Sword of Convallaria

Slower paced than most gacha games I've played(and that's many) but a respectable tactics game.

So, this is a gacha SRPG that I played for a bit at launch before dropping due to them only releasing characters from the part of the weapon triangle with no weaknesses which made me worry they were going to immediately ignore that part of the game. I was both right and wrong. They have had a fairly even distribution of characters throughout the triangle since, but their version of difficulty is often giving maps immunity to 80% of game mechanics and massive damage resistance. What actually pushed me over the edge and into burnout though is a combination two things. First is the pioneering expedition mode, [strike]200 maps[/strike] (edit: correction, it's 700 maps where you can choose the weapon triangle for the map after you have cleared 200 maps) divided into groups of 10 sequential maps where every enemy is vulnerable to the same part of the weapon triangle but extra deadly to all other alignments making it very grindy and which you have to push through to maximize the rate your characters gain strength. Second is a series of character releases that are so power crept as to invalidate most of the roster before them, a pattern they showed earlier where they would release one completely broken character from a faction and then realize that the power creep was too strong and back off for an arc. This time they have released several that are absurdly above the power curve and where I considered a good part of the power curve was already often resulting in me not having to adjust for what enemies did. With all that said, there are good parts to the game. If you play the older content with contemporary characters, there are decent levels and modes that I expect have more gameplay value, I just can't find the time or will to get to them around the normal grind maps and burning out on the game. Finally a bit of discussion of the port. There's a lot of weird stuff that is relatively easy to ignore here. The Steam install contains 3 versions of the game though most will only use one (each is an entirely unique copy of the game for each of the 3 release servers which are at different points in their release schedule). There's also a copy of all the localization for every language for every server. The game asks for Windows UAC access every time you launch it though I hear the version from their website doesn't. The game also heats up your computer a fair amount when run at 1440p 144hz which I wouldn't expect for a 2D title, which makes me think it may be a 3D engine with a 2D filter under the surface. The heat mostly disappears if you cap the game at 60hz, but you have to do this through your graphics driver since there is no way in game to cap the framerate. Some shortcuts are weird, like Esc backing out of menus but not opening the main menu when not in one. The scroll wheel also can't decide if it wants to be inverted or not for zoom and is uselessly slow at scrolling through menus. Finally, the exit game button is hidden a few layers deep in the main menu.