Some interesting things to talk about here, despite the trashy-ish core. A light background, I've read my share of gacha stories from start to termination (or however much it's caught up), done my dragalia raids, I know what people are kind of in this for are more long-term. But what's here is still... poor.

It's like weirdly easy, especially by projectmoon's standard, and i don't just mean in the "regular enemy encounters are just auto" but moreso that its ceiling, both mathematically and functionally is below-par compared to others in this genre. It's got a worse tactical ceiling than Arknights, it's got a very heavy lack of rng mitigation versus its contemporaries, and its toughest bosses including mirror, so far, are... really whatever? From a conceptual standpoint it's tough for me to infer what the hell a "good raid boss" would look like here without it becoming numerically oppressive.

But like, that's not what people stick to this franchise for, certainly not the ONLY reason for me. Ruina's gameplay fucks hard for me, and I love LobCorp's entire mechanical spectrum on paper, but what attaches me is that seamless weaving between that and an incredible all-encompassing narrative. The one here, so far, through three chapters, is very Porcelain. It dresses up some things with fancy nicely laden philosophy with hellish attitudes and anachronistic livelihood, but its character strands are way more vestigial to that main theme, culminating so far in, nothing. PJM's works are backloaded, sure, but they had more clear payoff than this, and they didn't sacrifice on its characters for the sake of The Long Run Soap Opera. Combined with the general messy affair that is gacha's narrative structure you get something that feels rushed as much as unfinished. And, again, sure, LobCorp and Ruina were both early access on release too, but they were way more orderly, far more hinting at what's to come. The pages by which each character in this game comes from is more interesting and expressive then they are in flesh. Seriously. My biggest takeaway is "go read what you get from googling this character". They also feel weirdly impersonal? Throughout all three chapters the weaksauce "deep-dive" done on each chosen character is more OBSERVED than Felt, or even discussed. It happens, and then things move on. There's a slight aura of internal reflection on what just happened but it's never actually considered. Not even by your meta stand-in Dante.

That expressive ~ludonarrative~ is also only barely reflected in its Check system, of which is much more divorced from how you're generally playing than actually something you feel metaphysically. To simplify that, with Ruina's cards you were putting on an air of someone's life that you dressed yourself up as, fighting abnormalities that were, mechanically, structured around their lore and story. Here, the fights barely have the latter but the CHECKS are binary, and they are the real difficulty in every fight so far. And what happens when you fail? You just roll back the clock, prepare with someone who can pass the check. But doing that isn't like ludonarratively the characters actualizing enough to survive the check as much as it feels like you just luck out. And this story isn't about 'luck.'

This leads me to a very very bizzare thought process. Who is Limbus FOR, exactly? Like I don't understand the business strategy. I thought initially that it was like, oh they bring in their devout fanbase and slowly turn them into buying past the grind. But... the past two games forced you to blame yourself for your mistakes and "buy-in" your time. These fans are more likely to grind their way through, not dump money for better pulls. And this gameplay isn't really that appealing from a complexity standpoint or tactical one, it's far too low a ceiling of decisions. Is the idea here simply to platform off people loving ProjectMoon's aesthetic sensibilities that they coast off that alone? I mean, I tried! But gods does that feel hollow. I don't understand why you couldn't just replay their other games or, read The Distortion Detective. Hell, Leviathan might be more worth the time.

I do get it though. They want to keep the lights on so they can fund LobCorp2. This game is certainly budgeted without seeming Too unpolished (at least, it performed well on my platform, i know it has had a terrible launch for most others), it's snappy and receptive, it is not too perfunctory, etc etc. Them keeping the cast to 12 specific main characters that they probably contracted in-house probably lowers their cost from hiring even more talent over time, but that's still a total bulk of money spent. VA isn't cheap over there. I wonder if it'll even be sustainable enough to have a genuine raid. Fuck if I know. It's a depressing tightrope of "I want PJM to not, die" and "this gacha is so terrible for them from a structural standpoint that it should, absolutely, be punished".

tl;dr basically weak-ass spinoff territory, if you want to rationalize it charitably. I'm going back to my not-quite-that-much-better-morally TCG mine.