While dropping most of the gacha games I’m playing, I took the chance to try two titles I had been curious about.

Blue Archive – It was released recently so I took a quick look. The modern UI was pretty and I loved the the sky blue palette. So cool and refreshing and relaxing. Apart from that, I didn’t like it much. The story didn’t pique my interest and the cast was too full of little girls. I have fond memories of playing Ring Dream, but these days I want more out of my games than just “Look at the cute girls.” The battle system was the usual “auto side-scrolling and press some buttons for skills” stuff. Nothing to keep playing over if the story and the characters aren’t working. Nice-looking game, though. And speaking of blue games and girls, I’ve been meaning to try Blue Reflection.King’s Raid – Also the same “auto side scrolling and press some buttons” combat, but flashier. It bills itself as an “Idle RPG,” which means you can dispatch your team to farm a stage, turn off your phone and come back later to collect the rewards. I so wish Epic Seven and Genshin Impact had that system…

Despite King’s Raid having a more rustic UI and worse graphics than Blue Archive, I enjoyed it more because it reminded me of PSP RPGs. Which ones? I don’t know, but it felt so comfortably generic that I couldn’t help getting nostalgic. Random orphan and his childhood friend who is a healer go on an adventure to find a family member and of course they meet a lively girl and a third wheel and they work together to fight this sealed evil and of course the random orphan is the chosen one, etc etc. Which RPG is like that? I don’t know, but it feels so familiar.

Actually I had to skip large parts of the story (you can skip!!!) because my phone hated the game and kept crashing randomly, but especially when loading story scenes. My phone hates every game, actually. Unlike most mobile games, King’s Raid‘s developers (Vespa) are pro-emulator, and they even have the APK available for download on the official site. But once I deleted the game from my phone after one too many crashes, I came to my senses a little and decided to get out before I got too involved, like I did with Romancing Saga Re;Universe.

That said, I hear there’s a King’s Raid 2 coming out later this year with better graphics and over improvements, so I may pick it up again at that point. Since it’s a continuation and all and we can carry over our data. On the other hand I also hear the developer is going downhill so IDK. “Later this year” is a long time.

Note about King’s Raid: there is no character gacha. You don’t pull for characters. You either get them for free through the story/rewards/events/the Inn, or you buy them with in-game currency called rubies. Any character can be yours for 6,000 rubies, no matter how powerful or broken they are. Imagine being able to just buy the most broken character in your game in the first week. When I dropped King’s Raid after 1 week, I had over 20,000 rubies so I could afford three characters. But! I didn’t even have to buy any because:

1) The free characters in the game are apparently useful all the way to endgame.
2) The game gave me my pick of any two free five-stars as well as any two unique weapons AND a free unique treasure.
3) This was enough to easily sweep all the story content and much of the side content until chapter 5 when I stopped playing.

AFAIK the developers initially balanced the no-character-gacha thing with gacha for weapons, accessories and other boosters instead. But right now all the best stuff can be attained from raids and grinding, so I’m not sure how they make their money. Costumes? The costumes are nice. But they can be had for rubies, so who would spend money for them? No wonder Vespa is revamping the game, and no wonder few other games followed the no-character-gacha model. It’s financial suicide. You can imagine the same situation in your favorite gacha game. Imagine if it was Genshin Impact and you could pull Ganyu, Zhongli and Kazuha after a week of play with plenty of primogems left over. AND they gave you the Amos Bow and the Mistsplitter for free. From a gamer’s perspective I love it, but I really wonder how they made their money.

Now that King’s Raid is approaching its end, it’s incredibly generous with just about every in-game resource. In addition to the 20,000 rubies, I received over 150 million gold and more than enough essences to transcend my characters several times over. This is like getting Ganyu AND Amos Bow AND five free constellations, because why not?

The downside is… there is no downside! More accurately, I didn’t play long enough to discover the downsides. It’s a crazy generous game that keeps throwing great characters and great gear and tons of money and loads of stamina at you. It’s almost guaranteed that if I’d played a little longer I would have run into a trap caused by this seeming generosity. For example, the powerful characters and the ease of auto-ing stages means I have no idea what most skills do or how to use them effectively. Once I get to a stage I can’t auto, I’m gonna be in big trouble. Maybe, or maybe not.

Same with gear, since I’ve just been using random drops without much enhancement or optimizing. And since the title is “King’s Raid” and there are plenty of raids in the game, I suppose I’ll be expected to join a guild and do raids so I can get the best of the best gear. *groan* Will cross that bridge if/when I come to it. We will find out later this year if/when King’s Raid 2 comes out and if I still miss it enough to give the updated version a try. Right now I’m leaning towards “Leave well enough alone.”

That’s enough for today. Next post will probably be about Epic Seven, since I’m this close to mustering the strength to drop it. Wish me luck!