OVERVIEW
Netmarble brings to you what may very well be the best gacha game ever. Bold statement indeed. Yet, I haven't encountered a gacha game so beautifully well done that not only gives you countless free opportunities with gifts and events daily, but at a relatively fair cost if you do want to spend any money compared to other games to get the characters you want. If you just want your starting crew to get really good, not a game breaker either. Not just the game itself, but if you're a fan of other popular anime, you may see a crossover event in this game as well, as Attack on Titan, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, and currently The King of Fighters '98 have all made appearances. The quality and quantity of things to do in this game are also excellent with a single player campaign or PVP multiplayer available for which ever play style you may have. The list of great things go on and on in this game, we'll do our best to dive into those.
STORY & GAMEPLAY
If you're familiar with The Seven Deadly Sins manga or anime (available to watch on Netflix), this will be your go to game for all things related to this franchise. The story mode itself is a near beat by beat a side comparison to the anime (minus the perverted things Meliodas does/the humor). This may be the shortened version of the story if you want a quicker rundown of what happens opposed to watching the four seasons of show to catch up on.
Playing this game can feel like a console game ported to mobile. I mean that in all the best ways. It feels too good and at times I wish this was in fact on consoles. Starting in Meliodas' "Boar Hat" tavern feels like a genuinely well thought out hub for this game. You start off with the lead character and through progression gain more and more access to features within the tavern and overworld.
Everything is about the characters and fighting while challenging you in different ways. Some fights will require thoughtful tact to beat the enemy. Tactics with utilizing poison, bleed, stun, or other such methods to take down your foe can be fun and creative while continuously improving your skills with the game. Sure, you could just get the most powerful characters and max them out, that can work for a large majority of the game, but it's much more satisfying to stack effects till the point where no matter what your opponent or boss tries to do, they are inevitably doomed to perish after their next move.
The game presents a wide variety of content to give you endless options for what ever it is you personally prefer doing. Rather use a team to take on your friends or random people in PVP? No problem. During some events you can team up with your friends or random players to beat giant monsters (such as in the Attack on Titan crossover event). Prefer single player? A majority of the game is, even the PVP stuff is no big deal. I would actively encourage people to play the PVP tournaments, as doing so gifts you a good amount of diamonds (currency for summoning characters) on a weekly basis and all you have to do is do it once a week. As you can't communicate in these except for in-game emojis, there's no negative to the experience.
We haven't yet scratched the surface here yet, most games would be done with content by now, but there's still collaboration and other events to discuss. Collaborations happen mildly frequently with this game so far, over half year in its global version lifespan. I mentioned briefly before, but we've seen the likes of Attack on Titan and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Characters from each featured IP were added into the game as well as specific events for each. In the Attack on Titan event we saw an up to four player co-op (quad-op?) battle against a "Titan" available with event specific items available to acquire. This would allow you to get limited time items and accessories for the new limited time characters.
There are also Boss Battles which so far have turned characters evil and are one of the most challenging events in the game. So far each one seems tailored to a new or recently new character having an edge in the battle, but if you don't have that specific character it's still more than doable on the "Hard" difficulty which is the easiest of the three available. These events absolutely require high level characters if you want to succeed.
Finally we've also seen the likes of holiday events. These have been pretty fun, with customizing the characters or adding new iterations of characters dressed in the theme. For example, currently we still have the lingering Halloween theme with new characters specifically tailored to Halloween and costumes available for characters you may all ready have (must pay for these though). We may get a Thanksgiving theme or small event that's in that time frame and then later will come the Christmas event.
CONTROLS & PERFORMANCE
This game's controls are right on for what it needs. In the lobby and within the towns and cities you control Meliodas by moving you finger on the screen towards the direction you want him to move. This is easy and very responsive. When you want him to talk or interact with an object, just click the little bubble. It is pretty little, but as long as there's not a bunch of other little bubbles nearby (which there will be at times) it's not an issue. It can be frustrating when a bunch of these are all overlapping and you have to fiddle around with hitting the wrong one multiple times until you get it. Not a huge ordeal, but it can be helpful if you move Meliodas slightly to free up the hitbox (meta reference!) you're trying to type.
Whilst in game play battles themselves, you will utilize selecting amongst the variety of character attacks displayed or combining the tiles to power up the attacks by sliding over two matching tiles to be side by side (a merging animation will occur between matches). Selecting up to three of these tiles will result in your team performing those attack or buff animations.. Figuring out what each characters' attacks and buffs do can really make or break your team (at least for the higher challenging events). There is a super useful feature that I wish more games had, an auto-play button. If you select this the game will do everything for you. You may be wondering why you'd want to do this instead of playing yourself? The answer is that this feature is really good as this game is an absolute terror for making you grind money, awakening items, etc. to insane levels. That's why this comes in so handedly. When you need to farm in game currency money for leveling up characters or awakening them, just set up auto-play (or the repeat x amount of times button prior to battle) and just let the game do its thing while you do something else. The only negative to this is if you max out your inventory, it'll stop. Forcing you to clean out your inventory box. Try and make sure your box is good and has free space prior to doing this.
Performance of this game has been pretty solid up until the newest event. I had few issues minus some sporadic game lag loading into areas or when my connectivity dropped for whatever reason. Until now that is, the newest event with the "King of Fighters 98" crossover has been brutal on my Android device. Game has never crashed until this event, and I now crash the game randomly every time I play it. This wasn't an issue prior to the event, I'd expect most of this to be resolved as the event is nearly over. (*I'll update post event if the issue does get resolved) Other than this one set back, the game has been great. One warning I should mention is the battery drainage this app will plague your phone with. This is by far the most draining app I've encountered. Your battery could be at full and be dead within an hour of playtime. If you can play with charging your phone at the same time, this will be the way to go. Mildly irritating, but worth mentioning.
AUDIO
The way Netmarble has incorporated character audio into all facets of the game really brings this game to life. If all we had were sound effects and music this would be pretty standard, audio from the anime sort of deal. However, when you're in a battle and hear a character call out while attacking, or saying a phrase at the battle's end, or throughout the game, it's so natural and fitting that it really brings the game together as a whole. I could give a minor grievance about no character audio during cutscenes, but for a mobile game to have that would be insane, there's just not enough space for all that dialogue (another reason this could make it as a console game). Like I mentioned, sound effects and music all peel right from the anime. It's not lacking anything in that department. To keep it pretty short and sweet, it does everything it needed to and does it well, no complaints.
SUMMARY
All these things, and some things I probably still missed, all add up to a game that is simply better in just about every way to any other gacha game out there, and there's some really good ones too, but this one in particular is just a cut above. There's nothing Netmarble isn't all ready doing, that I'm still wanting them to do. As long as they keep releasing new characters to summon, new events, and keep giving a ton of free stuff that's useful, this game will continue to last for the foreseeable future. I especially look forward to future collaboration events with other IPs from other games, anime, or whatever they can think of.
SCORE
9.0 out of 10.0
▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▢
+ Great assortment of characters, animations pop right out of the show, character
customization.
+ Content is always fresh with unique collaboration events, even sometimes with other IPs.
+ Nostalgic feel if you love anything remotely 7 Deadly Sins related.
○ Summoning characters can be exciting (if you don't care about this part it becomes a negative,
or if you have bad luck with RNG and never get what you want it can be frustrating, *this will
happen to you guaranteed at some point if you play long enough)
- Small percentage rates to obtain characters designed to get you to spend money to get them
- Grinding money, enhancements, and awakening medals is a bit extreme to the point of always
having to do this incessantly.
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