I won't ever make the mistake of playing any gatcha more than its main story again, so this review only talks about exactly that. And... I kinda liked it? Since the game is mostly two parts - visual novel and combat - I'll structure this review this way.

So, the story! The script's translation is beautifully bad, which gives the international cast quite a lot of charme (honestly I buy that none of these ppl know "correct" grammar). This translation also makes the script more mysterious than its "original" version probably is. And there's still quite a lot of good writing - the voiced segments with the really deep voice especially are a real treat most of the time. Thewriting also tends to delve into delightfully weird or unconventional ideas (the final chapter i.e. is a weird bureaucracy thriller), which I really like! So yea, story's good & weird & a little unconventional & really charming in its "bad" translation.

The combat on the other hand? It's the one link the story mode has to the awful gatcha and progression mechanics that and it's exactly that link making the experience much worse. While the actual combat mechanics are actually quite cute & fun, the awful grind for the resources necessary to level up your characters is really tedious & boring. Also, gatcha is gambling, which is not only exploitative but also a very cheap gameplay mechanic. So yea.

The bottom line: It's a great and charming story with an okay combat system made (a lot) worse by all the things that make it a gatcha. Which, to be honest, was the review I could've already written before playing the game.

Reverse: 1999 is reasonably enjoyable and undeniably aesthetically pleasing, but I failed to discover anything that justifies the exaggerated praises found in most reviews. It’s decent, but it doesn’t quite live up to the 神ゲー status I anticipated after reading those reviews. I do suggest giving it a shot, at least for 15 minutes, as recommended by App Island. However, if you have a contrarian spirit, rest assured, you’re not alone.
Longer version here: https://kenrin0.wordpress.com/2023/11/21/reverse-1999/

Boring.

The artstyle looked very promising but it didn't meet my expectations. The dialogue was boring, the sound was terrible, and the voice acting too.

Combat was interesting but nothing more.

Also, it's a gacha game.

I would just rate a gacha game or try to write something funny but I wanted to review it this time because I got hooked to this one and wanted to adress the cons and pros of it, mostly same as what you read or heard because translation issue is very known. I'll play it casually and wait for future content. with how good the trailers for CN patchs and events, I'm hyped.

there are issues with translation like everyone says but I would say thats mostly in chapter 1. it gets better in later chapters. I'm used to seeing gibberish text as I play gachas and vn's but even I got confused while playing the first chapter, not a good impression for a game which introduces itself as a fully english voice acted gacha with a setting that specializes in european. and the only ones who are complaining about the translation arent the eng readers, CN players had the same opinion as I've seen. developers are not ignorant to this as they made it known in their user survey questions. so translation could get better in the future when they hire more translator or proofreaders.

another issue I encountered is voice quality is not stable. sometimes it comes great sometimes it comes like the actor who voicing the line is using a 20 year old mic. if you intend to play or played you can notice this in druvis III's voice but again I stopped noticing it while reading chapter 4 so maybe they solved the issue or I'm just going crazy.

reverse 1999 is probably the easiest gacha to get into. has good length of story content and pacing (not like arknights or genshin which focuses more on embellishment in words in a simple story and making it unnecessarily long, this one is character focused. if something needs to be known it comes in from someones mouth not you reading twenty lines of text, for someone like me who fed up with that, reverse 1999's story is fresh air), basic but nice gameplay with a lot of options to go for when making your team and fucking beautiful visuals. performance, smoothness and the optimisation of the client is also unreal (plus didnt encounter any bugs so far), one of the reasons why I dont intend to drop this one.

I dont know who the fuck the guy talking in between chapters or what the hell is he blabbering about but its very entertaining and funny. if you are planning to play dont skip his speeches. disco elysium looking ass cracked me up many times. imagine some 50 year old guy with a heavy dark toned voice saying: ''More silence. You are really good at finding the right timing for your silence, just like my friend and I are experts in farting soundlessly in the elevator cart''. he was so real for this.

As a visual novel I quite like this game. It's charming with a great aesthetic, an interesting start to a story, (that is at times held back by translation issues, more on that later as it's a bit complicated) fun characters, but sadly some of the most tedious gacha-isms I've ever seen. I can imagine this game being absolutely incredible in the future, but for now it's still pretty good.
Firstly though, I want to address easily the biggest strength this game has, which is it's cast. This game is way more diverse than any other anime-styled game I've ever played in my life. (Excluding a few fighting games but I don't really play those.) Characters in this game come from all kinds of cultures, and getting actors from those cultures to play those characters makes the cast feel very alive, and it almost feels like a celebration of different cultures in the 20th century.
Onto it's writing though. This game is very obtuse. Things that should feel incredibly important are never properly explained (seriously, how does the storm even work. If the Foundation has a humanist faction, does that mean humans can survive in the storm too? How are the foundation buildings immune to the storm in the first place???) which means that the story very much expects you to go with the flow and not worry about the large details. If you can manage that, the story has some pretty good moments. Another thing worth noting is that the pacing is extremely fast too. Scenes never feel like they drag out too long, and if anything I would love it if the scenes were a bit longer.
In spite of it's obtuseness, I think Reverse 1999 does manage to cover a few interesting topics however. Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 especially have some surprisingly potent political messages at times. Nothing groundbreaking, but hearing a sixteen year old cry upon finding out that people were killed by the government simply for being poor did make me quite emotional.
Onto the thing most people talk about when it comes to this game: the translation. It's rough. It's not unreadable, by any means, and the dialogue being roughly translated is something I can forgive due the circumstances of this game's production, (Originally written in Chinese for a Chinese audience with english audio for the sake of aesthetics rather than accessibility. As an American I completely respect using British and American culture for aesthetics.) however the unvoiced writing having major translation errors is a bit frustrating.
I think the characters speaking odd english at times is charming and not something inherently bad, though I do wish that the text on screen at least matched what the original chinese writing said, instead of just scribing what the english voice actors say. Hopefully with how much money this game has already seemed to make that can soon become a reality.
One last thing before I get into the gameplay: yeah the yuri in this game is good. That's what most people will probably play for and as an avid enjoyer of lgbt media I think Reverse 1999 is very solid. Having explicitly lesbian characters like Tennant and Matilda is really nice, and Medicine Pocket being agender is super cool (even if that's unrelated to the original point about yuri.)

Now onto the gameplay
As an (unfortunately) active gacha player, I think the main appeal of the genre is accumulating recourses to build a variety of characters and seeing your teams grow in real time.
As far as the combat side of things go, Reverse:1999 is pretty fun. There's fun synergys for team building, and the card mechanics add a bit of randomness to avoid making combat feel stale. However when it comes to recourse gathering, Reverse:1999 is bad. Very, very bad.
Think of every negative with Arknights recourse gathering, but make the stages slightly faster. In exchange, add an additional two tiers of tedium for no real reason.
Easily the biggest issue with this game is that i3 should fundamentally not exist. It is a bullshit recourse dump meant to make you have to play/pay more for what should take far less time. In Arknights, each promotion feels incredibly necessary for the characters. Promotion 1 and 2 both unlock a skill for each character, and promotion 2 especially unlocks a passive than is usually game-changing. It's a large recourse dump, but all steps of the process feel rewarding, especially getting new artwork upon reaching max promotion.
Reverse:1999 clearly did not learn the right lessons from Arknights, because the promotion (or insight) process is literally just the Arknights system but worse.
Instead of having 2 levels, you have 3, for literally no reason other than to make you waste more recourses. Like Arknights, unlocking insight gives your characters new passives, but the primary problem is that insight 2 passives are actually bullshit. Every single insight 2 passive, for every character in the game, is just a 5-10% stat bonus. It has no reason to exist, and all it does is make unlocking their incredibly important third passives much more annoying, as you have you effectively reach what would be e2 max level in Arknights in order to unlock a character's REAL potential in Reverse. Also it's obvious that i3 was an afterthought to earn them more money because you unlock a character's new costume after reaching i2. You don't even get a new promotion line after reaching i3, they literally just repeat the same line from i2. It's a pointless mechanic that has no purpose other than being player unfriendly.
And 4 star units not being able to reach i3 is straight up bullshit why did they do that.
Anyways, gameplay gripes aside, I quite like Reverse:1999. I'll hopefully be sticking to this game for a bit, so I'll probably update this review as more chapters come out (and hopefully as the translation improves.)
If you like games with diverse casts, yuri, and don't mind egregious recourse grinds, Reverse 1999 is a fun time.
Thanks for reading my unedited rant.

The combat is a step up from automatic gacha like FGO, Epic Seven and the awful SinoAlice, but that's not saying much, especially when you have games like Arknights and Limbus Company which have a far more engaging and interesting combat.

The concept is very interesting, but the story and writing is your usual gacha mumbo jumbo that assumes you're already very much familiar with the story you just about started reading.

The English dub with a british accent, which I understand is supposed to be a pretty big selling point about this game, is...underwhelming, to say the least. That is, it was until I listened to the character with a chinese accent and I just fucking lost it.

The artstyle and characters are amazing, though, and the best thing about the game for me. I mean, what other gacha lets you talking apple? A girl made out of tube TVs? PICKLES THE DOG? Give me the apple that talks like an english butler over Paimon any day.

Can't see myself playing too much of it, but it seems decent at least.

it may be sound weird . but i'm shocked how GREAT the game turn out . i jump to it ready to skip dialogues cause its gacha game . and most of them have bad story . but since the first 5 mins i got attached to it . what do i say the art style are GREATLY BEAUTIFUL and voice acting made me listen to every voice line i see . every character have it own accent ( Russian . french . Australian . uk .... etc though i wish there was Arabic character in there since they but every region i guess ) . i think i'm now in version 1.4 all i have to say is the game great . i will keep playing it

This game is incredibly charming, with its realistic representations of different cultures in the voice acting and languages spoken. The story also seemed very intriguing, I wonder how far they will take it
But... I couldn't get far in the story because the gameplay was just so stale. Even with auto mode, there are some fights where you have to manually control and those are just incredibly boring and luck-based. I don't feel any satisfaction from making big plays or anything. Man, I really wanted to love it though

No, hermano, que juego es este.

Lo vi en la play store y dije, por probar a ver.

Y oh dios hermano, que preciosidad.

El arte es lo puto mejor del juego. No habia visto un estilo tan bonito desde hace tiempo. Y no solo eso, los personajes estan todos muy interesantes, hasta los de pocas estrellas les dan algo de protagonismo, o en la historia principal o en eventos o historias paralelas.

Porque o si, las historias paralelas son historias cortas de personajes de 3 estrellas o asi, pero que te cuentan lore de ellos y cositas de otros.

Los eventos son increibles, de lo que ha habido. Algunos tienen una historia muy interesante, otros añaden personajes que estan increible y me cuestionan cosas, mas tener pequeños eventos dentro de los eventos, tienda, historias, etc.

Y la historia principal, hermano, quiero mas. La base es que el mundo no avanza de 1999, porque ocurren lluvias que retroceden el tiempo y causan alteraciones de todo tipo a la poblacion normal, no a los arcanistas, gente especial con poderes. No es exactamente magia, es como, raro. Se tiene que jugar para entenderlo.

No se, de momento esta siendo uno de mis juegos favoritos. Lo añadire a la lista cuando termine el año.