God damn it, now I have to give this a shot. Can't be any worse than GF2, right?
I don't know how GF2 is but i really like how much depth mecharashi has. It's tiny maps with 5 units and 8-10 turn limit because gacha but every small step and action matters. It's not super deterministic too, sometimes you miss a 91% atk and get fucked, sometimes your sniper hits a double headshot and kills the guy. Progression gets pretty extreme with new passives that give you extra attacks and strong skills (the game does NOT explain the chip system well and it's necessary to unlock passives). You have 6 rewinds too so if you fuck up you can move back a bit instead of retry but i dont think you can cheat misses with it.
It starts very easy tho, i cleared 2-7 and that's the first real boss stage and it felt like a real scrub filter there but mostly on powerlevel. I was straight up not strong enough to kill the boss until i remade the farming stage for an S rank and farmed some mats to upgrade my mechs then it was easy. Mech level are massive because every piece gives POWER so going from 10 to 20 is huge.
Weapon system is weird because you don't actually upgrade weapons, you drop them at fixed levels and the first farming stage has low level common shit. Farming weapon is hard at first too but i didnt know you could garantee a rare weapon if you kill the bosses 4 times and go in the data menu. Clearing the hard mode first chapter gives a good lvl 24 machine gun too.
Getting stronger means you can go to the farmiing stage and farm better so you get more mats / spend less stamina when you sweep therefore get stronger faster which gives a nice sense of progression. The main downsides are
1-Story is cliche meh without any context i read but dont care.
2-Low budget voice acting and songs
3-The agressive account exp bottleneck. I cleared 2-7 and the game said "nah man, you're not allowed until your account level rises". Gonna take 1 or even 2 days.
4-A current event that gives a free S healer mech that i'll probably not have enough time to get (i need to farm 8000 badges i think it's possible if i spend all my energy consumables...).
5-The mecha gacha being terrible, i think i should've spent 30 free rolls on the rookie banner for an early S mech
6-The game has B, A and S rank pilots but the B rank are all hot garbage as far as i know, their stats are visibly thrash and have pathetic passives so they clog my rolls with filler thrash. Pilot dupes are alos mostly initial AP and stat boosts so thankfully nothing game changing and S ranks a
Behold, my garish main character mech!
(mc is bad but i don't want to take him out =/)
Manato is appearently an A rank and people are fucking furious.
It can go one of two ways. He stays an A rank or they pull a Lighter.
Unironically even.
I don't know what people expected considering the state of ZZZ marketing. Game released with a single 5* male who is a furry on standard. Lighter was clearly an emergency after people thought there would be no limited 5* male. Harumasa was free to bait women. Hugo was doomed to be worse than miyabi (and pushed hard into yaoi).
Just because it's not as bad as WuWa and genshin doesn't mean it's as good as star rail. And it sounds like it will get worse.
And maaan, does ZZZ only have one costume designer or something, this looking like star rail chinese dresses.
