This is the best gacha game I played. It felt open and fun and interesting. SaGa style storytelling fits the gacha structure surprisingly well.

But it's still gacha and I couldn't really get into it. Just the sheer amount of icons and popups and login bonus shit bombarding me at the home screen turns my brain into oatmeal. Sometimes seeing these gacha games makes me feel old for not being able to keep up with the amount of sheer fast data being presented to me. And yet at the same time sometimes it makes me feel too young to play it because I'm not old enough to be spending my time spinning slots or whatever it is these things do. I'm only 23.

Back to the dragon quest casinos I go

I tried playing the game again after my last negative review, this time with the hintbook with the dungeon maps it came with. I understand the dungeons were made by a junior designer who wasn't that experienced yet, and they chose to go with his designs despite realizing they were too big and mazelike for almost anyone to really play, and the hintbook was their compromise. Even with the hintbook, they're still hard to navigate, but I'm glad it doesn't completely remove challenge to play this way. In fact, it became kind of interesting, because at the start, the characters are doing a job, not a quest, so the "turn at the next corner" sense you get following the maps fits the feeling, and the fact that the combat is so much more zone-out inducing than the previous game makes it feel more like paid work these characters do with less speed and chaos of the previous game, which felt a lot more like a quest of rebellion. I may return to explore more of its unique art and story ideas, but the battles, pacing, difficulty curve, and dungeons are still pretty sloppy