I'm really enjoying the super anime Nintendo f2p gatcha thing Dragalia Lost, lol.

It's an action RPG thing where you make a team of four dorks and run a short little dungeon with a boss at the end. You control with swipes on your phone and it feels pretty good. You can dodge attacks! You can turn into a dragon! You can play co-op and spam cute emotes! All good stuff.

Like most new gatcha games it runs on a formula that focuses less on getting a lot of people spending a little bit of money on the game, and more on getting a few people to spend a whole lot. The game does expect you to have five teams of four (one for each element) but between free gatcha rolls and the story characters I got that pretty quickly. There's a lot of ways to get around not having exactly the right team (bring in a powerful character of a different element, play co-op, get good at dodging, play one of the grind dungeons) that I always felt like I had choices. I never had exactly what I needed for something but working around that is what makes RPGs fun.

But yea, it's also very clear how they're gonna make their millions on this game. Each character, dragon, and an equipable card called a wyrmprint has an assigned rarity of 3-5 stars. The odds of getting a 5-star anything are comically low, 0.5 for characters and dragons and 1 for wyrmprints. These odds do go up over time, so you are sort of guaranteed to eventually get a 5-star something as you spin more and more. It's extremely unlikely that it'll be what you want.

Overall though, that's okay. The game is balanced around the 4-star stuff and you'll get more than enough of that just playing normally. You're also able to promote lower rarity characters to higher star tiers and unlock extra stuff, and that's super satisfying cause all the 3-star characters have cute inferiority complexes. Honestly all the 5-star characters are jerks and I don't like using the ones I were able to get lol. I'm pretty sure they did that intentionally to take the edge off and it worked on me.

Speaking of which there's a bunch of story and while I don't think it's actually like, good, it was enough to keep me going. There's cute stories for each character you unlock that get new chapters as you upgrade them, which is rad. You don't get to customize the main character, who is always gonna be a blond ultra-goodie two shoes dude, but you aren't required to use when fighting and at least he's not unpleasant in the story stuff. Probably should mention that a lot of the art does the weird spine thing to show off the cute girls which may not be tolerable to everyone lol.

Okay that's enough, I've been playing this game like 30min a day, like in one hand while I'm at lunch and then like a bit on the sofa at night, and I appreciate it and now here's too many words about it thank you for reading. I should probably be playing something I can embrace more wholeheartedly like DQ12 but I feel like I need a phone game now and I like this one. Okay that's all thank you for reading my confession.