fire Emblem games, as well as some original characters.  The gameplay is what you’d expect from a mobile iteration of fire emblem. It inherited  a simplified version of the fire emblem stats, and skills have

been ported over as well. Outside  of the character collection which is not being taken into account due to its wholly subjective  nature, the greatest appeal of Fire Emblem Heroes is the character building, same as in standard  Fire Emblem games. This is best shown through the My Summoner, who has access to all of your units’  skills. So you can create some vile homunculus that has almost exclusively % dmg reduction skills  that will just get merc’d by any meta unit. Like in most games, the me

ta only matters for the  most competitive, but there’s a catch. Literally anybody can get meta units. This is because Fire  Emblem Heroes accelerates its powercreep unlike any other game, so much so that if you were  to make a new account and just pull the most recent banner, you could probably clean sweep  every abyssal map and up to Tier 18 of Arena. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t incentive for  continued play, of course. Permanent buffs such as dragonflowers, trait fruits, and ascendant f

lorets  can only be attained in small, recurring bursts. FEH releases new game modes every now and then  that are usually fresh and fun, but sometimes you also get Frontline Phalanx. If all else  fails, I will log into FEH at least once a year to vote F!Robin for CYL, which is a popularity  contest where the two winners on the male and female side of the vote will get an alt. It’s a  cool little way of allowing players to influence what characters are made available for gacha,  especially in a g

ame series as expansive as Fire Emblem. Of course, this mostly just boils down to  the most recent characters taking the cake, or, equally as depressing, lifeless titty monsters. As it goes, FEH requires no amount of money to be put into it in any capacity. The gacha rates in  FEH are the best of any gacha game to the extent that I have never not pulled what I wanted given  standard currency stockpiling tendencies. Maybe if you wanted to get a +10 and had less than  800 orbs, you would pull out

the credit card, but even then orbs are not hard to come by in  any capacity. This is the easiest UR of my life, and it only gets better if you  like the Fire Emblem franchise. Now we have Girls Frontline and Azur Lane, the  two games which I consider to be the spiritual successors to Kancolle. Let’s start with Girls  Frontline, which features anthropomorphic gun girls. A game after my warmongering heart. Looking  at the material system and the crafting gacha, you can clearly see the influence

of Kancolle.  The sortieing is also similar, though you are always able to choose movement in GFL as opposed  to in Kancolle, where routing was often based on your fleet composition. Plus there’s the  added aspect of multiple deployable squads, and you have to manage turns and resources  unlike in Kancolle. There’s slightly more player interaction in GFL battles, as you can manually  activate skills, as well as rearrange your units to avoid the highest damaging attacks. Again,  like in Kancolle,

there is a pool of regularly available T-dolls from the crafting system, and  event T-dolls that have a chance to drop when clearing event missions. Regarding the meta, uh, I  have no idea how it works. I stopped playing for a little over a year and my 40k power team went from  one of the topdogs to mediocre at best. Granted, GFL is pretty much exclusively PvE, so the meta  isn’t particularly important in the first place. Unfortunately, GFL’s replayability  isn’t great. Leveling is very easy, a

nd you’ll mostly just be doing dailies  while waiting for events. To GFL’s credit, the events are great. I don’t think any other  gacha game has collab’ed with Valhalla, and having Dana Zane dropkick robots is dimes. It’s just a  shame that events don’t have super great downtime. Also trying to capture Sangis Ferri ringleaders is  practically impossible, at least without tickets. GFL is probably the game that least fosters  whales. There is legitimately nothing in the game that cannot be attaine

d through consistent  play. Resources are abundant, and you can get a fair amount of premium currency just by triple  medal’ing story missions. Although this isn’t a criterion in consideration, I think that GFL has  one of the best gacha stories full stop, granted I usually skip through story text in gacha games.  The game also crashes a lot for me, but that isn’t an inherent issue like with Kancolle, it’s just  specific to my Phone OS, which is tilting beyond words. All things considered, SSR i

s a good fit. The other successor to Kancolle, Azur Lane, is moreso spiritual than mechanically, as was the  case with GFL. This is because it also features anthropomorphic shipgirls, though the gameplay  has been altered a fair bit. Resource management has been simplified into three commodities: fuel,  money, and cubes, the last of which is essentially exclusively used for shipbuilding. Sortieing uses  fuel, but you get money, ships, and gear in the process. More often than not, fuel tends to b

e the  bottleneck in resources. Unlike Kancolle and GFL, Azur Lane’s event ships are crafted rather  than dropped; gear is the event map drop, and for good reason. Overall, gear is more  important in the meta than ships; however, when speaking of meta, one assumes a baseline  of having gear available, so there is a clear distinction in which ships are meta-worthy. I’m  looking at New Jersey. Dailies are very simple, and you can auto-battle maps once full cleared,  so Azur Lane is a game that can

be thrown on in the background while doing other things. Much like GFL, Azur Lane really gets going during events, whereas otherwise it’s quite  streamlined. There’s one aspect of Azur Lane that makes its longevity greater than GFL, and  that’s the priority ships. Quite seriously, these are good ships, sometimes even meta ships,  that are hardlocked behind grinding with certain factions. You will have to play for a long  while before you are able to unlock each one, and even then, more get rele

ased annually. The premium currency in Azur Lane is pretty hard to come by. Having enough dock spaces in FtP  constantly feels like an uphill battle, but it’s far from impossible. The only other reasons that  you would want to put money into the game would be to oath various ships, or to buy skins, which is  possible to do if you refuse to upgrade the dock for whatever reason. SR for its benefits, though  there isn’t a standout feature to point to in this case, just an all-rounder of a game; unl

ess you’re  a coomer, in which case this game goes above UR. Since I first wrote this script, Azur Lane has  been getting criticized for being coomer bait, which it is. The dev team really goes above and  beyond with the Live2D skins, as in they probably have more distinct settings than many Vtubers  (I’m not talking about tracking). That said, I don’t think this is a boon or a bane  for Azur Lane, considering that I saved up gems to get Monarch’s sundress skin, and  I never use it because unifo

rms are peak. FGO is consistently one of, and frequently  the, most popular gacha games on the market, and for good reason. Taking place in the Nasuverse  of anime-fied historical figures, FGO offers some of the best gameplay in the genre. Rather than  using resources, FGO prefers the simple standard of stamina and gacha currency. The characters,  christened servants, come with unique skills, attributes, skillcards, and ultimates; this  leads to a plethora of possible strategies that don’t frequ

ently feel as though defeat  was down to dumb luck. As is the norm thus far, the meta isn’t horribly necessary in the game.  Certainly, Skadi-looping and the like is almost essential to first-clearing high difficulty event  stages, but those are optional. Not only that, but if you’re so inclined, you can continue  a level after failure using command spells, which recharge at a rate of one per day. With the  continues available, you can make any lineup work, even buster-focused comps which are  c

onsidered the worst of the three. FGO events are also the cream of the crop, with  most large events offering a free 4 star to keep with fully upgraded noble phantasms, which  are the ults that upgrade using dupes. They also offer earnable 5 star craft essences, which  have various effects from starting the match with a readily available noble phantasm, providing  a percentage boost to a card type’s damage, or providing some amount of turns of invulnerability.  The Craft essences that provide in

-battle buffs are generally the worst, mind you. But the  biggest part of FGO’s longevity is intrinsically tied to Saint Quartz, or the gacha currency. Fact of the matter is, it frequently feels as though the only way to get a large amount of Saint  Quartz is to get login bonuses; although the daily bonuses are pretty marginal, the bulk of login  saint quartz comes from maintenance rewards or some other interaction campaigns that are always  successful. Why is Saint Quartz so important, moreso t

han in other gacha games? Simply put,  FGO has some of the worst gacha rates known to mankind; I have never witnessed a game so intent  on denying a dopamine hit. And it’s pretty rough collecting Saint Quartz. If you’ve completed  the available story missions and free missions, all that’s left available to you is forcing  rank up quests and interludes by leveling random characters that might not be essential to any  comp. All that being said, FGO has what I consider to be the best gameplay of an

y gacha game, and  although my personal experience with the gacha has been pretty horrendous when I actually want  a specific character, as in, how do you burn well over 1500 saint quartz and not pull Jalter, I must  acknowledge that isn’t the standard experience, especially now that they’ve implemented a  pity system. FGO is proudly the second UR. Arknights has risen in popularity since its  release, taking its place at the forefront of gacha games. Its premise is one of tower defense,  iterati

ng on the genre with a time-based resource that can be accelerated through specific units.  The materials in this game exist for the sole purpose of upgrades, be it for your units or,  more frequently, the base. That being said, uh, I’m going to showcase bias greater  than when I placed FEH in UR for F!Robin, because I’m still hardstuck on 2-10. I don’t know  if this is a progression wall or a skill issue or what have you, I just know that being unable to  progress past the third act had me fair

ly peeved. It very much so felt like a numbers issue, which  was rather frustrating, but that was ultimately conjecture after I had reworked my team based  on guides to no avail. The way that gameplay was implemented feels fresh and fun in the gacha  game scene, but if the difficulty really is number bloat, well, I’m not a fan of that. Anyhow, I can’t really assess the longevity of Arknights for the aforementioned reason of  getting walled. The events are fairly generous in terms of providing th

e gacha currency, and  you’ll get a free 10-pull on event banners every now and then. Pretty much every forum I’ve seen  on Arknights agrees that lower rarity operators can be serviceable, which eliminates the need to  pull out the credit card. It does appear, however, that flash farming premium currency is difficult,  which could influence such decisions if pulls are bad and one is particularly invested in a specific  character. That’s to say, Arknights is an SR. I originally avoided Mobile Leg

ends Adventure  because I thought it was related to League of Legends, which would demote me from a turbovirgin  to subhuman filth. After a quick Google search, it was apparently vaguely inspired by League,  having been worked on by the developer of the actual Mobile Legends. The gameplay is pretty  nonexistent, and by design. It’s marketed as an idle game, which, as far as I’m concerned,  is essentially not a game in the first place. It achieves what it sets out to do very  well, but I wouldn’t

consider idle gameplay to be anywhere near the peak of game design. The longevity of Mobile Legends Adventure is, funnily enough, pretty bad. This might be just  me, but the more that a gacha game implements automated gameplay, the more likely that I am  to stop playing and not pick it back up. Is there a meta in Mobile Legends Adventure?  Obviously, there’s a meta in every game, but PvP isn’t particularly important, so you  can do whatever you want to clear the story and other single-player co

ntent. The events are  character banners, which are well-thought out, but they also don’t implement content,  so the underlying issue is still present. I still like the art style though, so R. Konosuba Fantastic Days. It’s an anime-inspired gacha game, and although said anime is one of my  favorites, it’s still bad. The gameplay is stale, and frankly, I stopped playing after about 3  hours total. You might say, “that’s not enough time to formulate an informed opinion!” You would  be correct, but

I generally don’t think I need to drink piss to know I won’t like it, or that it’s  not fine dining. That is to say, its failure to keep my attention for longer than 3 cumulative  hours is indicative of its quality. Plus, anime-inspired gacha games are essentially the  soul of paypigging, so I’m already heavily biased. I hate to say it, but this is our first C. Lord of Heroes. At an indeterminate point in time, I uninstalled it, so I’m going to go off  the cuff about what little I remember. The

gameplay wasn’t particularly unique. Dailies  were simple, but powering through the story was a numbers slog. The presentation of the story  mode was good though, being that you had to sequentially conquer neighboring kingdoms.  How were the gacha rates? Don’t remember, which means that they weren’t horrendous, and  neither were they generous. I can’t realistically rank this one, so I’m dumping it in C. Illusion Connect is a fun gacha game. An addendum. It’s been 9 months since I drafted  this

script, and Illusion Connect has since closed down. I’m still gonna rate it, but that’s a  sad little fun fact. It’s closure also means that I’m not gonna be able to get my own footage, so  sue me. But what does Illusion Connect have to offer? Well, for starters, the artstyle is good Touhou Lost Word. I like Touhou. I have no idea how to play this game. The systems are foreign to  me, and although I can extrapolate pretty easily, I just send the biggest numbers into battle.  Is the core gameplay

good? Not particularly? I feel like if I better understood  the mechanics at play, then I might, might enjoy teambuilding a bit more. But the  thing is, I’m making a team of my favorites, and there’s no stopping me, meta be damned. I wouldn’t say that the longevity of Touhou Lost Word is great. The gameplay requires very  little user interaction, which means that there’s no skill to cultivate or entertainment to be  derived. The biggest plus in Touhou Lost Word’s favor is that a casual player

will not have  to whip out the credit card. There’s a daily pull system called the Korindou Roulette, where  you can get 5 star characters and story cards, which are like craft essences. That being  said, the event banners are pretty rough, but you should be able to accumulate enough  premium currency to pretty consistently draw what you want. Beyond that, I personally would  never whale on Touhou Lost Word, between whaling and a fuumo, I’d rather get the fuumo, and  I have practically no intere

st in getting a fuumo in the first place so that’s your frame  of reference. This is overall a nice little SR Genshin Impact is probably the most notorious  gacha game that even non gacha players have heard of. At its launch, people called it anime Breath  of the Wild, but now, people acknowledge it for what it always was: brainrot. It also happens  to be the only gacha game that I have played on desktop, which means that I actually didn’t  skip through the story, so I can finally comment on tha

t. Anyway, I played from about release until  Azhdaha came out, took a break until Raiden Shogun dropped, played a little bit more, and I haven’t  played since. This means that I’m going to have to redownload this game, which I never thought I’d  do, but we all have to bite the bullet sometimes. Yes, I like Hu Tao. She is a nuclear warhead and a  poet. Anyway, the core gameplay is relatively fun. When you start out, the map is greyed out, and as  you explore, you run across side quests, puzzles,

and mysterious landmarks, which are all fun.  Except for the fetch quests, but what can you do? The world feels populated, and wherever you go,  there will be something for you to do. Populating the world are various types of enemies. On one  hand, you have the Hichicurls, which are Genshin’s equivalent of goblins. They’re primitive, and the  simplest enemy type. Their attacks are simple, and they generally have no defenses other  than shields, which can be easily broken or circumvented entirel

y. Each region has Hichicurls  and a regional equivalent, like the fodder samurai in Inazuma. Elite enemies are trickier to deal  with. For the abyss faction which the Hichicurls are a part of, the elite enemies are usually Abyss  Mages. These plushie bastards have bubbles which reduce damage by a huge percent, tend to have  annoying cc abilities, and teleport frequently. Sometimes they come in packs, or at the very least  with a band of Hichicurls to tie you up. What the solution to these fuzzy

rats? Elemental damage.  Their shields get melted by elemental damage, and so do most elite enemies including the Fatui. So, as you can figure, elements are very important to Genshin’s gameplay, so how do you utilize  them? You get four character slots in a party, with each character having an elemental alignment.  I’ll say this right now, the characters are the biggest draws in Genshin. You can play as a  soulsborne protagonist, you can play as a battery, you can play as Ted Kazynski reincarn

ated, and  you can mix and match any combination of four of these characters. So you can play as the poet  buddies who actually have good synergy, or you can play with Fischl and literally anyone else,  because she drops an electric autoturret. Or, you could play with Barbara and literally anyone  else, and kill yourself because she places a persistent water status on you. Why is this bad? Well, when two elements are simultaneously applied to an enemy, they have unique interactions.  For example

, fire and electricity will cause overloaded, which will do AOE damage upon  reaction. Water and fire will vaporize, which makes the triggering attack deal 1.5x more damage.  This makes forming parties more fun, because you can prioritize certain elemental reactions, but we  can also now return to Barbara. Because elemental reactions can trigger on your characters as well.  So you’re fighting an ice Abyss Mage that only deals ice damage, which doesn’t really do anything  on its own. But now you’

re playing Barbara, and you try to pop her E skill which is how you  apply water to enemies and heal yourself. If you get sneezed on by the Abyss Mage, you’re  getting frozen, which is arguably the worst elemental reaction to have applied on you. Now we can start talking about bosses. We can mostly divide them into two categories: field  bosses, and weekly bosses. Field bosses are fairly simple, which is best exemplified by the flower  field bosses. They have an elemental shield which, when brok

en, stuns them for a while and allows  you to deal heavy damage. Outside of this, they have limited movesets, which are basically  just going to be AOEs, and they don’t really move at all. The cubes are similar; they have simple  movesets, and they are only vulnerable for a small while following attacks. Once they are damaged  enough, they enter stun, allowing them to be damaged heavily, and then their stun gauge resets.  On the other hand, weekly bosses are the most fun you can have in this gam

e. They usually unlock  after you fight them through story progression, which allows sufficient buildup for their  character. Genshin dropped the ball with their first weekly boss in the dragon, but Tartaglia,  Signora, and Raiden Shogun are all phenomenal bosses. Flowey over there might headbang, but look  at this dude with a double power-up shooting a whole whale at me. The movesets are engaging,  their mobility keeps you light on your feet, and their phase changes bring the right brand of  in

tensity. There is one bad weekly boss though: Azdaha the earth dragon. So you know how  field bosses are just AOE spam with elemental resistance? Azdaha is that on steroids. I don’t  know what the counterplay to this fat bastard is, and I don’t care. I refuse to fight him again. I touched upon exploring the world, but how is the environment? It’s pretty good. The regions are  quite varied, in that you have Germany, China, Japan, and I know literally nothing about  the newest region. The subregio

ns are the most interesting, though. You can enter a small,  iridescent cave, you can come across Yggdrasil, you can enter Blackreach, the world does feel vast  and it’s only getting bigger. The NPC interactions are usually uninteresting, but sometimes you  get the blind girl waiting for her husband, or this Fatui who isn't a complete swine. I haven’t even talked about the teapot, fishing, boating, or any of the other systems  that have been implemented into Genshin over time, but there is just

an insane amount of things  that you can do in the world of Teyvat. That was the longest explanation of core gameplay  by far, but Genshin has the most content by far, so there’s no avoiding such a discrepancy. From  the core gameplay, you might think that Genshin is a UR. Well, let’s talk about the longevity of this  game. A question, then, what do you do in Genshin once you’ve caught up with the story and there’s  no event going on? The answer: nothing. Well, not necessarily nothing; I’ve purp

osely neglected  to talk about a specific mechanic of Genshin: resin. Resin is a resource that limits doing  dungeons and weekly bosses. Well, it doesn’t prevent you from playing through them, but it  means that you won’t get rewards for doing so, the rewards being artifacts and equipment to make  your characters stronger. Essentially, resin is stamina in other gacha games, which is somewhat  annoying if you want to get perfect artifacts. The thing is though, you don’t need perfect artifacts  to

bulldoze through the story. Once you hit level 90 with decent artifacts, you pretty much don’t  need to use resin, unless you’re trying to do more than 9 floors in the Abyss, which is completely  optional. That is all to say, that Genshin can keep you hooked for a long time. But once the  story runs out, which will admittedly take far longer now than it did for me, there’s nothing  keeping you glued. Hell, the core gameplay will start to become stale too, since you’ll find your  optimal or favo

rite team comp and stick with it. Last, we can talk about the gacha system. If  you’re pulling on every new character banner, you’re not going to have enough primogems, which  is the premium currency. Other than that, you’re going to be fine if you do dailies and complete  all the content. The rates themselves aren’t horrendous, and there is a soft pity system.  You’ll almost never have to pull more than 80 times to get a 5-star. The one thing is that both  weapons and characters are factored in

to pity, so there is a 50-50 chance that popping pity  will result in you getting a weapon instead of the character you want. If you pop pity  again, then you’ll guaranteed get a character, but I don’t remember if it’s guaranteed to be  the banner character. Do you need to paypig? No, almost not at all. You should never spend money  on resin, and you’d have to get horrendously unlucky or want every character to  spend money on primogems. The last time I poked my head into Genshin, they started 

implementing skins into the game, which is good, I like Jean’s swimsuit skin, but I don’t have  Jean, so it’s a nonconsideration, and I wouldn’t buy it because her original skin is better. Overall, an SR. My heart wants to give it the only fodder rating in the entire tierlist, but  I will admit that the gameplay was unique and interesting for a long while. Really, my bias is  what is taking it down from UR to SR considering everything it has to offer, but I don’t think  that it has any draw once

you’ve burnt out. All things considered, add Arlecchino  now. Make her a playable character now. I’ll bump the rating up to SSR when that happens. Nier Reincarnation is a gacha game based off of a real game series, a contender for my favorite game  series, to be specific. Sadly, I wouldn’t say that the core gameplay reflects the Nier series very  well. It really is a standard gacha game system, with a stamina resource, premium currency,  character equipment/upgrade resources, and hands-off comb

at. Keeping that in mind, the  longevity of the game is capped in the legs, considering that you have an uninteresting combat  system coupled with a self-imposed gameplay timer in the form of a stamina system. Exploring the  overworld is the most unique part of this game, although on my old phone it was a little laggy.  Nier games are loved by their most invested fans for the story; however, it’s a gacha game. I won’t  read the story, and every developer knows this, hence why they all implement

a skip dialogue  button. Hell, I still need to get around to reading Short Story Long, so this really  isn’t high on my list of priorities. Do you need to whip out the mastercard? Not from  what I’ve gathered. When I started playing with the Automata banner, I was able to pull A2  and 9S. I would’ve gladly traded 9S for 2B, but I got what I came for. It’s not super hard  to stockpile gems by churning through the story, but I can’t speak to how easy it is to get gems  after you’re all caught up.

It deserves an R, but I’ll give it an SR just because it’s Nier. Alchemy Stars brings that Bejeweled energy to the function that gachaheads love. Actually, never  mind, not Bejeweled, but I can’t remember the game that it’s emulating. Basically, your characters  are on tiles, and you connect the highest number of same-colored tiles as possible in order  to attack enemies adjacent to the drawn path, doing a special attack at the end of the path  contingent upon its length. This allows for a degre

e of randomness in the tile generation, but  it also is unique enough in the gacha game sphere that the gameplay is fairly engaging. When  I played, there was a Persona 5 Royal banner going on, which was okay, and I pulled Joker,  but overall I’m not really sure what it added to the game in terms of actual gameplay. How is the longevity? Well, since I stopped playing and never looked back, I wouldn’t say  it’s great. There’s only so much variation you can place onto the core gameplay, which is t

o  say that it can get stale very quickly. Upgrade resources are an unentertaining bottleneck,  especially coupled with the stamina system. How necessary is paypigging? You’ll have a large  amount of premium currency, but it also won’t do a single thing for you. I’m salty that I haven’t  gotten the white-haired ponytail character on the start screen, so I’m a smidge biased at  the moment. On top of this, I didn’t get the military mommy either, so right now I don’t have  many good things to say a

bout the gacha rates. There are purchasable costumes, but overall you  don’t need to use money on anything, really. As mentioned earlier, the bottleneck is  resources, which is to say, your time. SR. I downloaded Punishing Gray Raven because it  had a Nier collab. That being said, I did enjoy my fairly short time with the game. Punishing  Gray Raven has pretty unique gameplay, in that it emulates the hack-and-slash style very well.  Therein lies an issue: the controls don’t feel great to handle

on mobile. They’re manageable, but  it’s somewhat inconvenient feeling skill-capped by design. Of course, there is a desktop version,  but I despise playing gacha games on anything but mobile. There are a variety of game modes, which  tend to have differing gameplay that’s all fun. How’s the longevity? It would honestly be pretty  good for someone else. My biggest gripe is that using the mobile controls makes it so that I  don’t enjoy the gameplay as much as I probably should. At this point, I t

hink it’s clear that I  rate the longevity of a game based on whether or not the gameplay becomes a chore without room for  changing up the dynamic on my end. For example, FGO’s different character skills, cards, and  Noble Phantasms allowed for mixing and matching to create different team compositions that  makes different engagements feel fresh. Genshin, loathe I am to admit it, also had this for a  long while, where you could assemble different parties that focus on different buffs or element

al  reactions. Punishing Gray Raven has the capacity for this, in the sense that you can assemble  varied party compositions. Unfortunately, this variability does not waive my  underlying issue with mobile controls. Do you need to whip out the credit card in PGR?  No. Do not whip out the credit card. Overall an SR, but if I played on Desktop it  might honestly get bumped up to SSR. Nikke, Goddess of Victory, has some of the most  unique gameplay among all gacha games. It’s a third person shooter

mobile game. For filth like  me who will play gacha games based purely on art, they are pngs after all, having innovative  gameplay is always a welcome addition. That being said, and this could very well be a skill issue, I  really hate having to aim on mobile. For example, with the grave digger interception boss, the damn  thing moves around too spastically for my thumb to accurately hit the weakpoint zones, which, if you  don’t break in time, the boss practically one-taps your squad. This mea

ns that team compositions  that should be able to clear the boss based on stats are getting mogged. What accentuates this  is that most battles have an auto aim option, which is better than most players including  myself. The issue with this is that the auto aim will never target weak points, so it doesn’t  help when it really counts. I will admit, there is a desktop version of Nikke that would  completely remove this problem, but again, I have reached a point where I refuse to play gacha games 

if they’re not on mobile. Beyond the innovative mechanic, most dailies can be autocompleted, but  the simulation room cannot, which is somewhat annoying but not the end of the world. Regarding the longevity, I will fully admit that I played for about a month on release then  stopped playing. I only came back to the game very recently on account of a Nier collab. Speaking  of the collab, the story was pretty good, and encapsulated what I expect a good collab with Nier  to be like. 2B’s character

dialogue was a little off, but it is a completely different situation  than those we typically see her in, so I’ll permit it. That being said, holy hell. I know the memes  are that 2B has a giant ass, but Nikke managed to double it. As an aside, it mildly irritates me  that they made A2’s worn-down chassis into a latex tank top. I understand the confusion, but that  is not cloth. She is naked and her synthetic skin substitute has been weathered down to nothing.  Anyway, the collab was fun, the

gameplay was the same, but I’ll probably stop playing once the  event ends again, which isn’t a great sign. Now, how necessary is the credit card in Nikke?  Not particularly, even though it feels like the gacha rates are not as advertised more often  than not. If you want the extra goodies, then Nikke will squeeze you for all you’re worth  though. The season passes aren’t super expensive, but they also don’t give a whole lot in the first  place. On the other hand, skins are about $20, and in the

Nier event, getting the 2B  reincarnation skin will probably cost you $60 based on the abysmal grab bag rates. So yeah,  SR, mostly because the gameplay gets repetitive without much room for user-side innovation. Path to Nowhere. I downloaded it, played it, and have no recollection of having played it. A  concession is that it has a very unique artstyle as far as gacha games go, but having no memory of  its core gameplay and longevity is a bad sign. If I were being more fair, then I’d play this

game  again, but I have no interest in doing so. I’d call it fodder, but in the interest of being  as fair as possible, I’ll just place it as C. I downloaded Valkyrie Connect because it had  a Hololive EN2 collab, which I completed. Valkyrie Connect is also a pretty standard  gacha game: it has the stamina resource, character equipment, upgrade materials,  and automatic battles. That is to say, everything I had to say about Nier Reincarnation  holds true here. I’m going to level with you, I hav

en’t opened this game ever since the  Hololive collab ended, and I don’t think I will in the future. Overall, R. It’s not  bad, but it’s not standout in pretty much any measure. The chibis are kind of cute, though. Devil Maker Tokyo closed so long ago that I’ve forgotten all about the gameplay.  However, I will never forget that lobby theme. Easiest UR of my life, next. U tier. I enjoyed the character art, but the 6 star pull rate was 0.5% and I remember  that vividly. Never mention this again,

bye.