Admittedly, going into this I didn’t expect this to be a replacement for your girlfriend. When I booted it up for the first time, my wife Mrs Stix looked over, stared at me, and asked me what I was playing. I stared right back at her – then again at my phone – then again at her.. and honestly had no idea.
After playing for 30 minutes…. I definitely had an idea. This is the kind of game you hide from your significant other. Or that you say you downloaded thinking it was one of the albums from back when Beyonce was part of that girl group. Easy mistake to make.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to another episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A video series where we play through every single Gacha game and proceed to analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong, based off of my experiences within it over a period of time.

Destiny Child is the first vertical Gacha game I’ve played for this channel. Admittedly, I don’t have much experience with them. They always felt weird – it’s like watching a vertical movie as opposed to a widescreen one, you know? It just feels wrong.
Until you start playing it, and then out of nowhere… you’re engaged, you’re enthralled, and you can’t put the game down. Couple that with the fact that the game literally threw 11,000 stamina at me upon downloading the game, and realistically, I’ve had absolutely no reason to put the game down.
Well.. okay that’s a lie. I’ve left the game auto-grinding stages I’ve completed for hours each day to attempt to get resources, to obtain XP for level ups. I mean, sure, I made excessive use of Exploration missions to aid in the XP grind, but I just felt like if I wasn’t auto-grinding, I was wasting my time.

Destiny Child is your typical Gacha RPG, with a very mature twist: You take on the role of some random dude who seems kinda emo, uninterested in everything going on. The literal definition of a millennial.
When a super hot succubus comes along – Mona, who tasks you with becoming the Archfiend – the ruler of the infernal realm. Which beats the 9-5 job you work at the supermarket. Yes, we’re really that guy.
See, if I were some kid working at a convenience store and was presented with the opportunity for greatness of this magnitude, I can say with utmost certainty that I would be immediately interested. Leading a demon army of some of the hottest Waifu’s in existence? You’d have to be crazy to turn that down.

And thus, we’re thrown into a fight we didn’t want to take part in. Or, at least I don’t think we did. Did we? Okay I may have skipped a little of the intro. But you can’t hold that against me. I had more important things to do.

Now this is where the game begins.
This is a traditional RPG: It has a very, very deep narrative. A lot of it could honestly be condensed, but one thing I’ve learned from Gacha is that there are 2 ways developers craft their stories:
1.) The game is barren. There is no story, no world-building. You exist solely to let the game kill monsters for you for absolutely no purpose. Or none that you’re aware of.
And then 2.) The game is filled with so much story that if you don’t skip some of it you’ll never actually be able to play the game. This is present in Destiny Child. In Arknights. In Azur Lane. All of which are actually incredibly fun games, but packed with so much story you’ll often find yourself skipping parts, against your better judegement.

As a traditional RPG, the game makes use of a familiar type of progression: You’re presented with a world filled with Chapters. Each Chapter denotes a certain part of the story, with characters, levels and enemies specific to that story.
Each Chapter has a variety of different levels, with every level having their own unique sub-levels to conquer. As an example, Chapter 4 might have 8 levels. Typically, you’d do those 8 levels, and progress to Chapter 5.
In Destiny Child, you select one of those levels and there are 4 sub-levels to engage in, 3 of which are normal encounters consisting of 3 waves of enemies, and the final encounter being a larger-scale boss fight.
Meaning typically there are upwards of 30 to 40 fights, with 3 waves per fight to clear before moving on to the next Chapter. Admittedly, this can get repetitious, especially when encounters don’t seem to provide any real spike in difficulty or challenge.

Thankfully, auto-combat is present, along with the option of multiplying the speed of combat by 3 times. This makes an otherwise at times arduous grind much easier to tolerate. Especially given how long you spend grinding and regrinding content.
Speaking of, there are over 300 unique units you can recruit currently. Each character has their own unique look, personality and selection of abilities that can drastically alter the course of the battle.
Yes, they are divided up into varying categories based off of their rarity, but as we all know, sometimes lower rarity heroes are just.. better than their higher rarity hero counterparts. Each unit has 5 different elemental affinities, with strengths and weaknesses corresponding to other elements.
As an example, Fire is good against Wood, Water against Fire, Wood against Water, and so on.
Therefore, while it’s effective to level a select group of units – much like I did, it’s much more beneficial to instead level a surplus of different heroes to take advantage of the elemental system present.
If you have an elemental advantage, you’ll deal 25% more damage with each attack, as opposed to dealing 20% less damage due to being at an elemental disadvantage.
Then there are class archetypes: Attackers, who are fast and strong, but have low defense. Defenders, which function the exact opposite. Supporters, who buff their allies. Debuffers.. who, much like Defenders, do the exact opposite.
Healers, that keep your group in the fight, and Combine units that you sacrifice for the greater good of your better Waifu’s and Husbando’s.
You can actually do quite a bit with your units: You level them either via Exploration, questing, or sacrificing other units.
You can level up their skills, making them more powerful. You can Awaken them, unlocking their potential. Uncap them, Evolve them by.. sacrificing other units.
You can equip them with gear, there are 4 slots total that I have available at level 50. Each piece of gear can be enhanced, upgrading them into something exponentially more powerful than what they were in their base form.

Combat itself is fought in real-time. As noted, you can turn on auto for this, or opt to increase the speed up to 3x total.
You’ll notice that while in combat, you have a gauge towards the bottom of your screen. This gauge continues to accumulate charge, and after filling up, allows one of your units to perform a type of ultimate attack.
During this ability, you’ll be required to complete a quick-time event by pressing the button at the exact moment – or, let the game do it for you as it achieves perfection 100 out of 100 times.
Your units themselves appear down towards the bottom of the screen in the form of cards. They have their own HP, individual levels. Gauges. When attacking, they just kinda.. pop outta the card and smack one of the enemies. Then proceed to immediately slide right on back. It’s a weird visual, honestly.

Graphically, this game is absolutely stunning. The combat, the effects, and the characters that make use of those abilities are all absolutely gorgeous. The backdrops aren’t bad – they’re typically just a small background with enemies placed atop them. Speaking of gorgeous things, though, have you seen some of these Waifu’s?
These characters are designed by the very same guy that did the Blade & Soul and Magna Carta games, and his style is very noticeable. As are certain… physics.
The characters are all incredibly varied. From different regions. Fantasy-inspired, medieval-inspired. There is a lot of inspiration taken from various time-periods – adding additional depth and personality to characters that would otherwise all seem relatively similar.
Speaking of the Husbando’s and Waifu’s.. The Gacha system isn’t bad at all. The current publisher provides many opportunities for players to acquire premium currency with which to purchase character pulls. On top of that, the rates for 5* heroes are 3% – significantly higher than the 1-2% often found in Gacha games.
There are 2 Pity systems present in-game. Pity for the new Banner Children, where if you manage a 5* pull, it’s guaranteed to be the new Child. And the Mileage Pity, which does NOT reset if you obtain a 5* summon – if what I’ve read online is to be believed.

Outside of the main story and progression, you’ll never find yourself with a dull moment. There are more things to do in-game than I realistically know what to do with, which I will admit was very overwhelming as a new player.
Something I’ve learned playing Gacha games however, is the older the game, the more packed with systems and features it is. When Gacha games launch, they’re pretty basic. They offer a narrative. A few methods to obtain materials to upgrade your heroes. Some avenues to drain your stamina.
Destiny Child? We have The Forge of Hephaestus, House of Reincarnation, Devil Rumble.. which is essentially a type of PvP system. Admittedly, I don’t tend to play PvP in Gacha’s because my heroes are nowhere near being as powerful as the vast majority of other players’.
Adventure of Eve, which was kind of a cool little minigame, actually. Probably the only form of direct control you have in this game. The Underground, Event Dungeons – which you use to farm materials each day. Hecate’s Library, to relive events you’ve watched before.
The Scarlet Collection, Infernal Spa – where you can creepily just stand there and stare at your Waifu’s bathing. I know there are plenty of you do – you can’t hide this from me. The Rebirth Labyrinth, Endless Duel, and finally Exploration. Where you deploy your units on missions, acquire XP. You know, the norm.

And yes. Yes I likely glossed over any number of features. Yes, I probably did something wrong when forming my team. Leveling my Waifu’s. But that’s part of playing a new game.
You make mistakes, you level the wrong characters, you equip them with the wrong gear, you waste resources. But slowly, over time, you learn from those mistakes. That’s part of learning the game, and honestly part of the fun.

Overall, this is a very good game. Graphically, the character models are some of the most overexaggerated, yet aesthetically appealing I’ve ever seen in a Gacha game.
The abilities look great, the combat.. well, honestly I feel like there were far too many instances where I had to grind, mindlessly. Which isn’t really all that appealing to me. Having real-time events adds an additional layer to an otherwise basic combat system, though, requiring a little attention if you’re not playing on auto.
There are endless amounts of activities to engage in, the narrative, while not translated perfectly, isn’t half bad. The emo main character makes me want to smash my head into a wall but other than that… I had a lot of fun.

Is Destiny Child the worst Gacha game of 2022? Not at all. This is actually one of the better Gacha games I’ve played. Definitely not THE best. But definitely something I could recommend to players interested in something they haven’t played before.

I’ll admit, I honestly didn’t expect the level of difficulty I’ve gotten out of Girls’ Frontline. I’d anticipated it being something akin to Azur Lane – with all of the comparisons I’ve seen made between them.
On the contrary, I feel as though with the exception of a few similar features, this is such a contrasting departure from Azur Lane. Which I feel is a good thing, as it helps set it apart as opposed to being a “clone of,” and subsequently living in the shadow of a game much more popular.
But just because it’s more difficult, just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s better.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to another episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A video series where we play through every single Gacha game and proceed to analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong, based off of my experiences within it over a period of time.

Upon first inspection, I was under the impression that Girls’ Frontline shared quite a few similarities with Azur Lane. It just felt a little more dated, and with a lot less appealing Waifu’s.
For reference, Girls’ Frontline was released in 2016, and Azur Lane in 2017. But after putting 2-3 hours into the game, I quickly came to realize that that assumption was very, very wrong.

I’ve been playing Girls’ Frontline for the last 2 weeks now, and I can say with 100% certainty that this is easily the most difficult Gacha game I’ve ever played.
Not only are the systems a little more complex than I had imagined they’d be, but every single battle consists of enemies that are just so much more powerful than I seem to be, regardless of whether or not I significantly over level and over power them.
As an example, Chapter 5, Episode 4: Safeguard Retreat. This has a recommended strength of 7,000, with enemies ranging from 2,200 to 4,400 strength themselves. Which realistically shouldn’t be an issue, given my most powerful unit has a combat effectiveness of 6,800.
Yet after 3 skirmishes with the enemy, half my team is either approaching withdrawal, or already abandoned the encounter. Deploying other units that I’ve been working on aren’t much help because they’re drastically inferior in terms of power to my main.
Given I’ve been pouring every resource I have into my main team meant that I didn’t have much in the way left to boost other units.
And don’t get me wrong: I was making sure to enhance my characters, upgrade skills, utilize the Dummy Link, level them, but at no point after Chapter 3 did the game ever feel easy enough to fully clear it with an S rating without the use of other players’ units.
I know you’re sitting there thinking “is Stix complaining about the game being too hard?” or “I can’t believe he missed utilizing x feature,” when the reality is: I’m not complaining at all. I actually found the stark contrast in difficulty highly refreshing. It wasn’t as simple as auto-battling, auto-playing through the game with relative ease.
And honestly? I probably did miss a feature or two that could’ve boosted my characters a little. But even the utilization of friends’ units – with heroes that were level 80 in Chapter 5 left them damaged at times. Which goes to show how truly difficult and unforgiving this game is.

So, Girls’ Frontline is an Anime strategy RPG. Players control echelons of android characters known as T-Dolls.
Each Doll falls under one of several different class archetypes: We have Handgun users, Submachine gun users, Shotgun users, Assault Rifle users, Rifle users and Machine Gun users. Each archetype has their own advantages and disadvantages.
As an example: Handgun users have some of the worst base HP of any Doll, as opposed to Submachine Gun users who have fantastic HP. Both happen to have terrible damage, unfortunately.
As opposed to the Rifle or Machine Gun which both excel in damage, but fail in almost everything else, such as Accuracy, Evasion, Fire rate.
Each archetype also has the option of providing beneficial buffs to your team. Handguns boost all T-Doll types. Submachine Guns boost Assault Rifles, with Assault Rifles boosting Submachine Guns, Rifles boost Handguns, Machine Guns boost Shotguns, with Shotguns boosting Machine Guns.
Finally, your Formation plays a vital role in your overall survivability. Which I learned the hard way. Dolls placed in the very far right column are going to be targeted more frequently than any other space, so in an ideal world, you’d keep Handgun units far from the front lines.
This provides a lot of unique opportunities to create interesting team compositions based around a singular type of gameplay.

Since we’ve already delved into what T-Dolls are and how they function, let’s talk about how we play with them. Wait, no. How we use them to–wait, okay. Uh, hmm. However I say this, continues to just sound so wrong.
So the game primarily focuses around the narrative: a metric ton of Chapters, each with their own story, their own characters, their own environments.
Each Chapter has various different Missions, and each Mission takes the form of a singular map, with a Command Post to deploy your main unit, and various Heliports to deploy additional units. Whether those units are alternative Echelons you’ve been slowly building up, or backups from friends.
After deploying your units, you move around a grid – horizontally, vertically, diagonally. You have a limited number of spaces you can move per turn, and can capture one single node per unit per turn. The enemies move in much the same way: A single node per turn, and whatever node they land on, they occupy.
Unless you possess a unit on that node yourself, or circle the node. To capture a node, you need to have already captured an adjacent node, with the exception of the enemy Command Post. All you need to do to capture an enemy Command Post is to land a unit on it and end the turn.
And that wins you the Mission. Each Mission has several Grading conditions that need to be met: Bronze Medals, which involved just capturing the Command Post. Silver Medals, which consist of capturing all nodes on the map. And Gold Medals, which involved eliminating x targets in y number of turns.
Accomplishing all 3 medals allows you to unlock Auto-combat, which allows you to deploy your units automatically, accumulating a large amount of XP, Dolls and other goodies.
Additionally, clearing each Chapter unlocks more difficult.. er, well, difficulties. Normal completion unlocks Emergency, and then there are Night Battles.
The combat itself is automatic. You deploy your units, you select where you want them to go, and then you watch them unload everything onto enemy units. Hoping for the best.

As noted earlier, the Chapters escalate from being really easy, to incredibly difficult very quickly.
And if you’re like me, and have no idea what you’re doing at the time, randomly using all your resources to attempt to farm levels, wasting all your Dummy Cores on linking 5* T-Dolls only to realize you have a very limited number of Cores at your disposal.. then you’ll find yourself in quite the pickle.
Which left me having to use real money to acquire additional resources and try to get a little ahead. Sure, I made use of Logistic Support as often as I could, but realistically that only allows for so much when you’re burning through as much as I was on auto-battles.

Which–okay, wait. So, there is a narrative present in the game. A story that pushes the game forward; that provides meaning and purpose for you, your Dolls. That is the focus of the game.
But there’s so much more than just the main story, even though that’s what I spent most my time trying to slowly make my way through, amongst attempting to and failing to micromanage my resources.

Let’s just work our way down the menu that we can see on-screen.
We have our Base. The base provides us access to the Intelligence Center, Garage, Fairy Chamber, and Protocol Control Center, which are all locked at present.
The Data Room, which functions as a means with which to manage EXP gained from battle and convert it.
The Forward Basecamp, which allows you to send Dolls out on expeditions.
The Rescue Station, an area where Dolls can look after various different stray animals you come across.
The Cafe, which is a place to just.. chill. To participate in some cool little side-activities that have no real affect on the game otherwise.
And finally the Dormitory itself, where your Dolls live. Admittedly, I haven’t really done anything with this. All my Waifu’s are just kinda co-existing there, on some boxes. I like to think of myself as a minimalist. Well, that and Mrs Stix never fixed up my room. So if you’re gonna blame anyone, blame her.

That’s it for the Base. Next we have the Research tab. Where you can upgrade skills of your various T-Dolls. And…. admittedly a few other things that I still haven’t unlocked.
And, I know. I know. “Stix, if you unlocked those you might’ve been more powerful and had less trouble with-” I know. But, honestly, engaging in every gameplay mode I could never unlocked any of those, and with my limited time, I didn’t want to seek out exactly how to go about unlocking them.
Plus, at the time, I was playing through Artery Gear: Fusion which was a lot more fun for me. So I had to split my time, and that took precedence.

Then we have the Factory. You can create T-Dolls here, which use a variety of resources. So be careful. This was one of the ways I found I was most quickly draining my resources early-game, and wished I’d know how difficult resources were to replenish in the short-term.
Next we have the Dummy Link, which functions as a means with which to increase the stats of your Dolls exponentially. These either cost duplicate Dolls, or use Dummy Cores, getting increasingly more expensive per upgrade, but also being an absolute necessity for your characters’ survival.
Then we have the T-Doll Enhancement, allowing us to sacrifice our Dolls to power up our more important ones. Just don’t tell them why we’re actually sacrificing them, otherwise we might start some kinda revolt.
Retirement Disassembly should be relatively self-explanatory.
Equipment Production functions just like the creation of our Dolls. Instead of creating Dolls, however, we create gear. Which half the time we can’t equip because of RNG constantly producing gear for units you don’t have in your core group.

Dolls can equip gear that are specific to their class archetype in the form of Accessories, Magazines, and.. something else once you unlock at level 80. Which unfortunately, I haven’t reached yet.

There’s the Repair Station, which is important as your units don’t automatically heal themselves after battle. Rather, they take mass damage, and then just run away.
Oh, speaking of, one of the best parts about Girls’ Frontline? As your units continue to take damage, their gear continues to break down, revealing.. well, an interesting design choice.
Rarely do units possess 2 separate models – 1 for when they’re full HP, and 1 for when they’re damaged, but here we are. And it’s absolutely fantastic. I feel like, at times, it’s almost not worth repairing them.
And then I remember how difficult the game is.

Then we have Combat. Combat Missions function as the main game mode – this is where Chapters and Missions are located. There are countless Chapters to slowly progress through, and a number of Missions for each Chapter. These get alarmingly more difficult after Chapter 3, so prepare wisely!
Then we have Logistic Support. These allow you to deploy units on support missions, rewarding players resources to actually continue playing. Chapters are unlocked as you unlock them via Combat Missions.
Combat Simulation provides alternate game modes that consume Sim Energy to play through. These are very different, with completely separate objectives to what is normally found within Combat Missions.
And then we have Campaign Missions. Suffice it to say, all of these function the same: They’re all a single map with a group of enemies you need to overcome. Just with different objectives, different rewards, and different requirements.

Naturally, there are Event Stages, Event rewards, the Cash Shop. Which, admittedly, seems pretty fair. Browsing through I didn’t come across anything that didn’t provide, at best, a quality of life improvement.

One thing I was very pleased with though, and this is something that I haven’t touched on yet is the Gacha system. I noted above that you could produce T-Dolls, and that T-Doll and equipment production costs in-game resources.
What this means is that there is no premium currency required to pull for Waifu’s. Every Waifu is recruited purely in-game, with farmable resources being the only thing necessary to obtain them. And the rates aren’t bad. 2* Dolls have a 60% rate, 3* Dolls have a 27% rate, 4* Dolls have a 10% rate, and 5* Dolls have a 3% rate.
Given you can essentially recruit Dolls indefinitely without limitation – other than the resources you have available to you, I feel like this is more fair than what is present in most Gacha games, requiring you potentially spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to acquire the Husbando or Waifu you’ve been waiting for.
And then to upgrade them, you need dupes. Which means tens of thousands of dollars, or waiting for a re-roll banner in a year or two.

Overall, there is quite an overwhelming number of things to do in Girls’ Frontline. There was quite a bit more than what I had unlocked at the time I was through playing it.
And while some of the game most definitely feels unintuitive and much more dated when compared to Gacha games released in 2022, I found the difficulty, the depth of various class archetypes and the fairness of its Gacha system to definitely set this quite a bit above most Mobile games I’ve played over the last several years.
Sure, it felt like it took a little longer having to manually navigate maps with my units, but I’ve never been against actually being required to physically play the game I have in my hands.
So while auto-play wasn’t really very prevalent in the game, I feel that is, for the most part, a positive. Much like in Azur Lane.
It’s refreshing to be able to pull for Waifu’s without a premium currency, and be given the opportunity to play through Chapters and Missions without stamina, as entry was limited only by the resources you had at your disposal.

Don’t get me wrong, the lack of explanation, and overwhelming number of features definitely left me feeling like an idiot, even after I was done playing it. And I know many of you are going to complain I forgot x feature or y mechanic down in the comments below.
But I feel like from a casual perspective, this is a very difficult game to get into!

Is Girls’ Frontline the worst Gacha game of 2022? Not at all. It’s definitely not as aesthetically appealing as many of its competitors. It’s overflowing with features that you have to micromanage, and the difficulty is unparalleled.
But it offers players a unique, manual experience, filled with fair Gacha, a decent narrative, a lot of opportunities to roll for Waifu’s and gear. You couldn’t ask for more.

I’ll admit, I’ve probably been playing more of Artery Gear: Fusion and Counter:Side over the last 2 weeks than anything else.
They’re both absolutely stunning games with fantastic combat systems, incredible Waifu’s. And trust me, the Waifu’s are truly breathtaking. And they’re new.
So we’re given so much Stamina, so many attempts at rolling on heroes, that we’re capable of clearing every bit of content, experiencing every aspect of the game, and realistically collecting at least several of the Waifu’s we’re looking for.
But just because I’ve been having fun doesn’t mean these games aren’t without their issues.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to another episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A video series where we play through every single Gacha game and proceed to analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong, based off of my experiences within it over a period of time.

Upon first inspection, Artery Gear: Fusion looks and plays a lot like Epic Seven. I’ve seen repeated comparisons between the two games, and admittedly they aren’t unwarranted.
Having just done a video on Epic Seven 2 weeks ago, I could definitely feel the very strong similarities between games. However, there are notable differences – the most obvious being the drastic difference in not only graphical style, but also art style.
Realistically, you’re capable of making the same argument for the vast majority of Gacha games. “x game looks and feels like y game,” but what makes them unique, the features that allow them to separate themselves from one another are what’s important.

Artery Gear is a Chapter-based Anime RPG. Every Chapter has its own story, with a set number of individual levels. You deploy 4 combat units and 3 support units and engage 3 waves of enemies, with the 3rd and final wave often resulting in a more elite encounter – and in some cases, a full boss fight.
As is traditional in games like this, there’s more than a single difficulty mode present. Players are capable of clearing each Chapter on Normal difficulty, and then again on Hard difficulty. Admittedly, I didn’t find the Hard difficulty to be nearly as.. well, difficult as I had envisioned it being.
I cleared the Hard difficulty almost immediately following the Normal clear of each Chapter. Granted, I was always a minimum of 1,000 or more Combat Power above the recommended level, with Waifu levels significantly higher than the enemies until Chapter 5. So that may have contributed to the ease I felt.
Chapter 6 was another beast entirely. I’ve been playing this game for about 6 hours each day since it launched, and Chapter 6 is the first Chapter I had to stop, grind XP, Skill Points, Gear. I’m still, at this very moment, struggling to complete the final encounter. And I don’t imagine Hard mode is going to be any more forgiving than Normal.
Thankfully, as I just learned today, there’s a feature built into the game called “AI Combat,” that allows you to set up a type of auto-battle. You can repeat the same instance 10, 20, 30 times consecutively – even while you’re logged off.
What this means is that I can grind money, I can grind XP and I can grind the materials I need to upgrade all while playing Counter:Side or Arknights, and come back when I’ve made sufficient progress. This is a Quality of Life feature that I feel every game should offer players.

Chapters can be very easy, or very difficult, depending on your total Combat Power. Combat Power is increased in a variety of ways:
You can either level your character via battles, accumulating small amounts of XP over a plethora of encounters.
You can equip gear – weapons, armor, accessories. These have varied levels of rarity. I just got my first few Legendary pieces today – or at least I think that’s what they’re called in this. The Golden gear? 5* Golden pieces that are substantially better than anything else I have.
You can slowly upgrade these gear pieces – unlocking additional bonus statistics, like +Crit, +HP or +Attack. It honestly takes quite a few resources to +15 a piece and unlock its final bonus so I made my way to either +6 for the 2nd bonus, or +9 for the third. With the exception of weapons, because they need the additional bonus damage.
Upgrading your gear probably provides the largest statistical advantage to your overall team – leveling is great, don’t get me wrong, but getting from 45 to 50 takes a tremendous amount of resources. Upgrading your gear – at least for your 4 main Waifu’s doesn’t.
Every Waifu has their own unique Technology tree, consisting of 6 Phases. Each Phase requires a set number of Research Keys to upgrade, and continues to provide boosts to specific stats like Attack, Crit – at times even abilities. The Keys in specific are typically earned through the Data Collection mode.
Every one of your heroes has 3 abilities that are unique to them alone. Damage abilities – single-target or AoE. Support abilities, and healing abilities, depending on the role they fill. These abilities can be upgraded via use of Advanced Decoder Chips, which are much more difficult to obtain than any other upgrade item – at least from what I’ve seen.
So choose your upgrades wisely, since I wasted most of mine on my 4* heroes before obtaining my 5*s.
Then – and I know this is a lot of info. This game actually has a lot of very deep, very intricate systems that provide a lot of opportunities to perfect your characters. But I digress.
Then, we have the ability to Rank Up our Waifu’s. Ranking them up provides massive statistical boosts to them, and requires the use of duplicates to perform. Which, naturally, means that Ranking up your 5*s is going to be quite an arduous process, but definitely worth it.
There’s a hidden option down in the Gear section that requires a Technology Level of 5 – which I’ve yet to obtain on any character up until this point.
And finally, upon reaching the maximum level for your Waifu, you can upgrade them even further, increasing their rarity by a single point, their base statistics, power. These also require duplicates, or equal rarity units.
Doing everything listed above will present you with the most powerful units you can possibly obtain. The only issue I’ve found with all of this is that it takes an exorbitant amount of time. But you definitely have the resources to accomplish this during the launch event.

Now you’re probably sitting there thinking to yourself…. “well, alright. I get it.” You can beef up your Waifu’s to be absolute destructive forces. But what is there to actually do in the game?
As noted earlier, you’ll start off with, and continue to pursue the ever evolving Main Story. As of June 17th, there are 7 Chapters. 14, I guess, if you count the Hard modes available. Each Chapter consists of 10 main encounters and at times, a few side-encounters.
After either completing the Main Story, or hitting a wall that you can’t pass due to the difficulty spike of each Chapter, you’ll find yourself navigating on over to the “Battle” tab.
Under Daily Battle you’ll find “Data Collection,” the main method with which to obtain the Keys required to upgrade each Waifu’s Technology level. “Target Elimination” is used to obtain gear for your Waifu’s and upgrade Chip’s.
“Mutation Waypoint” is used to obtain Mutation Samples, which can be redeemed for important items like skill Chip’s. And the “Lava Rift,” which is a 100-floor tower, with each floor offering slightly better rewards, and equally as slightly more powerful enemies.
Next we have the “Resource Collection,” featuring “Capture Cat Orbs,” a mode that allows you to farm XP items, “Bounty Mission,” allowing you to farm in-game coin, and “Forbidden Blue Mist Zone,” rewarding you with.. well, admittedly I have 12 of these and haven’t found a use for them. Maybe it’s for the feature I unlock at Technology level 5?
Then we have the “Suppression Dark Zone,” which, admittedly, I just unlocked. It says it has a recommended Combat Power of 20,000.. and I’m sitting at roughly 11,000 right now.
Finally, we have the current Event stage. Currently, that is Asura. This functions like every other Gacha game: It rewards you with XP, items, units, event-currency to redeem for some goodies.
And that’s everything relating to the PvE.

What follows is the PvP. In Artery Gear, this takes place under the “Exercise” tab. PvP has 2 forms: Live-Fire Mode, and Training Mode.
Training Mode is your basic non-player game mode. Typically you want to avoid this, as the real challenge is found within the Live-Fire game mode. This is where you’ll go up against other players.. well, other players’ teams, anyway.
When first unlocking PvP, you’ll have the opportunity to set up both an Offensive and Defensive squad. Offensive squads are utilized when attacking other players’ units, and Defensive squads are deployed when other players attack you.
You can either control your units yourself, or let the AI control it – which I’ve always found to be more beneficial to my overall success if I’m being entirely honest with you.
You have a PvP ranking, but let’s be honest: The vast majority of us will never achieve a high enough rating where this will ever be of direct consequence to us. You do obtain a set amount of currency for each win, though, which can be redeemed for some pretty sick rewards: Items, Waifu’s.

Which, let me just take a brief moment to discuss. Man, the Waifu’s in this game are some of the most incredible Waifu’s I’ve ever seen.
They’re filled out in all the right places. Have some extravagant outfits. Even Mrs Stix looked at some of these characters and couldn’t do anything but stare. They’re just THAT impressive. These devs really know their target audience: Degenerates like you and me.

Oh, we’ve gone like.. almost ten minutes and we haven’t even discussed the combat yet, have we? That’s typically the first thing I mention. Whoops!
So, you’ll want to form a Team of your 4 ideal Waifu’s. A general rule of thumb for the most OP team is: The hotter the Waifu, the less she’s wearing, the bigger the booba, the more powerful and necessary she’s going to be. So go for those ones.
You’ll then set up a unit for Artillery Support, Air Support, and a Support robot. Not the hot kind. The derpy kind. And then you’re ready.
Combat itself looks even better than Counter:Side does. And I argued that it had the best looking visuals I’d seen this year. Naturally, I was surprised to be proven wrong not days later, when Artery Gear launched.
Every unit has 3 abilities. Each ability has a cooldown period between when you use it and when it can be used again. The AI doesn’t really fully grasp the importance of spacing your abilities out, so it just launches everything you have at the trash enemies before reaching the final boss.
Or, at times, healing with your big AoE heal when 1 unit has suffered 10% damage. For the most part, the AI-controlled auto-combat works well. But at times it can be more of a detriment to the success of a battle than an aid.
The battles themselves take place in smaller, instanced areas. You can’t control them – or anything for that matter, other than what abilities they possess.

Speaking of, there’s no open-world to explore in this game. There is no physical exploration – or physical control of any characters. You have the option of direct input when it comes to your Waifu’s abilities in combat, but that’s the depth of engagement outside of managing the various facilities and features.
I know this might be disappointing for some people – one of the things I love about games like Punishing Gray Raven, Genshin or heck – even games like Azur Lane and Arknights is that I still have a degree of control.
Not a whole lot, but that option of moving my characters gives me that sense of fulfillment I don’t get by not being able to control anything.

Abilities look absolutely incredible. Seeing the pre-rendered cutscenes that play every single time you utilize one of your special abilities… well okay, the first couple times you see them used, you’re in absolute awe. After seeing it for the 20th time in 10 minutes, you immediately skip it as soon as it’s cast.

Then we have a Fleet.
Our Fleet has various functions: The Supply Ship, which allows you to earn coin over time with no input from you. The Armament Ship, which does the same for the XP items. Mothership, which functions as your housing system. Science Vessel, for upgrading and transferring effects of gear.
And the Exploration ship, which allows you to send out Waifu’s on Dispatch missions, accumulating resources and materials.
Honestly, I kinda just check in once a day but didn’t really devote much time or attention to it. I never really do with those features in games. Not particularly sure why that is, honestly.

I know a lot of you are curious as to what’s in the Cash Shop.. and honestly, it’s not bad. Some materials. Items that will help you upgrade your Waifu’s. That will probably provide you a little less need to grind. Some decent – not great, but decent gear that you can quickly outgrind with the Target Elimination game mode.

Ah, right. Yes, this is a Gacha game. As the title would imply. Naturally, that means you’re going to be able to roll for and ultimately be disappointed by a surplus of Waifu’s that you just don’t want.
A single pull costs 180 gems, so 1 multi-roll is going to cost you 1,800. Every pull you make rewards you with an Elite Recruitment Order. Once you obtain 200 of these, you can redeem the banner character completely free. So, the pity is 200 pulls total. Not horrible, but honestly not very good either.
The drop-rate is 84.5% for 3* Waifu’s, 13% for 4* Waifu’s, 2.5% for 5* Waifu’s and 0.7% for rate up characters.
If you don’t obtain the 200 Recruitment Orders to obtain the banner character, those Orders will be converted over to Normal Orders, that you can use to redeem a normal 5* Waifu from the normal shop. Meaning it’s only a matter of time until you obtain the event Waifu.
Honestly, I’ve seen much worse Gacha systems and significantly worse pity systems. Here’s looking at you Fate/Grand Order and Dislyte. And realistically, this seems a lot more fair than other more popular games out there – at least in the long-term.

Then we have other features like the Daily Login for daily rewards, the Beginner Login for a Waifu and other rewards, Rookie Training – which is a newbie feature that rewards you with tons of items for just playing the game. Pre Mission Briefing, which is similar to the Rookie Training. Daily and Weekly Missions.

Seriously. The sheer number of things to do in this game absolutely baffles me. There is an astronomically exorbitant number of things to do to occupy your time. As this is a new game, I feel like the 6 hours I’ve been spending in it every day since it launched isn’t close to being enough to fully accomplish everything I want to.
I was never at a loss of things to do. I had seemingly endless pools of Stamina to run every type of content I wanted. To farm all of the XP items I needed to max out my team of 4. To gear them in 5* pieces. To upgrade their skills, and continue to slowly unlock their Technology levels.
I could play without any limitations. I’m aware this won’t remain the case forever, and if you’re watching this months after the game launches, you very well may run into some Stamina problems like you do in all Gacha games after their launch events are over.
Being capable of picking this up at any point in the day, set 5, 15, 30 instances of a Mission to farm for me automatically while I work, while I play other games, is a feature I wasn’t aware I needed in my games.

Sure, there are some issues present. The Gacha system itself isn’t too great. 200 pulls to hit Pity is painful to even think about. I couldn’t find an option to actually engage other players in real-time PvP. I’m not sure if that’s because there is no real-time PvP or I’m just blind.
I guess one of you will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong down in the comments.
The translations for the story were… well, not bad. Just a little.. robotic. Lacking in emotion. I’m not sure if I’m the only one that really picked up on that or not. It felt like someone ran it through Google Translate, and then corrected grammar.

Is Artery Gear: Fusion the worst Gacha game of 2022? No way. On the contrary, this is one of the most fun Gacha games I’ve had the pleasure of playing recently. Everything about this game was of such contrastingly higher quality than so many of its competitors.
Its flashy, fluid combat. Its incredible Waifu’s – of which there are many. Its variety in terms of content to consume. Not being inhibited by Stamina constraints, being capable of doing everything I wanted to at any point in the day.
Find me a better game release in 2022. The only thing that can even come close is Counter:Side.

More often than not, games are so overhyped that they ultimately fail to live up to the grandiose expectations set by their respective communities. This is all too common these days.
Companies release these absolutely stunning trailers that hype players up to unrealistic levels, only for players to play it and realize that it’s not remotely close to what they were expecting.
Thankfully, this is one of those rare instances where that isn’t true.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to another episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A video series where we play through every single Gacha game and analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong, based off of my experiences within it over a period of time.

Counter:Side is an absolutely stunning horizontal side-scrolling Live2D Anime RPG that is arguably the most stunning game I’ve had the pleasure playing as part of this series.
I’m not very familiar with Live2D animations, but they definitely bring something new to the game – something that I wasn’t aware I needed. Seeing them move so fluidly – almost like they’re alive.
Albeit, they kinda just stand there for minutes at a time while I’m navigating through my menus.

I guess, then, let’s start this off by talking about our units.
We, the player, take on the role of CEO of a mercenary organization. It’s always been a dream of mine to run an organization filled with some of the hottest Waifu’s in the world – but my wife Mrs Stix told me I’m not allowed to. So this is the only chance I’ll get. As CEO, we recruit a variety of different Waifu’s and Husbando’s into our service.
These units take on one of several roles. Striker, Sniper, Ranger and Defender. Each role has their strengths and weaknesses. As an example, the Striker class is strong against the Ranger class, but weak to the Sniper class. The Sniper, on the other hand, is strong against the Striker class, but weak against the Defender class.
Yes, you could do what I did and just fill your group with 8 of the hottest Waifu’s you could. But in the long-term, you’re going to want an even, balanced team to most efficiently fit the occasion. You don’t want 5 Striker’s, because if you come across a group of Sniper’s.. well, you’re dead.
Thankfully, at the time of recording this, there’s an event going on – as the game just launched, allowing players to potentially obtain hundreds of characters. And honestly? The rates in Counter:Side aren’t nearly as bad as I would’ve anticipated them being.
You have a 15% chance of obtaining an SR character, and a 3.5% chance of obtaining an SSR character. I managed over 8 SSR characters in the couple hundred pulls I made.
There’s a Pity system present referred to as “Ensured Recruitment,” and admittedly it’s not great. After recruiting 150 units, you’ll acquire the featured unit available on the banner – although if you obtain them prior to hitting your Pity the Pity counter will reset.
This is a much higher number than its competition – in games like Azur Lane or Punishing Gray Raven, both of which are much more fair.

Units have a degree of customization. On the one hand, you have the option of selecting their outfit. Which is arguably one of the most important aspects of the game. I recall people calling me out for still using SilverAsh’s default skin in Arknights. Like, dude. Skins ain’t cheap, and I’m poor IRL.
You have gear – a weapon, a piece of armor, an accessory, and a currently locked option. Gear has varying rarities, as you’d expect, with options to upgrade and enhance them at the cost of weaker gear pieces.
You can level your characters via Salary Negotiation. This is easily the fastest way of opening new content. There are 3 options when leveling your characters:
The cheap option – which reduces the cost, has no chance of increased loyalty, and no chance at additional XP gain. The moderate option, with a 20% chance at increased XP and loyalty gain. And then the “I’m so rich it doesn’t matter” option, with a 60% chance of increased XP, 50% increased loyalty, and 30% increased cost.
I chose the rich people option every time, because if I can’t do it IRL, you best bet I’ll do it in-game. Unfortunately, I ran outta money quite rapidly.
You can Limit Break your characters. These either cost duplicates used as materials, or materials that align with their affinity.
Limit Breaking your character can only be done up until the maximum number of stars they possess. Meaning you cannot 6* a character that only has access to 5 stars such as an SR unit.
If you’re unlucky like I typically am, and don’t manage many SSR units, then this is no doubt going to severely inhibit your chances at success as the game goes on, because the difficulty continues to scale exponentially every Chapter.
And finally, you’re capable of upgrading their Skills – at the cost of Skill books. For reference, every single material required for each feature listed above can be farmed in the game without too much difficulty.

I know, I know. “Geez, Stix, you’ve been talking about your Waifu’s for the last 3 minutes.” I’m sorry, there really just is quite a bit of depth to your characters – and that’s something I can genuinely appreciate.

In terms of content, you have the “Main Stream,” which functions as the story. As you make progress through the story, you unlock additional Chapters. New characters. Extra features. I’ve cleared part way through Chapter 5 thus far – although as noted, it has gotten quite difficult.
So difficult, in fact, that half the levels I’m doing I can barely manage 2 out of 3 medals on. Even maximizing my upgrades as far as I possibly can at this juncture.
Then we have the Supply Operation. This is one of multiple methods that allow for you to obtain materials to upgrade your characters. And from what I’ve experienced personally, has been the main method with which I’ve farmed coin in-game. As coin is necessary to upgrade pretty much every facet of the game.
We have the Simulation tab, featuring Attack, Defense and Anti-air missions that reward appropriate materials.
There’s the Side Story – which honestly I haven’t really pursued much of.
Challenges, which I’ve attempted and failed. Repeatedly. I have no idea what kind of team is necessary to successfully complete one of those Challenges, but a full group of level 70 units with a level 50 ship gets wiped in 30 seconds.
Counter Case allows you to redeem rewards based on how many levels each respective operator has acquired.
And then there are Free Contracts and Events, which are essentially more of the same.
In terms of PvE, there is no shortage of options with which to expend your stamina. There are a surplus of different game modes, each with their own respective enemy types, win and lose conditions, difficulties.
So many, in fact, that you’ll often find yourself short on time rather than things to do.

Outside of PvE, there is PvP, your Branch, and your Headquarters.
First, let’s discuss the Branch. After establishing a Branch, you obtain access to Missions. You can send squads out on missions with varied durations and difficulties. You can add additional facilities to your Branch, increasing the rate or reward of various activities.
You’ll also gain access to Diving, which is kind of a mini-game within a mini-game within the game that rewards materials and currency. Honestly, with the sheer amount of things present within the game, admittedly, I haven’t explored it as much as I perhaps should have.
Now, let’s talk the Headquarters. Your Headquarters allow for you to build things like your Laboratory – featuring upgrades for your units. A Workshop, that allows you to craft and upgrade gear to equip on your units.
The Hangar, where you can take a look at all of the incredible SR and SSR ships that you’ll never have because you’re stuck with the piece of trash ship you were given when you started the game and weren’t lucky enough to win anything better because you’re a loser and a failure as a CEO.
Ahem. Sorry for that little tangent. I’m just really depressed that I never got anything better than the generic crap I received when I started the game, and never obtained enough materials to build anything better.
And then you have the Dorm. Where your Waifu’s and Husbando’s sleep. And socialize. And you meet new people visiting. Mrs Stix actually spent everything I had to decorate the first of many rooms, and, admittedly, she did an incredible job. I just had a box, a broom, and a chair in the middle of the room. Yes, I’m quite the interior decorator.
That was my calling before Youtube.

Next, PvP. I love PvP in my games. There’s just something special about beating someone down, teabagging them, then laughing at them as they single you out for the rest of the game.
Like, tell me how much I triggered you without telling me how much I triggered you, y’know?
There are 3 PvP modes available in-game. Strategy Battle, which pits your team against other players’ premade teams. This happens without input from you, and is entirely automatic.
Then there are Friendly Matches. These are matches that are 100% manual. They require you to select which units to deploy, which abilities to use. There is no auto-playing your way through this. However, after trying repeatedly for several minutes to get anyone to fight me – I gave up. Everyone had the option to engage in manual PvP disabled.
And finally, Ranked Battles, only accessible after obtaining 100 Strategy Battle Points. Which I was attempting to make my way towards, but I could never find any players available to accept my invites to engage in PvP.
Why bother listing players as “available” in the match listing, when you’re not actually capable of engaging them in combat? That seems like a complete waste of time, and an absolutely redundant, unintuitive feature.
If there is nobody available to fight me, fine, but tell me that. Don’t tell me there are hundreds of people, and then tell me all of them have manual PvP disabled.

There’s also a Guild system.. but everything was locked from access, so other than joining and looking at the guild shop.. I really couldn’t do anything.

Oh, did I mention that you can buy gear in the cash shop? It might not be the best gear in the game, but you can buy significantly better gear than I obtained through my time playing – which could potentially make it much easier to progress through the story – through the encounters I was finding difficulty with.
And yes, that does provide a certain degree of pay to win, especially in PvP, even though they claim only 10% of your gear’s statistics are utilized when engaged in PvP. But if you think about it, 10% of overpowered gear is still much higher than 10% of trash gear.

Seriously, there is an exorbitant number of things to do in this game. I feel like I spent hours every day clicking through everything – fulfilling my daily, weekly activities. Farming materials to upgrade my units with. Attempting to slowly progress with the story.
I was never at a loss of things to do. Ever. And given the amount of stamina I had access to – almost never at under 70,000, I was always able to play pretty much without limitation.
I feel like at times there was more to do in-game than I had time to give to it. I have 3 Youtube channels I post on daily, I have several games I play every day: Azur Lane, Punishing Gray Raven, Arknights. I work out for 2 hours per day, and make fresh dinners almost daily.
But being able to simply pick this up and grind for 20, 30 minutes as often as I wanted without being required to look at my dwindling stamina was a refreshing change of pace.

Sure, combat was auto. You had the option of manually deploying your units and utilizing their special abilities when you wanted. You had the choice of firing your ships abilities when you felt the time was right.
But everything just felt so complete, and so much higher quality than I had anticipated it being. I went into this with the misconception that this was going to be a pretty basic, pretty shallow game.
On the contrary, the game was packed with story, had some absolutely gorgeous character models to stare at while spending hours playing. Had incredible special effects – I legitimately felt like at times there was so much going on that it was impossible to keep track of everything.
Where were my units? Did my Waifu just get knocked down? Did she slip? Is she stunned, or is she performing an ability? Oh, that isn’t even my Waifu, that’s a random monster? Whoops, my bad.

Is Counter:Side the worst Gacha game of 2022? Not even close. On the contrary, this is one of the most fun Gacha games I’ve had the pleasure of playing recently. Everything about this game screams quality.
I mean sure, it has its flaws. Its Pity is pretty bad. But its rates are surprisingly decent. And if you play right now, you’ll probably end up with more SSR units than you’ll know what to reasonably do with.
From its story, to its combat, to its world. Counter:Side is an absolutely fantastic, fun, engaging game to waste your time in, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good this ultimately turned out.

Have you ever looked at a piece of food and thought to yourself, “well.. that looks kinda.. good?” So you – against your better judgement, take a bite, and after taking a few moments to contemplate whether or not you enjoy it.. are forced to just take another bite? You know exactly what I’m talking about.
By the end of the meal, you’re still not quite certain how you feel about it or whether or not you’d get it again. That’s how I feel with Epic Seven after 3 weeks in it.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to another episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A video series where we play through every single Gacha game and analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong, based off of my experiences within it over a period of time.

Epic Seven is an absolutely stunning Anime RPG developed by SUPER CREATIVE and published by Smilegate.
Within 5 minutes of beginning the game, you’re gonna be sold on playing it. Not only are there some “epic”.. hah, see what I did there? Oh, too soon? Okay.

We take on the role of generic Anime protagonist 1137, Ras, a Beta male with absolutely no discernible personality outside of “nice guy” that every girl seems to like. ’cause that’s what these developers all want us to believe, even though real life proves that contrary to what we’re shown, a lot of girls do not in fact prefer the nice guys.
Ras is a special being – essentially, a reincarnated Goddess called Diche, who created Ras as a representation of herself to defeat the bad guy. And every time we fail, she resets the world, wipes our memories, and we’re forced to try again.
Thus, we’re caught in this vicious, repetitious cycle of death and rebirth – kinda like Groundhog Day if Bill Murray had to fight Sargeras.
And if it wasn’t already evident, yes, the narrative is actually quite good. There are points in the story where you fall asleep, sure, and the plot is pretty cliche and Shounen, but for the most part, its story telling is reminiscent of a JRPG.

The game world is about what you’d expect.
It features an over-world map, with each zone taking the form of “Chapters.” Each Chapter has a story connected to it, and one, if not several hidden side-stories you can unlock via branches in the levels you deploy your units to.
Typically, you create a group of up to 4 Waifu’s. I mean sure, you can add a guy in there too if it makes you happy – and I’m sure there are some of you out there that love adding Husbando’s to your group, but I’m a.. cultured Waifu connoisseur.
After filling your team with heroes, a support unit, and a pet, you deploy your units into one of the many levels scattered throughout each Chapter.
Your team automatically moves horizontally – left to right, navigating through several screens and waves of enemies until you’re greeted by the Chapter’s boss.
Alternatively, there are special maps that act as branches: They’re much larger in scale, and provide you alternate routes to take. Each route leads to potential treasure chests, additional encounters, bosses, and a hidden story.
Hidden stories are disconnected from the main story, but generally feature several levels and characters that are unique to them. Completing the main story – and each subsequent hidden story allows for maximum completion rewards.

The combat functions more or less the same as map exploration. After selecting a level, you deploy your team and begin exploring. You get jumped by a group of monsters, and proceed to engage them in battle.
You have various unique abilities, but for the most part, the game utilizes an auto-combat mechanic that – honestly, isn’t half-bad. Typically I’m against auto-combat in my games, but there are some out there, like this, like Azur Lane, that benefit from it as an addition.
Sure, you could always choose to do it on your own, and the further you get through the game the more likely this will no doubt become, but at least in the first 10 Chapters I played through, the auto-combat worked perfectly fine.
And given the length of the zones, the sheer number of maps.. a lot of times, it made sense.
I mean, look. They could’ve reduced the amount of battles necessary, which as a direct result would’ve lessened the repetitious nature of the game to a degree where combat would be preferable when done manually, but since that isn’t the case, auto-combat feels like a requirement to get through the first several Chapters.
Abilities look absolutely fantastic. You have unique animations that play for each character, and these are arguably some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game developed for the Mobile platform.
And given each hero has their own unique designation: Support, Tank, single-target DPS, cleave DPS, it allows for some extensive team compositions.

Speaking of your characters, there are a lot of them. Unfortunately, even despite Epic Seven having some of the most incredible looking Waifu’s I’ve ever seen, the Gacha rates within the game are absolutely horrendous.
From what I could find online, the chance of successfully obtaining an SSR character is 1.25% – however, unlike games like Fate/Grand Order, which has, arguably, a much worse rate, Epic Seven provides you a free summon every single day – which is the equivalent of 100 skystones – the game’s premium currency.
50 skystones from dailies. 80 skystones from logging in weekly. Skystones from PvP, and they’re just off the top of my head.
Sure, low rates are low rates. Seeing repeated duplicates is never fun. And while there are a variety of ways with which you can work towards obtaining your ultimate harem, it’s going to be increasingly difficult, if not impossible as a free player.
Which has led quite a few players to quit the game forever. There are many games out there with significantly better rates these days.

Concerning PvP, as I noted just a moment ago, this game has a functional Arena, amongst other features.
The Arena is compatible with both manual and auto-play. Meaning you can choose how you want to fight or who you want to attack, as opposed to allowing the AI to select everything for you.
I noted that the AI in Epic Seven is actually pretty dumb. My Waifu’s would attack a target, get them to 10%, then begin attacking another target. So instead of hard-focusing a single enemy, they spread their damage out, allowing the enemies to deal more damage as a result of remaining alive longer.
Thankfully, even though I was outleveled by the players I did battle with, my AI was more intelligent. Yes, I noted “AI,” because the enemy players were also AI. Which doesn’t really make a whole lotta sense, I’m aware. The other “players” were essentially just teams comprised of heroes the players themselves formed and leveled.

While the PvP is fairly limited, and there’s an exorbitant amount of content to consume purely via the story and the world itself, there’s so much more to this game.
Like Events. Every Gacha game has events that take place regularly. It’s how they keep players playing, and how they keep whales spending. These take the form of “side-stories,” and at the time of recording this, featured characters like Rem and Ram from Re:Zero.
Or the Spirit Altar, that has you go through several waves of enemies of varied difficulties.
The Abyss, which has progressively more difficult floors as you continue to progress deeper into it. It also has you face waves of enemies in succession.
Hunts, that send you out to engage.. several waves of enemies one after another, culminating in a larger more difficult boss fight with the monster you’re there to hunt.
The Labyrinth, which is.. well, true to its name. It’s a maze, with a surplus of different directions to explore. Your goal is to explore 100% of it and eliminate the hordes of enemies located within it. I only ever attempted each labyrinth twice so never made it beyond 50%, but it’s an interesting, albeit time consuming feature.
There was also the Automaton Tower and Hall of Trials, neither of which I had unlocked at the time of covering this.
Both AI and Player-PvP. Both of which were, more or less, automatic, despite one featuring teams built from other real players.

All of these reward you with items, materials, currency, gear. Things you cannot do without.

Speaking of gear, there’s quite a bit of customization concerning your heroes.
On the one hand, your goal is to obtain the most powerful gear you possibly can, in an effort to make your Waifu-army the most powerful it can possibly be.
You can level your heroes, you can Enhance their individual abilities, Memory Imprint on them to enhance them further, Awaken them via materials you farm in-game to improve their rank. You can see the altered star style next to their picture that denotes each Awakened level.
And then you can equip and upgrade gear. For those of you that’ve played Genshin Impact, this system will seem familiar to you. Each piece of gear comes as part of a set. Things like the “Speed Set” that increased a base statistic by a certain amount.
Each piece of gear also comes with its own rarity – like Epic quality gear, that are naturally more powerful in every aspect than the tier of gear below it.
They have their own selection of individual statistics as well, such as Health, Speed, Attack, Crit Chance. You can Enhance your gear to increase those statistics by making use of other gear of the same type – or via Charms. Weapon Charms for Weapons, Helm Charms for Helmets.
Or Equipment Charms – a more general Charm usable by every type of equipment. As its name would denote.

You have a Pet House, which allows you to “Adopt” pets from… uhh, honestly I’m not even sure where these guys come from. Do we magically summon them after forming a type of pact with them? Do we find them out in the wild? And if so, are they similar to the monsters we kill? Because.. I dunno. I wouldn’t trust–awww, but look at the little guy.
He’s so adorable, and sad, and.. how could you not trust him? I bet he’s a paragon of trust and wholesomeness.
Pets have their own individual levels, and unique purposes along with individual tiers. Everything in this game has tiers. Pets. Gear. Waifu’s. There’s a LOT of RNG present within Epic Seven, for better or for worse.

There’s a functional Guild system present within the game. I spent a week applying to what felt like a hundred different Guilds, but never got accepted by any of them. Thus, I made my own.
I didn’t do anything with it, but apparently you can engage in Guild Wars, World Bosses and more. Which could be fun, if you had friends. Or really anyone else to play with.

Then there’s the Sanctuary, where you can grow XP creatures, farm skystones, Phantasma. You can craft items, gear. And you can send your heroes out on missions.

There is just so much to do in this game, and honestly not enough time to do it in given my limited time throughout the week. I have to log into Azur Lane, Punishing Gray Raven, Arknights.
I have to write up videos, record, and edit them. I have to stream. And Epic Seven, while it definitely does a lot right, is a massive time sink. Sometimes more isn’t always better. Sometimes more just leaves you new opportunities to miss events. Miss content. And that’s never fun.
Sure, I could dedicate time exclusively to Epic Seven, and for those of you that want to do just that – then by all means, that will no doubt work for you. But for me? I can’t deal with playing a single game exclusively. I get bored, given the repetitious nature of Mobile games, and Gacha games more specifically.

Is Epic Seven the worst Gacha game of 2022? Far from it. On the contrary, Epic Seven is one of the better quality Gacha games I’ve played. It has high quality graphics, incredible looking Waifu’s and Husbando’s. Fantastic special effects in combat, and the auto-combat itself serves a purpose.
It’s packed with content, a rich narrative – albeit it falls victim to overcrowding in terms of how much story is present, including the side-story. Things could be condensed into a much more digestible format and still make just as much sense, yet they choose to stretch the game out.
There are so many positives to this game, but it’s severely inhibited by its horrendous Gacha rates. They provide a little in the way of circumventing it to a degree – but never enough to make it enjoyable and fair, like Punishing Gray Raven or Azur Lane.
Is this a bad game? No. Is this a great game? No. This is a good game, which is saying a lot given everything else released in the genre.

Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to coexist in a world filled with millions of other players, masterfully crafted by Level-5, the very same group of talented people behind the incredible Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle games, Dragon Quest 8, and set within the magical universe of Ni no Kuni?
Because that’s what I feel like we all expected from this. Regardless of whether you enjoy the game or not, for better or worse, what we were ultimately presented with was quite different.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to another episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A video series where we play through every single Gacha game and analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong.

Ni no Kuni Cross Worlds is a gorgeous new MMORPG developed by Netmarble in collaboration with Level-5 Studios.
It is currently available on PC, Android and iOS devices, but to play the game on PC you need to download it on your mobile device, connect it to something like your Google account as an example, proceed to download the PC client and connect to it via your PC to the same Google account.
You cannot download and play the PC iteration of the game on its own. You are 100% required to connect via Mobile first.
This is quite the topic of contention online. Many potential players don’t want to have to download and install it on their phones first, and I can relate. I’m already recording footage for Azur Lane, Epic Seven, Arknights and Blue Archive. My iPhone has very limited storage left!

Whichever platform you choose to commit to, upon logging into the game you’ll be presented with 5 unique classes, all of which are unfortunately gender-locked. As is popular in Korean MMOs.
The Swordsman, a melee damage dealer. The witch or Mage, a.. well, a magic damage dealer. The Rogue, who.. despite what you’d think upon first inspection, is an archer. The Engineer, which plays the role of support, healing DPS that stand in AoEs. And finally, the Destroyer. The meat-shield.
Choose your class wisely though! Because if you have regrets later, there’s hours and hours of tutorials you’ll be forced to sit through in an attempt to catch up.
You’re presented with a basic selection of customization options when creating your character. Eye and hair colors. Skin color. Hairstyle. This is elaborated on as you unlock Outfits later in the game.
After unlocking Outfits, you’ll have a selection of full-outfits, hairstyles, hair decorations, accessories, and makeup to unlock and equip. You can also dye your costumes, adding a slightly deeper layer to customization depth. And that covers customization.

After logging in, you’ll be greeted by an immensely large open world. The intro is something right out of Breath of the Wild. Ganon is upset with Zelda. You run in. Stuff happens. Fast forward a few minutes. There we are, on a grand adventure.. with.. the dollar store Navi.
Immediately, you’ll be greeted with a message telling you to use auto-pathing. And let me stop there for a moment. I know what you’re thinking – “wait, auto-play? I hate auto-play, this is trash!” I dislike auto-pathing in my games, too. I don’t loathe it like I do with auto-combat, because at times auto-routing definitely has its uses.
But this game priorities utilizing it. If you don’t, you’ll often find yourself lost with no real direction. You’re given the option of disabling each and every single auto-feature within the game. So before some of you complain “But you can disable it, so you don’t NEED to use it,” I’m aware.
But when a game is built around auto-mechanics, it is often limited by them. There’s a noticeable difference in terms of quality between a game built to play itself for you, and a game built to have you play it.

After auto-pathing to your first quest objective, you’re greeted by your first real quest. And your first taste of combat. The combat had my attention for the first moment. I couldn’t wait to see how this game played.
It looked absolutely stunning up until this point – but upon seeing my character begin moving towards the enemies and casting her abilities on her own, I came to the realization of what kind of game this was.
Yes, you would auto-path to your quest objectives. But at the same time, you would also auto-engage enemies in combat. And over the course of the next 8 hours of playing, I wasn’t required to pay a single second of attention to any fights whatsoever.
You equip potions in the shortcut bar across from your level and HP bar, so if you ever find yourself taking damage you will immediately heal so long as HP potions are equipped.
Despite fighting monsters, bosses, I never saw my HP drop below 80%. In 8 hours of playing, I happened across not a single moment of challenge.
Although if I’m being entirely honest, in 8 hours of playing, maybe 15 minutes was spent in combat. Approximately 4 hours was spent in cutscenes and chat windows. 2 hours sifting through all of the horrendous forced mobile tutorials.
And the final hour and 45 minutes being required to raise my reputation by running around the town talking to all the village idiots. And that was 8 hours worth of gameplay.

Don’t get me wrong – there is plenty to like about the game.
I haven’t seen many mobile games that have the aesthetic appeal that this game does. This game is astonishingly beautiful. The character models are high quality. The animations are fluid. The environments are crisp and smooth.
The game is voice acted – with the same quality English dub that you’d find within the original Ni no Kuni games. I personally loved it – but I know there are some people that found fault with it.
The narrative is better than I expected. Typically, mobile games are a snooze fest. Very rarely are you compelled enough to read through or listen to the story unfold. Which is the opposite for Cross Worlds.

Yet for what the game does right, it does so much more wrong.

On the one hand, there’s too much text present within the game. Every quest, every side quest. Every tutorial has countless windows to make your way through. So much so that you often spend more time closing windows, skipping conversations than you do playing the game.
There is a functional Skill system present within the game. You have access to Class Skills, Special Skills and Passive Skills. You can level them up, and equip them onto your incredibly tiny ability wheel. As a Mage, I had access to various elemental abilities, allowing me to focus on a specific affinity if I were so inclined.
This provides you with some freedom and unique class identity.
There is a Mount system present, which carries with it the potential to be very pay to win, as each mount provides Combat Power to your character – and as Mounts are typically sold within Cash Shops, the rarer, more powerful Mounts are most definitely going to provide an added statistical advantage, as is evident by what is currently available.
It has your typical mobile equipment system. You auto-equip gear and get bags of materials to upgrade, enhance or awaken them.
There’s a Familiar system – which is where the Gacha elements come in to play. There are varied rarities for Familiars – with base Combat Power effectively increasing for every additional star your Familiar has. As an example, I had a single 4* little tadpole thing. It provided 16,000 Combat Power as opposed to the 1* that offered only 1,000.
You can see how pay to win this system is going to be. The more powerful the Familiar, the more powerful your character. When combined with Mounts, you’re going to have the potential to be exponentially more powerful than free players. Given you can equip 3 Familiars at a time, the power gap is going to become unreasonably large.

There’s a Guild system present in the form of “Kingdoms,” allowing players to join a unified force and fight for the betterment of society, protecting your Kingdom from monstrous invasions in the Kingdom Defense game mode. Which unfortunately I didn’t get to participate in because I’m a Ronin. And people don’t like me. But more the former.

Like every Mobile game, there are Dailies you can take and complete every day, and worse than dailies: Reputation quests. Unfortunately the story – and subsequently progression is gated behind reputation, meaning if you are to continue with the story, you’re going to first be forced to complete all of the reputation quests to further your reputation.
I find this an arduous process to have to partake of. I dislike having progression be gated behind content I’m not particularly fond of. I disliked this recently in Tower of Fantasy, and dislike it equally as much here.

There are various Challenge modes you can do. Chaos Field. Dimensional Border. Labyrinth of Dreams. Field Bosses. After 8 hours I had only unlocked the Labyrinth and Field Boss modes, and honestly.. the Labyrinth was a single room with waves of enemies that you auto-battle. So it’s a game mode you let run while you’re playing other games.
And Field Bosses were just never alive when I attempted to find them. Even swapping channels.

I wish I’d managed to unlock the PvP game mode, but unfortunately after 8 hours it remained locked. Maybe I’m just slow, I don’t know.

Netmarble also confirmed that they are going to be implementing both Blockchain into the game along with NFTs over the course of 2022. Which – I get it – they want to make as much money as they possibly can. But I don’t think you could’ve made a worse design choice if your goal was longevity.
Because once implemented, any person that genuinely enjoyed this game is going to leave, and it’ll be filled with people who’s goal is to make a quick buck.

Is Ni no Kuni Cross Worlds the worst Gacha game of 2022? Hardly. The game has a focus on and prioritizes both auto-pathing and auto-combat, meaning there is little in terms of manual play required.
Again, you can disable these but why would you? The game is built around them as a feature, and it feels clunkier without it. Yet it’s also absolutely gorgeous, with a compelling main story – not all of the side content. Those forced side-conversations can go die in a fire.
Ultimately, I feel as though the game is largely filled with too much fluff. Too many unimportant things to do. We don’t need 30 poorly designed features. We need a few really good ones to keep us entertained – enthralled with what is available.
Unfortunately, nothing in Ni no Kuni Cross Worlds does that for me. At the end of the day, this is a very average game, and with the upcoming Blockchain and NFT implementation, it’s going to become a trash one.

Have you ever wondered what it’d be like if Pokemon were a horror game? Because that’s what Evertale advertises itself as. And, admittedly.. that’s about as far from accurate as you can get.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to the first episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A series where we play through every single Gacha game and analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong.

Evertale is publicly known to advertise itself as something it isn’t. You’ll find advertisements all over the internet attempting to trick potential players into believing that this is in fact a horror-esque Pokemon game.
On the contrary, the game is a very light-hearted, cute Anime-RPG, with little frog people, furries, and a whole lot of booooba. Literally, so, much, booba.
Upon logging into the game – they remind you of all the booba you haven’t yet spent money failing to obtain. Every Boss fight in the Tower of Trials consists of scantily clad women. The most overpowered characters you can recruit channel the power of booba to grow even more powerful.
And while I’ve played quite a few Gacha games recently, I daresay this is the most blatant use of oversexualization in an attempt to convince players to spend money I’ve seen yet.

Evertale revolves around generic RPG hero #642: Finn. A kind, compassionate brown haired sword-fighter that also happens to be a human-magnet for the hottest women on the planet.
Finn is a weak, completely useless 3 star character. When beginning the game I was of the impression that I should attempt to max out his level. Boost him. Equip him with the best gear I could obtain, because he’s the main character. Evidently he’s going to be an important, integral part of every team composition.
Boy was I wrong. Finn is a 3 star character, and no matter what you do – no matter what happens in-game, Finn remains a 3 star character. There is no ascending him to a higher class – a higher quality. Meaning he’s restricted to being level 30, has no access to Mastery. Limit Breaks. Awakenings. Potential.
He’s one of the most useless characters you’ll come across, and I wish I’d known this at the start before wasting so much time and effort into various 3 star characters I’d recruited. You know if it were a female main character she’d have a slew of upgrades. Alternate outfits. Anything to incentivize players to spend money to keep her relevant.

Let’s talk about your Units real quick. By selecting the Units tab, you’ll have access to the Forge, your Inventory, Mercenaries, your Battalion, the Power Up section, Fellowship and Story team.
The forge is pretty self explanatory. You can convert your characters – duplicates you don’t want to use to Awaken heroes into items.
Your inventory – thus far, seemed more or less useless to me. You can use it to keep track of how many of which item you have I guess.
Mercenaries are heroes you can equip and select, allowing your friends to use them if and when they need.
Your Battalion lets you create various different Platoons, each with their own characters, weapons, accessories. Platoons are used, as an example, for content like the Tower of Trials.
You can upgrade your characters using the Power Up tab. You can Awaken them, Boost them, increase their Potential. Limit Break them, level them up, and increase their Mastery, providing beneficial elemental advantages.
You can do more or less the exact same thing for your weapons, with the exception of Mastery. Providing a surplus of options to increase your heroes’ statistics across the board.
The Fellowship gives you advantages dependent on how many times each hero has been Awakened.
And finally, you have your Story team. This is where you form your group to tackle the main narrative of the game with. You select your party composition, equip their weapons, their accessories. And then you jump straight into the main story.

The narrative you follow isn’t bad. It’s a fairly basic story – one that I’ll admit didn’t retain my attention for too long.
You’re thrown into a linear world straight out of a JRPG from the 90s. There’s no overworld, but you have full control over your character at all times. You move through a variety of different areas, each with their own unique aesthetic.
Deserts. Snowy mountains. Forests. Weird.. other dimensional rifts in space and time. Each area had grass you could encounter monsters within – like in Pokemon. You run into the grass, and after several steps you encounter an enemy that takes you into a separate, instanced encounter window.
You don’t catch the monsters you engage out in the wild, though. Rather, you encounter NPCs out in the world. Via the story, and through Summoning. Those are characters – monsters you can recruit.
Each area is connected via a town. You move from town to town, with each town consisting of 2 screens in total: The initial load-in, a short, horizontal map that leads you to a building on the far right, and then a building where you talk to the NPC that takes you to the next zone, which leads you to the next town.
And that sums up the entire game, more or less. The narrative pushes you through to new areas, that are blocked off until you visit the town and unlock them. You can buy weapons in towns, but they were so inferior to what I obtained through Summoning that I didn’t bother.

Summoning is where you’ll really become unbelievably frustrated with the game, and come to realize that you’re probably better off wasting your time and money in something else.
Gacha rates, from what I found online, come in at a mere 1% for SSR units. I’m almost level 80 as of recording this, having played it for the last 2 weeks, and I’ve thus far acquired not a single SSR character.
Googling around, the sentiment seems to more or less mirror my own: The rates are horrible. Having low rates doesn’t incentivize me to spend more money to obtain the characters I want.
On the contrary, it makes me feel like it would be a waste of money, and instead, turn me away from spending anything on it because I know how unlikely it would be for me to successfully obtain what I want.
This might not necessarily be as bad if there were a Pity system in place, but there isn’t. Which means you’re not guaranteed an SSR character.. ever. You can go weeks, months, years and not obtain a single high-rarity unit.
But I mean.. they definitely know how to appeal to their playerbase. Looking through all the banners available – all you see are hot waifu-bait. Every time you log into the game, they throw hot waifu’s in your face, as if that’ll influence your… hey, what’re you doing! No! Don’t give in to temptation!
C’mon, man.

Outside of pursuing the main story, you have a selection of activities to partake of via the Battalion Warfare function.
War of the Realms.. no, wait, that’s locked. Alliance Quests.. which our Alliance is too low to really do much with. I probably shouldn’t have been randomly clicking “join” on every Alliance. The Tower of Trials, which is a mode that auto-battles waves of enemies for you.
Every minute you accumulate currency and XP that you can obtain by clicking the chest in the middle of the screen. You can use the Exploration feature to obtain additional rewards. You can also Fast Forward to obtain even more rewards atop those. Totaling an exorbitant amount of resources.
And most importantly, you can challenge tower bosses – I made it to Floor 57 before hitting a wall and being unable to progress any further. At that juncture, the cute little schoolgirl you see there absolutely stomped me. And I’m not saying I was entirely against it. I mean look at her.
But she made it look like the first 56 floors were an introductory tutorial.
The Arena is.. well, a mode where you deploy units to auto-engage other players’ units in auto-PvP. I’d say it requires skill and strategy but that’d be a blatant lie.
There are Raids present, but even at almost 3,000,000 Combat Power, I was too low to participate.

There’s a Training Dojo. Admittedly, I didn’t really do anything with this as I didn’t really have an affinity with my Charizard. I know Ash would be disappointed in me but every new season he ditched his Pokemon, so I feel as though he has no room to talk.
You’re given a pre-selected team, and have to defeat enemies to obtain currency and items to Awaken your pet if you still use it. Which I don’t. So again, it felt a little useless to bother with.

And finally, there are events. Things like The Day of Dragonfire, Kiss of the Vicious Rose, Grove of Wishes. These were events that were going on as I was recording footage, anyway.
Each event consists of a story associated with it and a sequence of battles one after the other. What you’d expect, honestly.

Do I have to mention that there are dailies? Because there are dailies. “Use x Mana, Fast Forward, Fight in the Arena, Win an Alliance Quest.”
Completing Daily missions earns you additional currency, so you can upgrade your heroes and your weapons further.
You have daily login bonuses to incentivize logging in.. well, daily. And that’s about it.

I invested 2 weeks into Evertale. After seeing advertisements for it everywhere online, depicting it as some type of dark horror Pokemon, I was intrigued.
It turns out it was merely false advertising in an attempt to sell itself as something that it wasn’t. And that was the first red flag.
Graphically, Evertale actually looked pretty damn good. Waifu’s look fantastic. Environments looked detailed. There was enough in terms of varied biomes that it always felt like you were genuinely in different areas of the world.
Combat was manual-exclusive for story battles, along with NPC battles you’d encounter out in the world, which I appreciated. Auto-combat was activated for random encounters, the Tower of Trials and other lesser important game modes.
There was a lot to do, with plenty of reasons to continue to log in daily.
However with its horrendous lack of Pity and Gacha rates, it’s such a terrible experience that becomes progressively more difficult as you begin to realize you’re highly inhibited by your team of heroes that would be so much more powerful had they just implemented a Pity system in the first place.

Is Evertale the worst Gacha game of 2022? Hardly. They have a shady, underhanded, downright scammy approach to advertising which is an issue I found immediately, and that alone is cause for me to never recommend this game to anyone.
And other than its rates and lack of Pity.. it’s actually a fairly average game.