I decided to download and give this a shot one day after English Open Beta started. I first heard about this game when the FGO subreddit had a post about the new ship Massachusetts, who looks a lot like Altera and is super hot. Let's face it, this is a waifu collector and the visual designs of all the girls are really varied and impressive so that was enough for me to take the first step. I've been playing for about a week now and I can identify pretty much all of the USS/HMS (American/British) ships by portrait because they are surprisingly distinctive without even using half of them. Just starting to see some of the IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy) ships now as they are starting to drop. Pull rate on SSRs is 7% so it's not a bad rate at all and 1 year into the game's original release, doesn't seem like there's any hardcore powercreep yet.
The actual gameplay is neat enough for a mobile game. Set a party of up to 6 ships, 3 backline ships and 3 frontline/vanguard ships. You primarily control the movement of the vanguard ships with your left thumb to dodge bullets and use the right thumb to launch torpedos, battleship barrages, and carrier bombing runs. Pretty much sidescrolling bullet hell with it not being THAT punishing getting hit and not needing to worry about your own guns since they autofire. The depth of the game is surprisingly high with the equipment to the point that consulting tierlists for the equipment seems mandatory and ships slightly less so. It might scare someone off initially and I didn't want to spend the time theorycrafting, but having the lists and going backwards from there to learning how the game works has made it much more bearable.
The real positive I'm getting from this game besides the ship-fus is the passive leveling and resource gathering via commissions. It's a brilliant idea to have a 9 hour long commission that earns some of your ships a huge chunk of experience and materials. Set it before you go to sleep, wake up to see that it is done, and set the next one before going to work. Have it be done by the time you are back home and more or less got the time to actively play. And boy, there's just enough to do in a day to appease both the hardcore gamer and enough variety to not make it too boring. Resources are given out generously enough as daily rewards and being a whale probably doesn't net that huge of an advantage because many of the best equipment have to be grinded for. Gacha currency is primarily for skins and wedding rings (oh boy oh boy oh boy!)
Finally, the game being released in English and there being a world chat which spams notifications of anyone rolling an SSR is nice to have. There's a real community there and plenty of newcomers who are experiencing the joy of a new toy.
My name in the game is Kirowind if anyone wants to add me. Along with the obligatory San Diegos, the only other SSRs I have so far are Enterprise and Hood. To my fortune at least, they are considered Tier 0 even in the up to date servers and they certainly do feel like it when I use them. At 7 days in, I'm loving it and will see how long it keeps my interest to play alongside FGO. Also, not being gated and compelled to play because of time based AP like FGO is also keeping my enjoyment high. Accumulating Oil that is used up to run a map is in my opinion a superior system in every way and allows me to play this primarily at night while I sneak in play time during the day to get through FGO. I'm considering buying gacha currency once just for the first time purchase bonus (you get an SR unit and some mats) and because it can cover initial desire for skins and not be as "haphazardly wasted" as a resource for rolling.
