English
2.6
(Updated as of 17/11/2022 - After event's Hard Mode release)
Positive:
1. Fabulous graphic
2. Fantastic character design and art.
3. Smooth and fun gameplay; difficulty is just right.
4. JP VAs are superb as usual
5. Great sound design.
6. Intuisive UI.
7. Many ways to get SSR; friend points roll has 2% chance of yielding an SSR.
8. Good writing and interesting plot; I've played half-way through chapter 6, and the story is just getting better.
Negative:
1. They lied about the 110 pulls. Those "110 pulls" are what you can get by playing THROUGHOUT the game, not launch event.
2. Extremely dilluted SSR pool; there are over 40 SSRs in this game, compared to less than 20 SR and Rs. Most of these "SSRs" should've not been SSR at all. If you're wondering, the real SSRs are the Pilgrims.
3. Horrendous launch rewards; No SSR selector, only 20 pulls, and no free SSR (Diesel is one of those SSR who should've been SR, and no, the tutorial pull doesn't count) are just horribly underwhelming.
4. No pity; yes, you got that right. It's almost 2023 and this game has no pity. The 200 pulls for mileage is just for Body Parts, YOU WON'T GET THE UNIT BUT THE DUPES.
(edit: there are two mileage currency; silver and golden mileage. Silver is for regular summon from the normal banner, while golden is from summoning from the rate-up banner. Regular summon ticket can't be used on the rate-up banner, so there's no use saving them. The rate-up banner has a seperate summon tickets which, fortunately, can be brought with free gems. Silver mileage can only be used for Body Parts, while golden is exclusive to the rate-up character. Also yes, the golden mileage carries over each banner, so there you go, we do have a pity system afterall.)
5. Downright predatory monetization; everything is expensive. I don't know, maybe I'm just poor, but I'm not spending $40 for an SSR. The $20 battlepass only gives you a "20% chance-SSR ticket", a "60% chance-SSR ticket", 20 pulls, and a skin. Oh, did I mentioned any paid packs other than the monthly pass and the usual top-up pack only gives you FREE gems? That's right, it doesn't count as a PAID gems.
6. Peanuts compensation for maintenance and bugs; It took 300 gems for a single pull, while they gives 100 gems for bugs and 300 for maintenance.
7. Breadcrumbs in-game rewards; A chapter clear gives you 50 gems, an outpost level-up gives 100, and player level-up is 30... clearing a sub quest ranges from 50 to 150, completing a character episode yields 50 gems...
8. No daily login rewards; you read that right, this game has NO permanent login rewards (daily, weekly, monthly).
9. Weekly mission is almost impossible to complete; we need 100 points to get the 300 gems (1 summon) from weekly, but the problem is the maximum point we can get from the mission is 120, of which 40 of those points are get by completing (a) 20 summon, and (b) limit break a nikke. Right now our gems income is NOWHERE near enough to warrant 20 summons a week, so we have to rely on the friend points summon, but the problem is if we get a maximum of 30 FP a day for a week, that's 210 FP which yields 21 summon.. yes, that is if all 30 of your friends are actively sending back points to you.. so you're forced to curate your friend list everyday... what kind of fked up system is this?!
10. Your team unit stats are reduced to 25% if you do not meet the required stage power; for example if a stage has power requirements of 1000 and your squad only has 999, you'll be getting your overall stats reduced by 25% up to a whooping 75% according to how much deficit your squad power has against the requirement, resulting in less outgoing damage and more incoming damage taken. Absolutely scummy and lazy "balancing".
11. The game's first ever event, "No Caller ID", is a circus designed for whales.
a) First red flag: Unlike the traditional "event currencies" in other gacha games that has guaranteed drop from the event stages, you need specific characters for a CHANCE to get said currency, PLUS the currency is limited to a maximum of 50/stage (the lowest item price in the event shop is 10.000 Credits which cost 40 event currency).
b) Second red flag: The entry for playing the event stage is limited to FIVE per-day. Additional entry can be bought with gems at the event shop.
c) Third red flag: Even if you're playing religiously, you still can't clear the event shop WITHOUT clearing the Hard Mode, so clearing the Hard Mode is MANDATORY because the event currency's income from the event stage is just THAT low. That's why you're relying on the Mission rewards, which needs you to clear the Hard Mode.
d) Fourth, and the biggest red flag: The event's Hard Mode can only be cleared by whales. Yes, the power requirement's jump is ridiculous. The last stage has a power requirement of 46.000 -which is absolutely unreachable by F2Ps with two-weeks of playing. I'm a D1 player, with some $ dropped which I absolutely regret doing so, account level 62 and a squad power of 33k. I know that the majority of D1 F2Ps right now are pushing through the 20k's, so the bell curve is clear as day where most people stand on the power curve. Yet they still made their first ever event completely unclearable by MOST of their playerbase. Event on Discord, whales are complaining that they're struggling with the event.
Who tf designed this event?? You want to see how a game dies? Because this is how you kill a game!
(edit: They nerfed the event's Hard Mode difficulty, now it's 27.900 for the last stage instead of 46.000. Alright, at least there's indication that they're listening to feedbacks, so there's still hope. Devs dodged a bullet right there)
Conclusion:
With the way they run things, this game would become irrelevant in a few months. It's not going to die, but it's not going to live either. I was prepared to spend a few hundred dollars on this game until I saw the cash shop. How disappointing.
More Reviews of This Game More
GranblueArin
2.0I updated my review. Yes, the gameplay is appealing but sadly, i don't see a bright future for this game. Given that 10Cent is in charge, the shop is expensive af, more important, the game is leaning to CENSORSHIP. The gacha rate is bad, enemies health scale is way off from players dmg esp starting from chap 12. #10centout.
Dummy-kun
2.75First things first: THIS IS AN IDLE GAME. Adjust your expectations accordingly before going in. Graphics: worse than I thought. Even after you chose high quality (this game weirdly defaults to low quality no matter how good your phone is) the graphics are still bad. The character sprites are somehow still kind of blurry, and the environment still look pixelated somehow. Anyone who has watched trailers of the game will expect lots and lots of butt jiggle, but in reality, many of the girls' behind are covered by either a coat/jacket/shield/whatever OR by your thumb since the gameplay is press and drag. Sound: I haven't played with sound enough to rate it. However, from what little I heard, the jp dub is good. From what I see in reddit, people at least praised the voice acting in multiple dubs, not only jp, and the BGMs are also allegedly good. Gameplay: it's a rail shooter. Think house of the dead or time crisis, if you're familiar with arcade games. Whether you manual or auto it, both have advantages and disadvantages. Auto will aim at random enemy, even if the boss has already appeared. Meanwhile manual, you'll get bored fast since the girls' skills are so bland; it's either increase some stats, or just pure damage skill. Your skill activation speed is also inferior to auto, except in cases where you want to hold it. However, there are some contents where you have to manual, and from my experience in CBT, those will at least be more interesting since the difficulty is higher. Story: it's good. It's not too edgy, yet it doesn't take itself too lightly either. There's a balance between serious time and the jokes. This is what makes it shine compared to other idle games since it actually has a good, coherent storyline. Value: only the one time packs are worth it. You shouldn't ever buy crystals directly unless you're a whale. The battle pass is also overpriced in my opinion, not to mention the grind for it is also awful. Additional notes: 1)the loading screens are atrocious. Initial loading after you boot up the game is very long, the game also asks you to choose a server everytime you log in even though you've already made an account. The in-game loadings, while not too long, are numerous. Main menu to stages? Loading. Go back? Load again. Go to the base? Yep. Enter a stage and exiting it? You guessed it. It is so irritating. 2) beginner gacha experience is horrible. Note the "beginner" word. First, you can't delete an account. Well, you can, but there's a 30-day wait period. Next, you can only access the gacha after clearing stage 1-4. ALL. MANUALLY. Fortunately you can skip the tutorial dialogue to speed it up a bit. THEN, when you finally got to the gacha section, your first 10-pull will always include an SSR. Nice, right? Nope. As of launch, NIKKE boasts 44 SSR characters, with performance ranging from broken to "why is she an SSR?" and there are a LOT who tilt to the latter. If you don't care about rerolling and only want the ass, you won't have to experience this hell, but others who care to get at least 1 good character, like me, will suffer. I rerolled 14 times and by that time I'm already sick of repeating the stages so I finally relented and just use what I got. For account changing process, one thing that is good is that you can use salted emails, so you don't need to create a bunch of emails to reroll. One email is enough. After you got through that, the launch gift is really underwhelming. 20 rolls in total for a dupe intensive idle game (which genre usually shower players with pulls) is very lackluster, especially compared to another game that I reviewed recently, Path to Nowhere, where you easily get around 30 or 40 pulls at the start. Tl;dr it's an idle game. A very, very polished idle game, yes, but still an idle game. At least there are SOME actual gameplay here. The fan service is nice too, although it's held back by the aforementioned drawbacks. All in all if you like idle games, or if you've always wanted to try one, NIKKE is good to try.