Still feels weird to review a mobile game like this but frankly it kinda deserves it seeing as how before Zelda this was pretty much all I played for 2 months. This recent one happened to be my most mentally draining, busy college semester so in some of my free time when I wasn't just staring at a wall I started playing this cause a friend made it sound interesting. I also play Arknights every now and then, and while it is probably better (I'd be willing to say it is the best gacha out there period and the only one I might even try to recommend to non gacha players) AK requires an amount of brain power and time I could not afford if I wanted to make it through the semester alive. Blue Archive was exactly what I needed, fun and snappy game that I could play fairly quickly despite my brain being fried. From the very moment I downloaded this game it has this very nice, chill atmosphere. Kivotos, the city the game takes place on, is a massive, shining and pretty metropolis populated almost exclusively by underage anime girls. Very questionable detail aside, the game has a very lighthearted tone that I found really appealing during a stressful time. Even on the main story it rarely loses its metaphorical smile, though it knows when to be serious and even pretty interesting, and I found myself smiling along quite a bit. It can be pretty funny (dare I say cute too) when it wants to be. The cast of characters is pretty varied, and while they all take from the same trope basket anime has been sucking dry for 20 years, I never found a character I didn't like, and was fun to see them all interact with each other in events or with the player character even if that got pretty questionable at times. I think the game is pretty nice to look at, all characters are really expressive and their chibi 3D versions during combat have a lot of detail that give them personality. UI was fairly simple and usable which is something that you don't always see on a gacha, though I have some issues like when selecting a formation to use during a mission. Great presentation overall, feels really modern and thought out and it makes FGO look horribly ancient (and honestly in gacha game time it really is). I even quite enjoyed the music despite the genre not being my favorite. There's lots of memorable and catchy tunes that aren't too overbearing and are a great companion to whatever you're doing. The combat is quite simple, you don't directly control your squad of students and instead just choose when to use one of the skills of your squad. Each student has 1 active skill you can use, and you can pick between 3 at a time. You barely have to think for a lot of the missions, but a couple, particularly the very well made raid bosses, can require a little strategy and team building. Main issue of said team building, however, is the horrible cancer every gacha game carries with it: the gacha. For what its worth, I don't think it is that horrendous on this game. The rates are somewhat reasonable, the pity system isn't designed exclusively for whales, the game drip feeds you pretty reasonable amounts of currency (in fact, the global server of this game gets considerably more free currency overall than the original Japanese server) and there are ways to grind for a lot of characters just by playing. This doesn't shake off the bad taste in my mouth it leaves, but there are a lot of games that do gacha in a lot more predatory and insidious way. Overall, I really do enjoy this game despite its many flaws, and I can't deny I appreciate how it helped me get through a difficult period without going insane. It does a lot of things right for a gacha, and things like the sweep function that make it as easy as possible to grind stages or the really quick dailies you can finish in about 5 minutes are great quality of life features that more of this kind of game should adopt, and make me a lot less apprehensive about logging in each day to play at least a little bit.