New character

Luruka and Metsa

CN version (self-published by manjuu) is getting censored, KR is still untouched from the CBT. No clue yet if there's going to be a hidden censorship toggle or not.

Keep in mind Global is self-published through manjuu’s shell company (Jimi), so this should show us if Global is getting hit with censorship too and if we'll need a toggle. Though keep in mind the game is eventually coming out on PlayStation (manjuu is still looking for devs with PS experience), and it’s pretty unlikely the PS version will get a toggle.

source: Arca

AP pre-registration campaign

The pre-reg campaign tops out at a 30M reward, and I've been logging the global counter every 30 minutes for about a year (~18,000 readings). Here's whether it actually gets there.

Short version: 20M is close to certain and 25M is likely (that's the free Anais, the reward most people want), but 30M is roughly a coin flip that depends on how big the launch is. A 2026 launch looks likely (Nexon's Q1 investor deck lists AP as a 2026 release), and pre-reg spikes hardest right before a game ships, so 30M comes down to whether that launch spike is big enough before the campaign closes.

Where we are

16.5M as of July 27. The 15M reward is already claimed; 30M is roughly double the current count.

Milestone	Reward	Left to go
20 million	Pure Memory Trace ×5	3.5M
25 million	Character "Anais"	8.5M
30 million	Pure Memory Trace ×12	13.5M
5M social followers	Kibo "Starhue Floating Cloud"	not reached

The tier that matters is 25M: a free Anais, and it's what most people are pre-registering for. 20M and 30M are Pure Memory Trace (pull materials), and 5M followers is a Kibo skin.

Total pre-registrations over the past year, with milestone lines and the gap to 30M

Nothing much happened for most of 2025 (5M to ~7.5M, then flat for months). Spring 2026 is when every region started testing and it climbed sharply. 30M needs +13.5M, close to everything the game has gained across the whole tracked period.

Growth only happens during tests

On a quiet day the count adds ~2,700. During a test or marketing beat it adds tens of thousands: CBT2 sign-ups peaked around 130k/day, the Japan test hit ~114k/day, and the single biggest day was 185,000 during the first CN beta.

New pre-registrations per day, quiet months vs during a test push

Same pattern by month, each orange bar a test:

Monthly pre-registration growth, beta or marketing months vs quiet months

Every test so far, sign-up window vs the test itself:

Test	Region / publisher	Sign-up window	Test dates
CBT1 (Star Arrival Test)	China, Manjuu	closed Jul 28, 2025	Aug 15–18, 2025
CBT2 (Constant Sequence Test)	China, Manjuu	Feb 24 – Mar 17, 2026	Apr 3–11, 2026
Korea CBT	Korea, Nexon	Mar 14 – Apr 24, 2026	May 15–18, 2026
Taiwan CBT	Taiwan, NIJIGEN	May 15 – May 29, 2026	Jun 12–15, 2026
Japan CBT	Japan, Yostar	Jun 1 – Jun 25, 2026	Jul 2–10, 2026
CBT3 (Journey Trace Test)	China, Manjuu	Jul 10 – Aug 20, 2026	not yet announced

The sign-up window pulls far more than the test week (Japan: ~1.8M during sign-ups, ~0.7M during the test). The run of regional tests plus the milestone campaign took the count from ~11.7M to 16.5M since May, then it flattened. CBT3 sign-ups are open till Aug 20 but there's no live test right now, so it's back to a few hundred a day. Next real jump is CBT3's test, then launch.

Can it reach 30M?

Not on daily traffic. At 2,700/day, +13.5M would take about 14 years. To hit 30M by Dec 31 the count would need to average ~86,000/day for the rest of the year, which is the busiest week on record held for five straight months. It's cleared 86k on only 26 days all year, never more than a week in a row. And every one of those 26 days fell inside a test or its sign-up window, none of them out of nowhere:

Window	Days over 86k	Peak day
CBT1 test (Aug 2025)	5	185k
CBT2 sign-ups (late Feb – early Mar)	8	150k
CBT2 test (Apr)	6	87k
Taiwan test (Jun)	1	86k
Japan test (Jul)	6	114k

What each milestone needs per day vs the daily rates AP has actually hit

So it's all about the launch. There's no AP launch data yet, so the reference is comparable launches:

Game	Pre-registrations at launch
Genshin Impact	~10M
Honkai: Star Rail	~20M
Neverness to Everness	~30M
Wuthering Waves	~30M
Zenless Zone Zero	~40M

AP is already at 16.5M months out, and 30M sits squarely in the WuWa/NTE range (both topped out there; Zenless hit ~40M). Working from the current count, a modest launch lands around 24M and a big one reaches 30M. I'm not charting that, since the launch size is a guess and it would just be a made-up curve. Most of those peer numbers are advertised milestones, so real totals ran higher, which works in AP's favor.

• 20M: very likely. Only needs +3.5M; the pre-launch ramp covers it.
• 25M (Anais): likely. A normal launch run-up reaches it.
• 30M: uncertain. Needs the launch to nearly double the count.

If the launch lands in 2026 with time to spare, 30M is reachable. A small launch, or one that slips to December, probably pushes it into early 2027.

AP vs Ananta

Same tracking, for comparison. A year ago AP was 4.4M behind Ananta; it's now within 0.9M (AP added 11.4M this year to Ananta's 7.9M). Different games, not a direct comparison, but the growth since regional testing is steep.

Azur Promilia vs Ananta pre-registrations over the same year

Which regions drive it

One shared counter, so it can't be split cleanly, but you can see how much each region's test moved it.

Peak daily sign-ups during each region's test, China far ahead

China by far: the biggest spikes, and the daily rhythm runs on Chinese clock time (drops to ~21% overnight in CN). Japan is a clear second, Taiwan moderate, Korea barely registered. That Korea number is low enough that I suspect Nexon tracks Korean sign-ups separately, so I wouldn't read it as low interest.

Could the numbers be faked?

Big gacha games almost always "reach" their top milestone, because announcing a reward and then missing it is bad PR. The rare exception is Limbus Company (300k goal, hit ~180k, just didn't award the top reward). So AP will probably announce hitting 30M regardless, which makes the real question whether they hit it honestly.

I ran the usual fake-data checks over the full year (Benford's Law, last-digit, round-number clustering, runs test, day/night timing, event correlation) and everything comes back clean: the count sleeps overnight in CN like a real audience, round numbers show up slightly less than random, ~90% of big jumps sit inside a real event. But that's weak evidence. These checks are public math, so a careful dev could produce numbers that pass all of them; what they'd catch is lazy manipulation, like a rushed bump before a deadline. The clearer warning sign would be a fast climb to 25M/30M right before Dec 31 or a Nexon earnings date with no event behind it. Nothing like that so far.

TL;DR

• ~16.5M now. 30M means +13.5M, roughly double.
• The count only grows during tests and launches (~2,700/day quiet, up to 114k during an event), so 30M needs a big launch, not grind.
• A 2026 launch looks likely, so 20M is close to certain, 25M (Anais) likely, and 30M a coin flip on launch size and timing.
• The fake-data checks are clean, but that's weak evidence since a careful dev could pass them. Watch for a jump to 25M/30M right before a deadline with no test behind it.

Pre-reg is free and takes a few seconds, and the count only jumps when a lot of people sign up at once, so if you want the free Anais or the 30M rewards, CBT3's test and launch are the windows that matter. Mostly curious what people think about launch timing, since that's the whole ballgame for 30M.

https://preview.redd.it/upykbfgzwtbh1.png?width=700&format=png&auto=webp&s=6352217a52430cb97c8347b8a050d9cc4856fe29

The first Japanese closed beta of Azur Promilia (アズプロ) ran July 2–10, 2026. I scraped the Japanese community threads on the AzuPro board, transcribed a candid Japanese CBT-impressions video, and cross-referenced everything against the game's known systems, then used AI to translate, filter out the board's heavy shitpost/NSFW noise, and merge it all into one overview. AI-generated ratings table at the bottom if you just want the TL;DR.

📌 This is a follow-up to my AP CBT2 Comprehensive Overview, which covered the Chinese hands-on reviews. Since the JP CBT ran the same build, most of the game matches that post — the value here is the Japanese reaction.

One key thing up front: the JP CBT ran essentially the same build as the Chinese CBT2 (April 2026) — about three months old. So combat balance, the roster, and most systems match what CN players already reported. What's new here is the Japanese audience's reaction, the localization state, and JP/global operational details.

CBT Logistics & Access

• Recruitment June 1–25 (a longer window than other regions); winners announced June 29 in waves; test ran July 2–10, ~8 days (too short to finish the story or reach multiplayer).
• Yostar operates JP/global; Manjuu develops; NEXON runs Korea. This CBT was PC (~44 GB) and Android (~22.7 GB) only. PS5's status is unclear — earlier platform materials still list PlayStation 5 alongside PC/iOS/Android, but JP pre-registration currently shows only Windows / iOS / Android, so it's uncertain whether PS5 has been dropped or merely delayed. Its absence was debated either way (dodging Sony censorship/lock-in vs. lost reach). A few PC testers also hit stalled downloads / resume errors partway through the large install.
• Selection was a genuine lottery. Despite pre-test cynicism ("only streamers get picked"; the form asked for creator URLs), tons of people won with blank creator fields and single accounts, some streamers got rejected, and throwaway/duplicate applications appear to have been filtered. Long-time Azur Lane / Yostar-ID accounts felt they had better odds.
• Nightly official livestreams during the CBT struck many as odd for a small closed test. Surveys went out (starting with "favorite character") but the first one ended with no free-text field, frustrating people who wanted to write in requests.

Story & Setting

https://preview.redd.it/2sfh72kextbh1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=370662475e5e46ec7b6de9b2aba8acef0b48507e

You play a 星臨者 (Starborn) — a figure with a mysterious power and slightly hazy memory — in a fantasy world where you travel alongside 星霊 (star spirits). The CBT opens with an elf, Symphoria (西芙莉雅), and a fairy, Lumi, searching for their companion Abby in a land overrun by 凶獣 (kyōjū, "calamity beasts"). A fiend swarm throws you straight into a tutorial battle; afterward the real protagonist wakes up (the intro pair are a framing sequence — with a suspicious shadow lurking behind). You create your own protagonist — male or female, through a character creator, and your custom look even carries over into the roguelike mode's pixel-sprite avatar. Once the Kibo introduction is done you're separated from the party and picked up in an unknown town, where the beastfolk sisters enter the story.

The telling itself drew a common gripe: the opening buries you in Chinese-fantasy proper nouns (anima, kyōjū, star-scars and the rest) fast enough that some players said their "eyes glazed over," and with the JP voicing cutting out early (see below) the writing lands as competent-but-generic rather than a hook — though a few countered the presentation is more animated than the usual static visual-novel intro, and the opening is polished.

Worth flagging, since the game's name invites the question: hands-on, the world and cast read as a completely standalone work — there's no detectable Azur Lane lore connection. That's by design — Manjuu has said AP is a deliberate step into "a new field, the 3D open world," meant to move past the "Azur Lane's company" image and reach a wider audience. The "Azur flavor" people talk about is really the fanservice DNA (swimming, a screen-centering double-jump on scenic overlooks, ultra-miniskirts), not shared characters or story.

Combat

https://preview.redd.it/t3nj778kxtbh1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=dec6e66d06e4327afcefeb8c7901f6c1ebd0de5e

The standout positive. It's a 3-character tag-based action RPG with separate dodge and parry buttons, and it's easy to pick up.

• The parry is the star — generous window, satisfying, repeatedly called a "real parry" (favorably vs. ZZZ and Wuthering Waves). Combat "speed is way faster than other gacha games," and the effects/damage fonts drew constant Granblue Fantasy: Relink comparisons.
• But the parry has a cooldown / use-limit, and it's the one combat complaint players keep raising ("don't repeat ZZZ's mistake"). The gripe: a parry should reward reading attack timing, and a cooldown that stops you parrying when you want to makes it feel like a "tacked-on parry." Some found the underlying swap combat merely "the usual."
• The Dissonance Mark / 同調 system underpins everything — skills and Kibo apply elemental marks that EX skills consume for burst. There are co-op attacks, swap combos, and "entrance skills." Downside: heavy input load ("the pad literally doesn't have enough buttons"), and the UI doesn't clearly show the mark count, so many players "just parry everything."
• There's also an enemy-gather (集敵) layer — hitting two or more enemies at once deals bonus damage, so several characters double as crowd-herders (Metsa's charged AoE, Abby's heavy attack, Shalle's skill), which is what defines the "support" role beyond healing.
• Difficulty is uneven (same as CN CBT2): starter enemies are too weak and the tutorial doesn't teach real combos, then the second region spikes hard — brutal level-diff correction, lv60+ mobs swarming, forcing you to grind the starter zone. Worse, moving to a new region can invalidate the capture cards and crafting tier you just built up, so the progression flow feels unnatural rather than earned. Debate over whether this MMO-style regional scaling is good design or just makes early maps disposable.

How teams work: characters fill five roles — Eruption (burst DPS), Destruction (toughness-break DPS), Assault (sustained DPS), Amplification (hybrid buff/sub-DPS/shield), and Imbuement (pure support) — built into two team styles: a break team (Destruction cracks the enemy's toughness bar, Eruption dumps damage in the Break window) or an Overlimit team (an Assault carry stacks Dissonance Marks off two supports and detonates them). In practice both converge on the same solved comp — one DPS + two supports — because top DPS shred toughness bars on their own, which leaves the Destruction role feeling redundant (a complaint carried straight over from CN).

Meta (from CN CBT2): Shalle (夏儿) is the consensus strongest (her spear-throw with Abby's "omochi dragon" buff has broken uptime). Xiaoyu (涂山小玉) is a lazy-strong AoE Overlimit carry. Ruby (红宝石) is the older, weaker Overlimit template and a resource hog. Support cast includes Anais (艾妮丝), Luruka (璐璐卡), Kataru, and Metsa (末音).

Characters

https://preview.redd.it/o51bds5mxtbh1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=94ae5314d0f2b1042e43eb0a9b77142dad374634

The character art is treated as the core selling point — JP players rated it above Genshin / WuWa / ZZZ / HSR / Endfield / NTE for "erotic-cute" appeal, crediting the Azur Lane team. Even skeptics conceded the design, texturing and modeling are "genuinely good" — detailed enough that even the underarms are modeled.

• ~18 planned playable characters at CBT start. Named standouts: Xiaoyu, Nono (诺诺), Luruka (called the most explicit; the younger of the beastfolk sisters, speaks in a mysterious gibberish and hands you an "energy drink"), Terara (忒拉拉) (her energetic red-haired older sister, VA Fairouz Ai), Abby (阿比) (soft/plump "omochi dragon" owner, VA Maria Naganawa), plus Shalle, Mitty (米蒂), and Morwyn.
• Gacha was disabled (spec undecided). You got characters via a character-exchange shop using login-bonus + quest-board coins, and characters were playable in a trial mode.
• Rarity worry: several of the busty "mama" characters (e.g. Anais and the maid) are only ★4, and some players suspect they were late add-ons to the roster — people enjoy the easy access but wonder about the rarity balance. (Metsa, by contrast, is a ★5, so she's not part of that concern.)
• Models look a tier below Endfield/NTE — great in cutscenes/menus, but jaggy and downgraded in the open field.
• Fanservice is restrained on every server — and it looks deliberate, not regional censorship. Early JP worry that the build was toned down vs. CN/Taiwan (TW was "spats everywhere") gave way to the realization it's the same everywhere: mostly opaque coverage, spats under short skirts, real panties only on long-skirt characters (Luruka's low angle the notable exception). Manjuu has actually framed this as intent — in an interview, Manjuu's CEO Ms. Lin said that where Azur Lane "pushes sexiness," Azur Promilia is "pursuing cuteness" and the feeling of a player being excited, and Mr. Kanon added they want to reach a wider range of users and establish a new position in the Japanese market beyond the "Azur Lane's company" image. Read that way, the softer fanservice is a design pivot toward a broader audience, not a compliance edit — though it's still a hot survey topic.
• Audio is a genuine highlight — composers Kenji Kawai and Yasunori Nishiki (Octopath Traveler) with Square-Enix-tier fantasy BGM, plus a strong VA cast.

Kibo System

https://preview.redd.it/b7hv4pmqxtbh1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=eb0a4d630274ce78925dd4bf02e87867102ec28e

Explicitly Pokémon-meets-Palworld: catchable creatures that also work as base laborers whose food you manage — and the game leans into the homage hard (the starter scene has an NPC ask "there are three Kibo here, you see?" and a "I choose you!" beat).

• ~186 species at test start. Catching is called Starlink (星絆) — weaken a wild Kibo and recruit it. Because combat is action (not turn-based), leaving a sliver of HP for the capture is fiddly — people accidentally killed the ones they wanted. The first creature you meet is Kyabekko, a plump cabbage-like Kibo, and early on you pick a starter Kibo from several elemental families (a water-type starter was a common choice). Two shiny tiers plus color variants; evolutions gated behind high levels (e.g. Lv60).
• Each Kibo has detailed parameters and an attribute-affinity (type-matchup) chart that matters a lot in battle.
• Rare Kibo trigger a spawn announcement but have no map marker, forcing tedious sweeps.
• The genetics/factor (因子) system is the long-term hook — capture grants random gene skills, daily tasks teach more, and ~10 slots let you min-max. Genuinely well-liked. The creatures are also just cute, with a petting/head-pat mechanic players loved — enough that some wished for a first-person view (NTE-style) purely to admire and dote on them up close.
• Base workers underwhelm: dispatched Kibo auto-gather but slower than Genshin expeditions, and equipped Kibo get un-equipped when you dispatch them. You still hand-gather wood/stone for gear.
• Economy is punishing: crafting multiple capture cards eats huge resources (crystals require mining out whole maps), and it's unclear why you'd raise a Kibo vs. just catching a high-level one, since shells are too scarce. Some feel the Kibo effort would be better spent on more characters.

Exploration & Mounts

https://preview.redd.it/l80lmjasxtbh1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=96569e47ddfa1492f1e520bc756334f12ba1e112

The flying open world was praised — high freedom early, a natural transition to flight, pretty "translucent"-atmosphere scenery, and satisfying gathering (auto-collects nearby drops after one action). The protagonist can also swim on foot, and there's a double-jump (the camera snaps to scenic vistas when you use it).

Pain points: mounts can't enter water at all; heavy inertia/drift moving around the farm; a map-zoom bug (icons vanish when you shrink the map); the camera glides and causes motion sickness (fix: set "Smooth Camera" to 0); mounted Kibo hunger drains too fast; you can't mount/dismount in the air. One more common gripe: tilt the camera up to the sky and your character disappears — annoying when the whole appeal is admiring the characters ("the moment the character vanishes, it's out of the question").

Side Modes

https://preview.redd.it/lt6u190uxtbh1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=1d00d96b59e3c4254e51502c1c8b75436a2677a6

• The Totem-stacking minigame is the single most-hated content — stacking 12 totems for the gold chest with over-strict timing. Its difficulty was even joked about by the VA hosts on the official stream. "Totem haters" became one of the two dominant complaint factions (the other being controller users).
• Rhythm minigame — too hard for a non-rhythm game (hitting the Q/E inputs cleanly is brutal).
• Fishing — a button-timing/reflex minigame that several felt had "zero fishing feel"; divisive.
• Kibo Showdown / キボ対決 (a.k.a. Kibo Fight) — the Pokémon-battle / lane tower-defense mode. It's a card-game-meets-strategy mode where you summon Kibo units that advance and clash; the explicit win condition is to defeat the enemy's Kibo and destroy their "Starlink Mark" (the base/tower) — structurally close to Battle Cats and Clash Royale. Reception split hard: some found it dangerously addictive ("you could ignore the main story and just play this forever"), while others said they simply "don't want to play it." That split is exactly the point — for some players, being funneled from open-world creature action into a tower-defense mode is jarring ("Wait — I have to do this?!"), and because it's a core content pillar, disliking it sours the rest (the way Endfield's factory content drove some players off). Flip side: players who click with the Kibo battles love the game — it's AP's "sharp," standout hook.
• Endgame roguelike (Treasure Hunt) — a generic 3-card-pick roguelike that disappointed; MP matchmaking wasn't working. People wanted ARPG-style progression instead.
• Multiplayer — "Crisis Subjugation" (progression co-op) and "Ether Nest" (Kibo boss battles) exist; testers liked that MP has real dungeon traversal, not just a boss room, and asked for light MP rewards so solo players aren't forced in. Few reached it in the window.

Monetization & Gacha Economy

Gacha/payments were not testable — the main reason players expected another test before launch.

• No dupe/constellation system (凸なし) appears to be the plan — widely celebrated as "the worst case avoided." Strong, repeated demand to remove off-banner losses (すり抜け): "no off-banner and I'll play; off-banner and I won't."
• Skepticism remains (Manjuu/Yostar; someone cited two recent games doubling gacha unit price at launch). Azur Lane was cited as proof Manjuu can run ~9 years on mostly skins — though AP's far higher dev cost makes that shaky, and Manjuu can't pump out characters as fast as AL.
• Skins (esp. lewd skins) are the expected money-maker given no dupes; people plead for a generous gacha in exchange.
• Possible gacha Kibo: Kibo show up in the same UI as character exchange, raising fear of gacha-exclusive Kibo.

Technical & Performance

• CPU-bound and heavy. Overall load lands between Genshin and Wuthering Waves / Endfield, with high CPU use even in menus and modest GPU load. High-end rigs run it maxed but the GPU screams; VRAM use is surprisingly low. A 4090 tester said it runs better than Wuthering Waves.
• Low-end owners worry about launch viability; at FHD60 it only uses ~30% GPU, so people actually want a higher graphics ceiling, not lower.
• FPS options are just 60 or Unlimited — no 120 cap, no frame-gen like WuWa. DLSS/FSR present but buried. Shader-compile stutter on startup, confirmed across setups.
• Controller support is broken — the biggest technical complaint. Gathering, capture, swap, ultimates, and parry variously can't be done on a pad; some tutorial actions aren't even mapped. No key rebinding, no camera-invert. External tools (JoyToKey/reWASD/Steam Input) mostly fail because the broken native pad input takes priority. Players pin it on a keyboard-mouse-centric CN dev focus (and the fact that no console build was part of this test).
• Localization is unfinished: JP voice ends before the Chinese-timed lip-flaps finish, and story goes voiceless fairly early. Cutscenes occasionally freeze; the boss tutorial can stop accepting input.

One clear QoL win everyone appreciated: the story dialogue has a speed-up feature (1.25/1.5/2/3×) — the kind of thing people said they "want in every game."

Overall Assessment

Strengths (per JP testers): combat feel (that dedicated parry), best-in-class erotic-cute art, a heavyweight composer duo, a pretty open world with great flight, deep optional Kibo/crafting systems, and consumer-friendly signals (no gear RNG, planned no-dupes). Runs lighter than WuWa, and selection was a fair lottery — goodwill for Yostar.

Weaknesses: effectively non-functional controller support and no keybinding; wildly uneven minigame difficulty (Totem & rhythm widely hated); a second-region difficulty wall; clunky menu/UI navigation (barely-working sort-and-filter, obtuse selling/swapping, unclear early-game routing); unfinished polish (voice/lip-sync, cutscene freezes, shader stutter, no 120fps); fanservice deliberately restrained (Manjuu is chasing "cute" over "sexy," which will disappoint the crowd the art otherwise courts); and a black-box monetization model. The recurring verdict — "not a bad game at all, but one that selects its players (人を選ぶ)" — captures the deeper worry: whether a heavy crafting game you can't play alongside others, built around a divisive Kibo-battle pillar, can hold both the chill life-sim crowd and the hardcore-action crowd, and whether the endgame has depth. Genre newcomers will likely enjoy it far more than jaded gacha veterans.

Outlook: a strong, distinctive foundation — combat, art, and world all land — buried under a CN-CBT2-era build's rough edges. Because this was the old build, most complaints (controller, keybinds, full voice, graphics ceiling) are "surely fixed by launch" candidates. CN CBT3 recruits right after this test, which is where gacha/payments finally get tested. Release estimates range from late 2026 (per NEXON's Korea-facing materials) to 2027. No firm JP date announced.

JP CBT Component Ratings

AI-synthesized from community sentiment (AzuPro board threads + the featured video), not a personal playthrough. Scale S / A / B / C / D. Reflects the JP CBT (CN-CBT2 build), not the final product.

Component	Rating	Summary
Visual Design & Art	S	"Erotic-cute" art rated above every major competitor. Field models jaggy, but cutscene/menu art is top-class.
Combat Feel	A	The standout. Fast, real dedicated parry, Relink-style presentation. Hurt by heavy input load + parry cooldown.
Combat Balance	C+	Same as CN CBT2 — Shalle dominates, "1 DPS + 2 support" solved comps, uneven difficulty.
Story & Setting	B-	Competent fantasy framing (Star-descendant, star spirits, calamity beasts), but standalone from Azur Lane and voiceless/unfinished this build.
Kibo System	B	~186 species, fun catch (Starlink) + genetics loop. Undercut by punishing economy, no rare-spawn markers, weak base-worker payoff.
Exploration & World	A-	Pretty atmosphere, great flight, swim + double-jump, good gathering QoL. Water-locked mounts, farm drift, camera sickness.
Mount System	B-	Flight is a highlight; water-locked mounts and fast Kibo hunger drag it down.
Home Base & Crafting	C+	Deep loop, but slow auto-gather, hand-farmed gear mats, scarce shells make it grindy.
Side Modes	D+	Totem & rhythm minigames widely hated; Kibo Showdown ("Battle Cats") polarizing; roguelike generic with broken MP.
Multiplayer / Co-op	C	Real dungeon traversal + Kibo-boss modes intrigue, but buggy and barely reachable.
UI/UX & Onboarding	C-	Cluttered, unclear mark display, obtuse sell/swap flows, tutorial under-teaches combos.
Controls (Pad/Keybind)	D	Broken controller support, no rebinding, no camera-invert, external tools blocked. Top complaint.
Performance / Optimization	B-	Lighter than WuWa, low VRAM — but CPU-heavy, shader stutter, no 120fps/frame-gen, runs hot.
Localization (JP)	C	Voice/lip-sync unfinished, story goes voiceless early — a CBT-stage issue, expected to be fixed.
Music & Audio	A	Kawai + Nishiki + strong VA cast. Square-Enix-tier fantasy BGM. Cheap parry SFX one minor gripe.
Fanservice / Art Direction	C+	The audience's core draw, but censored on every server. Big survey topic.
Gacha & Monetization	N/A	Untested. Signals positive (no dupes planned, no gear RNG), but rates/pity/off-banner all unknown.
Content Volume	A-	2 regions, ~186 Kibo, ~18 characters, multiple side + co-op modes. Quantity is not the problem.
Overall (JP CBT)	B	Distinctive, promising foundation — combat, art, world all land — held back by an old build's rough edges. Most gaps are launch-fixable.

Sources: the Japanese AzuPro board community threads (June–July 2026) and the CBT-impressions video. Companion to my CN CBT2 Comprehensive Overview. Character/Kibo names are transliterated from the Japanese community's katakana and cross-checked against known CN names — official English names (see the Fandom wiki) may differ. Ratings are AI-synthesized from community sentiment, not a hands-on playthrough.