I can't tell you why I felt compelled to do a writeup on this game, but here we are.

First, the good. Priconne's production values are truly great. The character art is excellent, the occasional anime cutscenes look great, the music is actually outstanding, and the game's got full high-quality voice acting. The quality of the writing goes so far to have unique phone notifications for full stamina/guildhouse messages respectively, depending on who you have your favorite character set to. All the characters are cute, quirky, charming, whatever words you use to describe females.

And then there's the bad, or moreso "the reason why I just can't bring myself to keep playing this game". Everything is time-gated in a way that I just cannot stand. If I do all the daily missions for a week and a half straight, my account's level will go up by 1. This increases the level cap of all my characters. To increase the level of your characters, you need an ever-increasing amount of EXP potions, and an ever-increasing amount of mana to increase their skills' levels. Your characters also need equipment, which requires an ever-increasing amount of equipment shards that drop randomly as you watch your in-game stamina get sapped away as you spend tons of skip tickets, because I can't be arsed to actually play the game.

It's all just a vicious cycle that eventually leads to me to abandon the game regularly. Again, I like the characters, enough to keep indulging in their individual stories. But the game is just so unfun after a certain point. I've played other gacha games with much more fulfilling gameplay loops. I'm told that the Japanese version is a lot more generous, to the point of players having more resources than they know what to do with, and frankly, I wish I was playing that version.

I do love Pecorine though. Actual cartoon character. Fount of optimism. I smile every time I see her.

Reviewed on Mar 15, 2022


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