Dragalia Lost is an action RPG gacha game for mobile phones. Like all gacha games, there are two central mechanics:
• What characters you get, beyond a few story-related characters, is random, and more can be purchased via microtransactions.
• The game involves large amounts of grinding, some of which can be skipped or accelerated by spending money on the game via microtransactions.Dragalia Lost is an action RPG gacha game for mobile phones. Like all gacha games, there are two central mechanics:
• What characters you get, beyond a few story-related characters, is random, and more can be purchased via microtransactions.
• The game involves large amounts of grinding, some of which can be skipped or accelerated by spending money on the game via microtransactions.
Many people find these practices to be predatory. And yet, the game has a very acceptable free to play experience on the whole. And unlike most games of its type, it actually has fairly decent gameplay on the whole.
But this isn’t a game I can recommend to anyone; it’s an endless hole for your time (and if you are a whale, your money). It is a game that centers on grinding, over and over again.
The game seems pretty simplistic at first – you attack by tapping on the screen, navigate around environments by dragging on the screen in the direction you want to go (rather than clicking somewhere and running to it), can make charge attacks by holding your finger on the screen in a stationary manner, and can use character skills (which gradually charge up by attacking) by clicking buttons on the screen.
Each weapon type has its own attack pattern, and each character has their own set of two skills and three static special abilities.
The central conceit of the game that separates it from other, similar games is that you can transform into a dragon by charging up your shapeshifting bar. This basically serves as a super mode, and which dragon you transform into is based on what dragon you are equipped with – this dragon gives you static bonuses to your stats, and when you turn into them, you get to use the dragon’s very powerful special ability and generally smash stuff with your powerful attacks (including some objects in the scenery, which feels pretty satisfying).
There’s a story campaign that more or less teaches the players the ropes, with you fighting your way through stages consisting of a bunch of weak little monsters, maybe a miniboss or two which is generally pretty easily dispatched, and then finally a boss of some sort at the end. Most of these are pretty simple and repetitive, but there’s a few different boss fights against special characters or against dragons you are trying to impress so they will bond with you so you can transform into them.
Once you beat all of the story campaign (which is presently incomplete, ending the game on a cliffhanger after only six chapters, which is about 60ish levels or so), the game dumps you out into what might be termed “the real game”. Unfortunately, the real game is endless grinding. You’ve got the “Imperial Onslaughts”, which are five levels, each with their own unique (and often dangerous) level setup and a powerful imperial soldier backed up by a small horde of weaker but still damaging foes. You’ve got the dragon fights, wherein you face off against a powerful dragon. You’ve got three super grindy areas – a money-making level, a elemental orb/crafting elements collection level, and an xp-grinding level – that are pretty trivial in terms of difficulty, but which you must play many, many times to get what you need to upgrade your characters.
Notably, almost everything in the game can be played in co-op multiplayer, with four players each controlling their own characters, but the game can also almost entirely be played solo, with you controlling one character while three AI teammates tag along.
Ironically, these final boss fights – the dragons, the raid events, the wave stuff, and the imperial onslaught – all are actually pretty decent. The game abandons its earlier, bland design and actually pushes things in interesting directions mechanically, with attackable body parts, AoEs that can be dodged or prevented, and interesting attack patterns. Overcoming these challenges for the first time actually feels pretty good.
The problem is that you don’t have to overcome them once or twice; you need to overcome them dozens if not hundreds of times in order to upgrade your characters.
And for what? To grind some more?
It just isn’t worth it. The game just isn’t good enough. The game content is repetitive, and the story itself is rather generic. The characters aren’t terrible as far as such things go, each of them pretty much having two dimensions instead of one, but very, very few are any deeper than that, and the game, by randomizing which characters you have, doesn’t really have much of an ability to fill in more details about most of them.
In the end, this is a game that tries to be compelling, but not in a good way. It is trying to compel you to play it endlessly, but it is all Skinner Boxes, doing the same thing over and over again. The gameplay is decent, but not amazing, and it asks you to do the same things dozens if not hundreds of times.
Don't play this game.… Expand
Dragalia LostYour Score0 out of 10User Score
