Sword x Staff - initial impressions
Not too far into the game yet but just wanted to share my mostly positive first impressions and hear other folks’ opinions.
First, this is definitely a gacha game – understandably an immediate dealbreaker for a lot of people. I haven’t played long enough to get a sense for how predatory or generous the gacha mechanics are. With these games there is always a honeymoon period where you are steadily progressing using the free currencies being thrown at you, and sometimes that grinds to a halt to pressure you to spend, sometimes it keeps up at a decent rate with heavy spending only really benefitting competitive players. As far as I have gotten with this game, it remains to be seen.
What kind of a gacha game tho? Well, it is a single-character auto-combat anime RPG. The main mechanic involves equipping your character with skills and passives and watching them auto-cast them in sequence. Combat takes place in a grid against groups of enemies. Positioning happens automatically, but it is interesting that your skills can manipulate and exploit the enemy’s positions. I would describe it as “auto-tactics” – your character moves and casts skills according to some automatically determined efficiency, but what skills you equip and how you sequence them could potentially make a difference. I say “could” because I haven’t really reached a point where I have needed to actually think tactically to win a fight, relying instead on just the normal power progression of upgrades to push through the content.
What you pull from the gacha are the skills and passives that you equip, and there seems to be a good variety of potential synergies and customizable builds you can create. This is probably what I like most about the game so far: between your lightly-customizable avatar and very-customizable combat build, you can actually stand-out quite a bit from other players. This feels pretty cool when you get into the group dungeon combat and get to see how other players have built their characters. My hope is that this holds up long-term and there aren’t balancing issues that disadvantage unique builds.
Outside of combat, there is a cutesy anime fantasy story that has you exploring a gridlike world, fighting enemies, gathering resources, completing little puzzles, etc. It’s OK, I appreciate it for feeling very light and casual, playable with one hand in portrait mode, easy to pick up and set-down.
For the aesthetics and graphics, it all looks fine…not ugly but pretty basic, definitely not standing out or blowing anyone away.
So far the UI is nice, simple, relatively uncluttered, there are red-dots but it is not an exhausting red-dot nightmare like many of these types of games can be.
Overall, I see myself sticking with this for a while until it starts to feel too repetitive or grindy – all signs indicate it will almost certainly reach that point, this is not a game that is going to keep anyone for more than a year or so. But hey, I could be wrong and they might have some tricks up their sleeve to hook players long-term, I guess we’ll see.