good game for the genre, devs clearly care about it (but not their international audience haha…) and it’s got clear ambitions with aesthetic and worldbuilding. definitely not what it used to be, however, and for me it lost most of the things that i liked most about the game.

one aspect is stories becoming far, far too long and unrealistic to complete in conjunction with how short event periods are (and how perfectly they tend to line up with exam/crunch seasons LOL). arknights clearly has a lot they want to say but sometimes they’re honestly just saying too much. pacing that might be fine in mandarin becomes clunky and long-winded in english, with 8 hour-long reads not even guaranteed to have >30 minutes of screentime for, sometimes, the titular characters of the event.

there’s more to say but i won’t get into it for now. it’s still a good game, requires some genuine thought to play and team-building and executing strategies efficiently is very satisfying. gacha rates are alright and there are many clear avenues for getting free gacha currency (i’m 4+ years in f2p and have 90% of the skins and characters i want). QOL is extremely good as well, international voice lines are fun and unique, character sorting by faction is fun and genuinely a really smart move for developing character attachments (i’d say they popularized it tbh), many good things remain in the game.

in general, not a bad choice for a gacha game, just lost some of the spark that made me play regularly for 3+ years. yostar is also pretty mid as an international publisher.

might come back to this review later.