KonoSuba: Fantastic Days – God's Blessing on this Dull Gacha Game!

Ach ja, I fucking love KonoSuba! I love its two seasons and the movie, enjoy the manga adaptation and am eager to finally read the original Light Novel. So when Crunchyroll announced to bring the Gacha Game to the west, I was hyped, even did all the pre-register stuff and after playing Fantastic Days for almost two month, I can now finally say without doubt that it is not bad… just unbelievably dull.

I don’t have a lot of experience when it comes to Gacha Games, though I did try. Fate/Grand Order is not available in my region and even my new phone can’t run Pokémon Masters EX. The only Gacha I play is Princess Connect! Re:Dive, starting a few weeks after its global launch around 8 months ago. I clearly don’t know what makes a Gacha a good Gacha, but I do know when I am bored and feel like not accomplishing anything.

A normal day for me looked something like this: You wake up and are greeted by a full stamina bar. You collect your log-in mission, adding another 400 stamina to burn. You play through all the Hard Stages and switch over to the Free Quests, where you do all the daily missions and burn through the last of you stamina on one of the several quests giving you only one specific item. Lastly, you go to the Arena and do three identical attacks against the weekly boss. If there is an event going on, you spend another chunk of your time just doing the event boss attempts. In the evening, you burn all the accumulated stamina again on the Free Quests, until you wake up the next morning and repeat.

My problem doesn’t even necessarily come from all the grinding, but not even knowing what I grind for. The characters themselves don’t need items, unless you want to promote them. You can’t really aim for certain items, as most of them are not available at your progress yet. You do the Hard Stages, as they will eventually make the item available to you. I basically did my daily grind only, because it has to lead to something, right?

Something similar plagues the battle system. It is certainly more complex than something like PriConne with a character having several kinds of attacks and those differing from one character to the next. It certainly has room for interesting gameplay, weren’t it for the Auto button taking care of everything and doing it better than I ever could. I never even learned what the abilities and of the characters were, since I didn’t need to do so. I looked at the element of the stage, let the game suggest a team for me, it automatically equips weapons, etc. and then I do nothing in the actual battle. The game literally plays itself. The only time I could have taken over was, when I couldn’t beat a stage, however, just getting stronger turned out to be a more viable solution.

Since you don’t equip characters with items or something similar, leveling up is the only way to get them stronger. So you grind EXP bottles, until they have reached their level cap. So you collect the items to promote them, increasing their level cap, until you fully promoted them. It is at that moment you have reached a glass ceiling. There is nothing more you can do with you current characters… so you pull new ones.

I don’t really have a bad experience with the Gacha in Fantastic Days. Sure, it took me more than all my jewels and a few to pull Swimsuit Darkness (Still worth it, at least for the CG), but beyond that? You earn jewels quite fast, which makes pulling less an event, once there is a good character in a banner and more a thing you do every once in a while. While the actual character pool is rather limited, every character has like a million variations at different star levels. Too bad that you mostly only have use for the 4-stars, them being the rarest to pull. As every character is basically limited to its base stats, pulling stronger characters was my way to progress through the game.

To recap, I basically (don’t) play the game to mostly earn items I don’t know how to use on characters that can only get so strong before I have to pull the Gacha. Yay. To make things worse, I hate the UI design. All my problems were enhanced by layers upon layers of different menus, some of which I only discovered by actively searching through them. Why can’t I buy and enhance items in the same menu, especially if I can’t even see which character can equip it? Playing the game is frustrating, as I mostly don’t know what to do, and when I do, I don’t know what it is for.

Beyond the gameplay, there is actually a lot of good things to say about it. For story sequences, the game uses Live2D animated character, which makes them move quite nicely and doesn’t get as repetitive as staring at the same three poses all the time. Too bad I never looked into the main or character stories, as the daily upkeep kept me busy and took all the the I wanted to give the game. A shame too, as KonoSuba’s story and characters were its initial draw for me and, with the exception of the token Idol trio, all the game exclusive characters seemed interesting too. I could have stopped playing the game and only read the stories when I found the time, but at this point, I already uninstalled it.

I tried to like the game, but at the end of the day, I just couldn’t. If I were a more cynical person, I would say the blame lies upon capitalism and its need to present a product nobody actually wants, but engages with anyway. There is good stuff to be found, but not enough to keep me playing. Maybe I will reinstall the game if my hunger for more KonoSuba content takes over, but beyond that possibility, KonoSuba: Fantastic Days will stay a footnote in an otherwise godly blessed franchise.