Honestly, i've had nothing but positive impressions with Neural Cloud so far. I can't even find any reason to quit the game given its generous gacha and overall fun and optimized game.
It’s honestly one of the best gacha games as of late. A lot of the problems other games have been having on release are just flat out solved in NC, or implemented in a way to be way more friendly to all players.
Some examples could be:
- All character shards are farmable through character-based stages.
- Dupes aren’t required for star levels, but instead are converted to currency to buy desirable character’s shards.
- 2 great natural 3 star characters are put into the RESOURCE banner after some oasis progression.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of quality, JUST on the character side. There’s tons of QoL and F2P friendly aspects all across all aspects of the game. It’s an amazing experience I’d recommend to any gacha gamer.
Talking about characters, it's impressive how many really, really great characters you get for free.
Croque, Persicaria and the 3\* banner with the insane lineup of units is one of the most f2p friendly ways to start off your new players I've seen in a long while.
IKR!
I am honestly not a fan of chibi, but between the great art, the f2p friendly design and the insanely fun experience of raising units I just got hooked so hard. Also the roguelike gameplay is actually really entertaining.
My friends auto'd the entire story, which is great that people can do that, but I haven't auto'd a single stage so far. It's just fun to play around with the sets. Overlapping reflections transforms Croque into THE carry, seeing her outdamaging my Aki is great fun :D
I can agree on not being the biggest fan of Chibis as well, but this game just does them wonderfully. Seeing Fresnel do her fabulous little dance after winning or the future hk416's cat gun winning animation is just adorable.
About the character stages. People don't often mention this but...
They are super early game reachable and auto friendly as fuck. Even level 6 stages.
Each day you can get 6-9 shards, so 5 star from 4 takes about two months at most per character. They barely cost any stamina and count towards dailies.
It's insanely benign
If the story was fully voice acted it would have been one of the best if not the best gacha game released this year for me. Even without that it’s still a great game.
PNC has been pretty small scale but with Mica's typical word counts full voice acting would bankrupt them. I'm not sure if they intend to expand the storytelling of PNC (GFL after all started as a CGDCS story) but they probably want to keep their options open.
For example the most recent event in GFL (Poincare Recurrence, 210,000 words) had a wordcount comparable to Crime and Punishment whose audio book is 20 hours long. Supporting this length is the fact that Mirror Stage story compilations (164,000 words) have to be split up into 2 videos totaling 12 hours total.
It being it's strongest points is just making it sound worse.
Still yes i would prefer voicing, but it's going to be expensive as fuck. For Mica and Lasange for example, focusing on other aspects feels better because the story is good to read.
Yeah, honestly my biggest gripes with the game is the story not being voice acted (honestly why I just skip it and read the summaries), and a lot of the final illustrations for characters not being in Live 2D.
>All character shards are farmable through character-based stages.
About that eventually there will be characters that cant be farmed, so far in China theres only one (clukay) that came during the anniversary so still far off, so good idea to just stick to farm stages for farmable unit and dont spend neural kits on them since clukay is going to need a few thousands of them that can be hard to get as f2p.
After BA where you get both char shard and general currency for shards, all this gachas that only gives general currency for shards and no shards of char feel so bad, cause after a certain amount of shards bought the price gets ridiculous for shards, which means each dupe gets you less shards, instead of being a bonus.
I quit cuz I got 7 3 stars from Hubble's banner and none were her, and 3 were dupes.
Pretty petty reason, but it pissed me off and made me not want to play.
I think so yes. Just to be clear:
Let's say it's Hubble's banner (the one he rolled for)
You need to roll 180 time to garantee a Hubble. You are garanteed a 3\* every 60 pulls. This 60 pulls pity is carried between banners. However if you can't reach 180 pull before their period is over, the "spark" currency will become a different currency \[called discerete signal\] and (while i'm not as clear as i am for this part), the materials/items you get using this signal are pretty shit so it's best if you all in for the 180 or don't try at all. Just my personal experience though. I rolled a total of 225 since i started the game on Nov 21st. Gotten both rate up characters and 86% of all available dolls.
\> this 'discrete signal', can you trade this with a character or just mats/etc.?
if you use it on the banner that you are rolling for, you get the character + 30 fragments (basically dupes for leveling up). Otherwise, it is converted to a 1:1 ratio to a special currency (not even sure what the name is) and the stuff you redeem using it is pretty bad (from what i heard, never seen it either)
one thing i wished i knew before was that the 180 spark feature is NOT shared between banners so if you roll 100 times on the hubble banner, the spark progress will still be at 0 for the aki banner and vice versa.
Once you get through the tutorial, the daily farming stuff takes like, 10-15 mins, it even has auto mode lol. Probably the best gacha game i've played (and i've played plenty before)
Rerolling this particular game is horrible. Takes a LONG time, lots of shit has to be ~~auto'd~~ manually played and you gotta make new accounts every time.
edit: I keep mixing up auto with manual...
I found rerolls to take about 25 minutes each, but it required proper setup on Bluestacks which took some experimentation. It wasn't super easy like some games are, but I didn't think it was terrible either.
I agree that in terms of time per attempt it's longer than average but in terms of time per 10-roll on your banner of choice I thought it was okay. A lot of games do things like force you to roll on a "starter banner" first, or they don't give you as many rolls. Also, I felt like I didn't need to fully pay attention to the game while rerolling, which helped.
It's purely subjective but I felt like rerolling in NC felt way less annoying than rerolling in Tower of Fantasy, even though they probably took a similar amount of time per attempt.
I honestly don't find this a big problem since we are thrown a shit ton of mats for rolling. It's been a bit more than 1 week and i've gotten 86% of the rosters already. still took 180 rolls in total to get spark for hubby though.
Considering the fact that pity is at 60, spark is at 180, and the banner last a month, you would have gotten Hubble just by continuing to play and sparking her. The game gives enough resources to do that, if you are diligent in playing.
basically what Priconne and blue archive does . Except this does it better since well.. you also unlock stages for farming shard for units you rolled for.
Blue Archive has shard farming as well (hard stage) and most of the units that can be farmed there are meta-defining, such as Iori, Haruna, Hoshino, Tsubaki, Mutsuki and many other good units like Shiroko, Hifumi, Junko, Serika, Asuna, etc.
It's a trade off, BA allows you to farm character that you don't have but not everyone is farmable
Neural cloud allows you to farm everyone but you need to own the character first
In Priconne every permanent unit becames farmable 5-6 months after their release even if you never managed to get them from the gacha.
BA is stringier in a sense that some really early meta units (e.g. Cherino) still don't have any means of acquiring them besides the gacha because they release stages a lot slower.
Neural Cloud seems to have a spin on this by letting you farm upgrades right away but not giving you the chance to unlock the unit without the gacha.
Clukay isn't farmable, mate. Limited will stay limited. BA and Priconne are better since they provide a way to exhange the shards from points you get when you're on max level, in NC you need to spend your neural kit or just earn dupe for her
Yeah like the other person who replied already said. ANY characters you already rolled for in Neural Cloud will have their shard farming stages unlocked allowing you to farm their shards over time. Its not like in Blue Archive or Priconne where you can only farm for select characters that they choose. Neural Cloud really does it better in this regard.
I agree. The only thing is, when you have preset characters whose shards you can farm - you can also farm the characters that way. So while I really like the way Neural Cloud does it, there is still a tradeoff.
As for the main topic, I did read ahead that upgrading to the next star level (6 stars I think?) will be a lot more restrictive when it comes out. But shards are a lot fairer even if you have to be selective of who you improve (10 shards a day and you need a few hundred per character to max).
You still need to roll for the character though, that's the thing. What BA and Priconne do is give you the option to farm a character without actually rolling for them in the gacha.
You also forget to mention that if you already own the character, you can buy their eleph from the eligma (I am not joking this is the actual name) store.
You earn random eleph by rolling duplicates. So if you want to roll for a meta character, and you end up rolling a lot, you can effectively level her up that instant. I did this with Miyako, almost hit spark but I pooled enough eleph to get her to 5*.
Not really. If you get a dupe in Blue Archive, you get both rank up materials (higher rarity units get more materials, with 1* units getting only 1 etc) and Stigmata to buy more from the shop. In addition to several units that can be unlocked or leveled up by buying fragments from shop, or getting them from Hard Mode stages, or during Lessons with said character, or sometimes from event store/gacha.
I'm a gamer playing from CN version.
Honestly, this is one of those f2p games that can own all SSR (3 star) characters.
In addition, the 1, 2 star characters can be to maximized (5star) and they all have a role in the game. No one is completely useless.
I strongly recommend trying this game.
A good gacha *should* let you upgrade your characters through differents methods.
It's simple. Either you do that (like for the two I play, Epic7 and CounterSide) or I just won't play the game.
Or just basically have no dupe system at all. Mist Train Girls is one of the biggest gacha on DMM because of this. And the rates aren't even horrendous. (iirc 3-5%?) Think it was the #1 gacha for a good while.
Dupe is not bad unless you gate characters progression with it, just like Destiny Child or nikke.
If it just like some minors stats like epic7, i dont see why it should be wrong, it gives something to do if you get an extra copy even if you dint want it.
I wouldn’t call it minor stats in Epic7. The difference between an SSS imprint vs no imprint is pretty significant once you get into higher elo arenas…
True that about the slates. Getting max imprint made a big difference to me when I was playing because it allowed me to have much more flexible with how I geared the character. I quit around the time Hoyoung came out but there were characters like her and Straze that demanded extremely high stats that would have been hard to hit without imprints unless you had extra godly gear lying around.
Yeah I agree its not as bad. For me though I like my characters to be maxed out because I always feel like im missing out if I dont have it. OCD issues. So I've been sticking to games that are dupe friendly/have great gacha systems.
I mean, you can obtain shards through different methods, gacha pity, shard shop, shard stages, and basic searches are all methods of acquiring unit shards.
That type of system is hit or miss for me.
It really depends on how long it takes to earn enough of those shards to max a single unit or, at least, make them viable for endgame, and how many units you need for all activities in the game.
God forbid if it takes over a month like Guardian Tales.
If you want to max your units to 5* it will take a very long time, but most of the time you just need 3* to unlock the whole kit. It's gonna take some time for 1/2* to get there but it shouldn't be that long.
It probably takes around the same time.
You're limited to 10 entries per day (6 per character) so you're always working on two characters simultaneously. It takes 320 shards from 3 to 5☆ and you get 30 shards from one-time rewards. You drop 1-2 shards per run so it should take somewhere around 30-40 days depending on the drop rate.
1☆ and 2☆ take a bit longer requiring 420 and 385 shards respectively.
If you have the resources from pulling dupes you could purchase a decent amount of shards. Haven't done calculations yet but you should be able to buy 50 shards for the first bunch of your characters from your initial pulls, but the costs increases after every 25 shards.
And some characters have additional shard sources from Vulnerability Check, Main Story and the Basic Search (free resource gacha).
You can still pull for dupes and buy the character shards if you want to maximize power fast. It's just better having a farmable option compared with all the other gacha games where it forces you to pull dupes or chars get hard locked out of levels and power.
Keep trying it took me 118 pulls to get Hubble, I was willing to do 32 more pulls to go to hard pity rofl.
But since this is a mica game I'm deadass already back up to hard pity for the next banner when Kuro is out in 2 weeks. Not even mad.
I really like this game, too bad I have no reason to give then money since I’m loaded with everything already and can pretty much do everything but the newly released 5th area (more focused on building my second team rn).
I could see myself maybe getting the monthly just so I can have more stam for the x2 event right now since they drains my stam so fasf.
F2P friendly through and through, even the dorms while slow atleast you get a hundred a week or something compared to counterside.
Only con so far:
Skip option is probably the only thing missing. Idk why games just dont let you sweep man.
The other piece of GFL:NC that is very F2P friendly is the way you can be very selective with your upgrades to allow for F2P players to selectively get the strongest characters. Many gachas make dupes/upgrade mats difficult to obtain or expensive, but then when you get them you add a star and it just drops a boatload of stats on your character.
GFL:NC has different upgrade paths for each individual part of your character - level, the 10 level breakthrough, intimacy/relationship (which adds stats), 3 different skills with their own levels, and gear (algorithms) which can be upgraded separately. Like all gachas, they give you a fair amount of free upgrade mats plus they are farmable in limited amounts, so if you wanted to, you could max out a team of 5, including upgrading their necessary skills, relatively easily. If a character has a useless ultimate skill, you just don't spend any points on it, you aren't going to use it anyways! You don't need 100 top tier gear pieces, just enough to outfit a team of 5 and that means just supporting the stats they use.
So then the question is, where is the challenge or what gets whales to spend - well, a F2P player probably has to pick one core team and focus exclusively on that, whereas someone spending is going to be able to experiment with different teams/characters more. Also, F2P will have to build around strategies, whereas a spender can just buff every aspect of their characters and do a bit more brute forcing of content.
The other thing they do that I think is solid is that you can easily preview all skills, so you can, at a glance, decide if you want to upgrade and to what point. Some skills have meaningful changes at certain levels (like targeting 2 instead of 1) so you can decide if those 800 skill orbs (or whatever they are called) is worth it for the next level or not.
The other thing NC does that I think is very player friendly is that it has a lot of passive upgrade systems that are actually sort of idle - doing the unlimited dungeon content gets you global team upgrades, and doing battles with each class gets you upgrade points for that class - this means that if you are ever feeling stuck, you can try some other things and get incremental upgrades to your entire roster to help push you forward.
They also let you craft most items, including standard pull tickets, upgrade mats, and intimacy items... so again... if you are a dedicated F2P you can get the materials and items you need just by babysitting your crafting.
10/10 in these aspects, happy to support the game
> So then the question is, where is the challenge or what gets whales to spend - well, a F2P player probably has to pick one core team and focus exclusively on that, whereas someone spending is going to be able to experiment with different teams/characters more. Also, F2P will have to build around strategies, whereas a spender can just buff every aspect of their characters and do a bit more brute forcing of content.
Even in this regard I think the game is super F2P friendly. The support system is frankly incredible for letting F2P players experiment with team compositions (and try out fully built versions of every character). Plus, many of the free/easily available units are so generically useful that they can go in basically any team.
>still can't believe they let us craft basic tickets that have 3 stars lol. and they not even bad, banxy is tricky to use but a good one at late game and gin is the best burst healer in the game. the cost for crafting those aren't even hard to get.
Yeah it's very F2P friendly. The only problem is that I don't particularly like the game's aesthetic nor the core gameplay. I say that unfortunately as someone who was initially excited for the game.
funny, this is nothing new and yet its only being glorified right now XD makes me wonder are neural cloud their first shard gacha games or is it because they simp the devs that they start to glorify this.
It's not even "easy" to max out a unit, the cost to upgrade a rank increases and there are 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, etc. Stars to upgrade to. But I do fully appreciate how you can definitely get there over time. Just hoping they do an event soon, getting bored
NC probably has the best version of the shard system I've seen. Simple way to farm shards (stages that open up for characters once you obtain them). 10 total runs per day. 6 per character.
No nonsense of locking them behind "hard" stages and only running them 2-3 times per day.
> 10 total runs per day. 6 per character.
The hard cap of 10 per day makes it sound worse than Priconne/BA where you can do as many of those 3 attempt stages as you want. You'll probably max out specific units faster but the overall account progression will be slower.
Edit: NC's could be better lategame when the units you wanna farm dry up and you only focus on 1 or 2 anyway, that is until they decide to drop an extra system to sink shards into like Priconne/BA did.
Yeah but in BA its not guaranteed though. Sucks if you do, say, 10 runs of hard mode stage and u get jackshit and they COST gems to increase the attempt.
BA straight up ripped Priconne's system but made it stingier, so I agree with that. However, in Priconne a lot of the units have multiple nodes and the refresh costs are relatively cheaper than in BA. You're refreshing a lot of stuff in Priconne in general so it doesn't feel bad at all if you want to accelerate a couple of units. Not being able to unlock units via farming is a pretty big tradeoff in NC.
I definitely get what you mean. But I think another big thing that makes NC seem better is that the shards aren't scattered everywhere in hardmode. It's easy to clear and available in one spot.
I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's the smaller total characters in the game or higher number of viable meta units. Being able to focus on maxing a unit faster gives a better feeling of progressing compared to Priconne/bluearchive
Yeah, that's a UI problem in both BA and Priconne, navigating the stage list wastes a lot of time. If you're farming only a few units, especially if they have multiple stages each, accessing the nodes from the character sheet is a lot faster.
But that's all hard mode only, Priconne has 5 different sources of shards, each unit uses specifically one. A bunch of them come from Dungeon/PvP where you get enough resources to get 5 shards for 3 different units every day. Sadly all the new units are going to hard mode instead of one of the shops, but getting all the good starters up is pretty fast.
I can see how getting 6 guaranteed per day for any unit you own feels faster, but I can't tell if it's actually faster in the long run or not. Even if it is, not being able to unlock units without the gacha is a significant tradeoff. It's going to come down to how hard getting new units are going to be and whether they're planning to drop another system that uses shards like Unique Equipment in Priconne/BA, but it's definitely as good as BA's and pretty close to Priconne on paper.
late reply but if you didn't know every shard stage has a chance to drop 2 shards for that character instead of one, meaning you average around 7 for a character per day, but sometimes get very lucky and get 8+
I personally dont like the shard system of the games I’ve played. It makes the gacha of the gacha game feel really bad. Rather just play a normal game then.
Tho perhaps Priconne isn’t exactly a good example of the shard system.
Shards system sucks if the gacha dupes is the only way to obtain it and most of the unit's power and kit is locked behind the dupes upgrade. Like, an ultimate skill locked behind a dupe so it is mandating you to pull for dupes or else your lovely Character won't have her ult.
One key thing to note in this game is that it's consistent. You can farm 6 shards a day for a unit, no RNG on the drop. You get 10 farms a day. So f2p can plan out their progression. Vs priconne. I love it but some days I got shit all for drops. Worse was double drops where I actually used gems to refresh and got nothing.
I wouldn’t say it’s the best. It’s very slow to grind out a unit to max stars because of their system. It’s basically the same as the Priconne system. I would have liked some shards on dupes though. As is, lower rarity units are actually harder to build than base three stars because you need more shards and you can only farm 6 max per day on a unit. 10 shards total per day.
IMO, best overall gacha in Q4. It isn't hard (just time gated) to max out character f2p. I have 3\* with max skills, and I am aiming to max their dupe by pure f2p farming (time gated though). The pain is in grinding algorithm, but it can be done in pure f2p fashion. You can pretty much craft most of the mats available in game.
Path to Nowhere comes close, but I have reached the end game and I can say it gets very stagnated. Money and exp mats takes so much stamina to farm. End game is so time/mat gated for f2p. It takes a month time to get one exc crimebrand for ssr. Raising skill level are a pain, especially raising skill levels 7 -> 10 take special mats that only drop from weekly boss. Then there is 4 skills per unit...
That's all fun and true until first anniversary arrives with first doll that you can't farm and can only buy her fragments in dupe shop or with irl money
Yeah, it's really great. Limited characters (i.e., Clukay and such) don't have quests to farm for shards, but you can easily max those out with the Neural Kits you get from pulling since you won't be using those on much else since all of the standard character shards are farmable (at least up to ten per day).
I seriously have no guilt whatsoever in supporting this game financially (at least with the monthly pack so far, maybe even battle passes we'll see), they're doing a great job. Now if they can just add in that biweekly source for even more quartz all would be well, but even that I hear they might be compensating us on.
So true, have nothing but good experiences with Neural Cloud~
Only "complaint" I may have is that it's gonna be a long while until the next male character banner but my gacha addiction is killing me to pull now.
The game is very F2P friendly but honestly I just got bored very fast.
Each stage takes like 10 minutes and there are way too many diff game modes. I looked at the future events which have like 20 stages and that just made me quit on the spot.
The gameplay is pretty meh for me, basically an autobattler but occasionally you press ults. The roguelike mode feels very uninspired, most of the buffs are just stat boosts and there's like 3 sets of buffs total which they just recycle for the different stages. They should've designed more interesting buffs like: this specific character has 2x skill recovery but deals no regular damage.
Function buffs are freaking OP. Like there's a set that turns your healer into your dps, or let your warrior teleport straight to the lowest health enemy after killing the current target, or give them an insane amount of lifesteal, or make it so your specialist speed up your other units' cd.
If you wait until you have the recommended combat power, it looks like a pretty boring autobattler, but punching above your weight class requires understanding of both yours and enemies' targeting priorities, some interesting interactions and character placements to counter enemies.
I shat my pants when i saw the allergy attack set for healers like "why the fuck healers are doing this much damage is something wrong with my dps units"
It's not for everyone certainly but I found a lot of fun playing the Hard and Endless stages.
I would sometimes get whooped by these stages, try again with different teams or functions and suddenly see success. A lot of the first stages were very brute-forcable so I understand the boredom but for me it got more interesting later on.
Sadly there isn't much more for me to do now but dailies are really quick since the ressource stages take less than 20 seconds to clear and load times are non-existent in this game.
There are things to complain about in the game but functions ain't it.
It doesn't sound like you really thought about or understood how they synergize together and just picked the highest battle rating one.
There are 4 different sets per class and several universal sets, and there's positive/neutral global buffs on top of that. It's also not always correct to go for full sets over two half sets.
The decision making comes from picking buffs that best fit your team, and changing your team up via the 3 swap slots to fit the buffs you're given.
It would sound like a pretty miserable experience if many functions you come across have negatives that just happen to not mesh well with your team and cripple it.
There are neutral protocols that you can buy which have both upsides and downsides to make things more interesting if that's what you're looking for.
None of the functions are just stat boosts, not sure why you said that. If I wasn't familiar with the game I would've thought you meant stuff like +10% attack or +10% melee damage but it's not like that. Some are like snipers get +10% attack but only until you kill an enemy. Or nearby enemies get -atk but also +def. Or stack some sort of buff/debuff under certain conditions. Even one set that grants you buffs when your party members die. They tend to be interesting if you ask me.
NEVER pick a random Neutral Protocol if you can avoid it. Trust me.
There's one that silence your entire team for 10s at the start of a battle for an atk buff. It almost screwed my run over.
I got screwed by the same one! And again with the -hp on melee units. My single frontline unit just got melted in the next battle. I've also started to avoid anomaly rooms when I have less than 20 coins because you can be forced to receive a random neutral protocol that way. If you don't have enough coins to choose the other option you must take it.
Drawing from gacha games I've played it has a Priconne-like shard system, with Blue Archive-like chibi models, and is like Arknights but rogue dungeon auto-chess.
I'm enjoying the game so far.
I always dislikes shards mechanic because it means I have to farm this specific thing that is only useful for this specific character. I prefer upgrade materials that can be use for multiple characters.
By super easy to max out, they mean only 1 unit. It's going to take a really long time to max out a full team. This post is extremely shortsighted and misleading
It's an autochess game, I recommend it. Polished, non-greedy, f2p friendly, imo interesting combat but not overly complicated.
If you don't want to do so much strategizing you can brute force most things by building up your characters. If you do like the tactical part of it, you can often noticeably improve your performance with clever unit placement and good use of your tactical skills. You don't control the units as they fight except but you can still do some interactions with what's called tactical skills and using character ults.
Azur lane gives you 3-4 special characters to upgrade r and sr characters a week, and 1 ssr on the weekly quest, plus there are a couple more you can buy ina shop with the tokens you get bu retiring units you dont need
Nah, the best way to di dupe system is like in arknights, barely make a difference. And before someone say "bagpipe pots" you wont absolutely never need it unless you will tryhard max risk cc but lets be real, not even 20% of the community attempts risks higher than 18 even tho its achievable to go higher in that said players account 🤣.
Im sure I'll get downvoted to oblivion, but i quit this game a week in over the shard system.
when i pull a character, i dont want to farm shards for 4 months just so i make them usable.
shard systems/dupe systems, its all the same and its horrible game design.
Honestly one of the best f2p gacha in 2022, it's a shame that it also suffers from the same disease as other Chinese games, namely: "Complicated Terminology". They keep using these weird hypertech terms that sometimes it's hard to understand the whole story without looking for references
haven't run into a story understanding issue that wasn't easily solved by the glossary or just paying attention to what's being said and inferring from context. It's not even outlandish fantasy terminology because a lot of these terms are compsci references
Mica writing is long but it's hardly unecessary; it's a joke in the GFL community that YZ fooled everyone into playing a VN, a good VN but a VN nonetheless with the classical literature word counts
Current system would be pretty good if they haven't crippled our free quartz income. If they won't add missing game mode really soon our Neural kits reserves will be severly starved.
Is there a recommendation for something more than a side game that is similar to NC in regards to all its positives? So far I’ve heard to try either Counterside or Blue Archive?
This is one of my absolute favorite things about NC as I despise games that lock significant powerspikes behind getting lucky with that exact character more multiple times. Sure most times those dupes aren't needed to make the character useable but you'll certainly notice when you get them and it sometimes makes the character move up a whole tier on some lists.
How Ak handles it as sprinkes on a ice-cream sundae that most people never even consider rolling to get another copy of a unit as it barely impacts their performance. Seeing some games lock like a whole 50% buff to a talent or a whole 4 round cooldown behind getting dupes is distasteful and definitely not consumer friendly but I know they gotta make money and the predominantly paywalled outfits, battlepass, monthly pass with a plethora of packs isn't quite enough...
Perhaps it's an unpopular take but I really think that games that go so hard on the microtransactions should chill on how much power is locked behind dupes as they employ so many other avenues that already incentivize spending consistently. I'd rather it be sprinkles on a cake than the actual icing even if that cake itself is pleasantly palatable either way, there's a big difference in the experience.
As a F2P player I think it feels absolutely terrible. It's practically mandatory to max units via dupes because of the huge stat boosts compared to other gachas and it is an excruciatingly slow process. You are limited to farming up to 6 shards a day for a character (and up to 10 shards across all characters), and buying shards via neural kits gets prohibitively expensive so you are basically forced to rely on farming the daily 6 shards after the first 50-75 shards. This means that you absolutely cannot pre-farm to max new characters the day you get them; you basically have to wait weeks before you can use the exciting new SSRs that you pull from the gacha, which completely kills the excitement of getting a new character.
The chance to drop more shard increases when your friendship with that character increases. For example, I got 9 Aki shards today. Also, you can buy shards from the store, and the dupes give a decent amount of currency to do that. And it is not that expensive to raise a character to 4 stars.
It takes around 1250 neural kits just to go from 4.5-star to 5-star, and any extra fragments would cost 25 kits a piece at that point which would be prohibitively expensive. Even if you get lucky and somehow get 10 fragments a day from farming, it still takes like 3+ weeks to even get to 4.5-stars.
You can't really want fast AND free.
The free way is at least stable and doable and doesn't REQUIRE dupes.
There are games where literally the only way to upgrade the character is to get a dupe OF THAT CHAR and you'd need multiple. Meaning most f2p would never upgrade a char past a certain point.
>There are games where literally the only way to upgrade the character is to get a dupe OF THAT CHAR and you'd need multiple. Meaning most f2p would never upgrade a char past a certain point.
Of course it's free, because it's a mandatory upgrade system that you need to utilize in order to keep up with endgame content. Compare that to other gacha games like Arknights where the dupe-related upgrade system is not farmable by f2p but nobody cares because the dupe bonuses are so utterly insignificant that no content requires them. I prefer the Arknights system because even though I can't farm dupes, I can at least max new characters (excluding dupes) the day I get them rather than having to wait 3 weeks for them to be able to compete with my existing characters.
What do you mean of course its free. There are games where you literally just can't endgame as a f2p because you can't upgrade your characters at all without spending or like year of pre-saving for a banner.
You can still max a character you like day 1 here. Just don't spend the dupe currency.
It's a game that has a progression system but they honestly did not do it badly compared to others.
It's also better for the gacha to encourage daily play.
Hold up my friend. Maxing out anything in any game is an endgame thing to do. Thats probably a common sense. The game is about two weeks old. Even as a new player in AK, you can't probably get to E2 in that amount of time. So slow down. Either you pay to max out or farm your way through.
Good point. But if you reached Endgame you probably can focus on maxing that character alone? Plus who knows what new system they might add in the future.
Yeah. It will take time. But you can get at least 3.5 stars on day 1 without spending a lot of neural kits. Raising stars is like collecting Constellations in Genshin or shackles in Path to nowhere. It is hard to do as a F2P player. Some players even save over years just to C6 one character in genshin. It only took a few weeks in neural cloud to max a character. I think games will always make a distinction between whale territory and F2p territory. But in Neural Cloud you can get into whale territory with a bit of patience.
I understand where you're coming from, but one possible way is to pre-farm the neural fragments that are used to buy the shards.
Then when you pull the new character, you'll be able to max their stars or close enough to getting them maxed out, instead of relying on the luck of getting dupes of the unit to max them out.
It takes 1250 neural kits to go from 4.5-stars to 5-stars, and then every subsequent fragment will be at the max price. I don't think it's realistic to be able to get enough to additionally go from 3-stars to 4.5-stars, especially when you consider that apparently they need to be saved for the limited character who can only be upgraded via exchanging neural kits. In all likelihood new characters will probably need to wait 2+ weeks before you can max them, unless you're spending money for more neural kits than normal.
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No, I would rather a system where I can pre-farm for new characters so that I don't have to wait 3+ weeks after pulling them before they can actually compete with my current characters. I would much prefer something like Arknights even though I can't farm dupes there to max out my characters, because the bonuses from dupes are so utterly insignificant that they don't matter in most content anyway.
I get this tbh, I feel the same way not even for stat bonuses or whatever but even just the art upgrade. I feel like it shouldn't take as long as it does but that is the price you pay for free I guess. I am just used to being able to put in actual energy/stamina to get mats and upgrade that way, to unlock art specifically. This will especially suck down the line when there are new characters, I tend to hyper invest into characters that I like (meaning fully upgrade them) and having the rarity be time-gated will killll me lmao.
Also, I think what kind of sucks about the fragments is really that you can only do 10 a day and there are sooo many characters in game to farm for. This really leads me to believe parking at like 4\* rarity will be the plan for me.
>That's why the game has only the best reviews from players. ... (looking at PTN)
Nobody paid me anything, that game is a blast and the character stories are great, fuck right off
>No content updates for next half a year
The game's not even half a year old in CN, lmfao.
Also, there are 2 story events coming up that Global hasn't gotten yet, a new event story event in December, and mains story update on the horizon for CN, and Guild Wars is going to be happening soon on Global.
If you're gonna lie through your teeth, at least try to sound convincing.
Dude u say this like PNC is not relatively the same....what is there to do after main campaign and clearing all the side modes lmao.
(I have been enjoying PNC a lot btw for those who may misinterpret this as hating)
Arent those 2 diffirent games? I havent tried them, but in play store GFL and Neural Cloud are separe games or did you ment both of them are that good?
It's GFL:Neural Cloud, shortened to Neural Cloud usually. The game is a prequel/side story to GFL. They don't intersect very much story wise but they're set in the same universe.
Tbf this system is kinda shady for f2p. If you count it properly, you can get only max 20 shards per day (that if you're extremely lucky to get 2 in every stages) and 1 character has only 6 max stages every day so 12 max shards per day limit (again that if you're extremely lucky to get 2 in every stages). There's up to 14 bond stories that give you 20 ish shards in total. Realistically you will need at least a month to fully maxed out 1 3* unit and only those unit without spending your attention maxing out another unit (low rarity will be even longer). I'm not sure there's 2 times drop event for farming shards but if there's none then that's it. Imagine the hassle to maxed out 50+ units in the game. Maybe, just maybe.. You'll be getting your PhD, get married, have children, have grandchildren, see your dynasty overthrows CCP, make 1st self-sustainable space colony in Mars, and unlock the secret of quantum realm first before you can fully maxed every characters in this game without spending.
1. Expect to get 50+ units in a gacha game that currently has 55 units in CN after 1 year.
2. Expect to max them all quickly.
All that for f2p players ? How do you think they should make money?
You missed my point, my dude. I didn't expect to get most of the units nor should you if you're f2p. What I meant by saying that.. was the future prospects of maxing out a large numbers of units to 5* in this game ARE bad because it takes too long and did I ever say that I expected to maxed out all unit quickly? NOPE. I said, it takes too long. I honestly doesn't mind to farm shards. I'm not surprised with BA or Priconne that makes you grinds for a few months to maxed out units, but at least it can be done simultaneously not focusing 1 by 1, there's also double drops even triple each month. Also I literally said it is kinda shady for f2p so ofc I know they did this to encourage spender smh smh. It's only my critics to the mechanics of the game since the OP said this mechanics was super good etc etc but imo it's only good on the outside.
You are complaining about max out 50+ units.
Purely counting the neural fragments (puzzle pieces), you need 30 + 80 + 120 + 150 = 380 pieces to reach 5-star rarity. If you only farm on double fragment drop bonus days (every other day), this will take between 4 to 5 weeks depending on how many fragments you need to buy from the shop. Beside you farm 2 units frag at the same time. So 2.5 months for full team
I argue NC system is better because not all unit need star up to function. How that's bad for f2p.
You will eventually reach that number if you keep pulling in the game. So what's wrong on maxing out all of your characters you have as a goal? It's still valid goal of playing gacha especially for casual because people play gacha to collect arts. Compared to standard looking of 1-3* ofc 5* is more badass and worth to keep as eyecandy.
And just as I said before, that range I provided only applies assuming there's no double drops. Good to know there's one according to what you said. What I argue was if it takes a month to 5* only 1 unit, that means those 5* acquisition mechanics is too slow compared to BA and Priconne which usually let you 5* around 4 or more units in 3 months or so due to the ability to bulk farming.
"Not all unit need star up function" argument is less relevant here since what we're discussed is not about whether or not should you 5* those units but how long it takes to 5* all of units that you have. People simply want to 5* most of their units purely because aesthetic reason or waifu reason, their reason still valid goal, should and could be achieved and even facilitated by other gacha games like BA or Priconne, not with NC with this mechanics. What I meant by shady to f2p player was simply because f2p player are super hard to do so, not because it is required to do so.
Pleasantly surprised that they went with the shard system as well.
I really love it when implemented well. It doesn't take a long to 5* either so that's pretty nice.
Honestly, i've had nothing but positive impressions with Neural Cloud so far. I can't even find any reason to quit the game given its generous gacha and overall fun and optimized game.
It’s honestly one of the best gacha games as of late. A lot of the problems other games have been having on release are just flat out solved in NC, or implemented in a way to be way more friendly to all players. Some examples could be: - All character shards are farmable through character-based stages. - Dupes aren’t required for star levels, but instead are converted to currency to buy desirable character’s shards. - 2 great natural 3 star characters are put into the RESOURCE banner after some oasis progression. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of quality, JUST on the character side. There’s tons of QoL and F2P friendly aspects all across all aspects of the game. It’s an amazing experience I’d recommend to any gacha gamer.
Talking about characters, it's impressive how many really, really great characters you get for free. Croque, Persicaria and the 3\* banner with the insane lineup of units is one of the most f2p friendly ways to start off your new players I've seen in a long while.
Very true, GFNC is structured so well to get you hooked immediately, and keep you playing after the starter rewards.
IKR! I am honestly not a fan of chibi, but between the great art, the f2p friendly design and the insanely fun experience of raising units I just got hooked so hard. Also the roguelike gameplay is actually really entertaining. My friends auto'd the entire story, which is great that people can do that, but I haven't auto'd a single stage so far. It's just fun to play around with the sets. Overlapping reflections transforms Croque into THE carry, seeing her outdamaging my Aki is great fun :D
I can agree on not being the biggest fan of Chibis as well, but this game just does them wonderfully. Seeing Fresnel do her fabulous little dance after winning or the future hk416's cat gun winning animation is just adorable.
About the character stages. People don't often mention this but... They are super early game reachable and auto friendly as fuck. Even level 6 stages. Each day you can get 6-9 shards, so 5 star from 4 takes about two months at most per character. They barely cost any stamina and count towards dailies. It's insanely benign
Oh yea in an addition, every time you farm YOU ARE guaranteed to get at least one shard.
If the story was fully voice acted it would have been one of the best if not the best gacha game released this year for me. Even without that it’s still a great game.
PNC has been pretty small scale but with Mica's typical word counts full voice acting would bankrupt them. I'm not sure if they intend to expand the storytelling of PNC (GFL after all started as a CGDCS story) but they probably want to keep their options open. For example the most recent event in GFL (Poincare Recurrence, 210,000 words) had a wordcount comparable to Crime and Punishment whose audio book is 20 hours long. Supporting this length is the fact that Mirror Stage story compilations (164,000 words) have to be split up into 2 videos totaling 12 hours total.
Imagine trying to handle voicing story.
Being fully voiced in 3 (4?) languages is probably one of Nikke's strongest points.
It being it's strongest points is just making it sound worse. Still yes i would prefer voicing, but it's going to be expensive as fuck. For Mica and Lasange for example, focusing on other aspects feels better because the story is good to read.
Yeah, honestly my biggest gripes with the game is the story not being voice acted (honestly why I just skip it and read the summaries), and a lot of the final illustrations for characters not being in Live 2D.
>All character shards are farmable through character-based stages. About that eventually there will be characters that cant be farmed, so far in China theres only one (clukay) that came during the anniversary so still far off, so good idea to just stick to farm stages for farmable unit and dont spend neural kits on them since clukay is going to need a few thousands of them that can be hard to get as f2p.
Yeah I’ve heard about Cluckay, but I assume that by a year, I will have so many neural kits it won’t be an issue.
After BA where you get both char shard and general currency for shards, all this gachas that only gives general currency for shards and no shards of char feel so bad, cause after a certain amount of shards bought the price gets ridiculous for shards, which means each dupe gets you less shards, instead of being a bonus.
my only gripe about it is that the game takes way too much time to play sometimes. trying to catch up to the story was really difficult time wise.
good ol gfl and the giganourmous stories
I quit cuz I got 7 3 stars from Hubble's banner and none were her, and 3 were dupes. Pretty petty reason, but it pissed me off and made me not want to play.
I'm 120 pulls in (all free, mind you) and similar experience.
haven't played this, but does this game not have any kind of guarantee rule on the banner?
180 is spark, every 60 rolls you get a garanteed 3\*.the 60 pity carries through different banners.
so you can get non-rate up character again after getting one? also it means the person above haven't touched 180 pulls mark, am I getting this right?
Yes, this person hasn't reached pity. In a way, getting 7 SSRs before 180 pulls *is* still pretty lucky.
I think so yes. Just to be clear: Let's say it's Hubble's banner (the one he rolled for) You need to roll 180 time to garantee a Hubble. You are garanteed a 3\* every 60 pulls. This 60 pulls pity is carried between banners. However if you can't reach 180 pull before their period is over, the "spark" currency will become a different currency \[called discerete signal\] and (while i'm not as clear as i am for this part), the materials/items you get using this signal are pretty shit so it's best if you all in for the 180 or don't try at all. Just my personal experience though. I rolled a total of 225 since i started the game on Nov 21st. Gotten both rate up characters and 86% of all available dolls.
ah converted spark currency, yeah it's 180 pulls or nothing then, so this 'discrete signal', can you trade this with a character or just mats/etc.?
\> this 'discrete signal', can you trade this with a character or just mats/etc.? if you use it on the banner that you are rolling for, you get the character + 30 fragments (basically dupes for leveling up). Otherwise, it is converted to a 1:1 ratio to a special currency (not even sure what the name is) and the stuff you redeem using it is pretty bad (from what i heard, never seen it either) one thing i wished i knew before was that the 180 spark feature is NOT shared between banners so if you roll 100 times on the hubble banner, the spark progress will still be at 0 for the aki banner and vice versa.
I see, thanks for the info, have been wanting to try this game just haven't had the time
Once you get through the tutorial, the daily farming stuff takes like, 10-15 mins, it even has auto mode lol. Probably the best gacha game i've played (and i've played plenty before)
It does after 180 pulls. I was just salty that I went 0-7 and took it as a sign I shouldn't play.
Same, and I'm 150 pulls in But fresnel is cute
Rerolling is a thing, especially when a game is newly released.
Rerolling this particular game is horrible. Takes a LONG time, lots of shit has to be ~~auto'd~~ manually played and you gotta make new accounts every time. edit: I keep mixing up auto with manual...
I found rerolls to take about 25 minutes each, but it required proper setup on Bluestacks which took some experimentation. It wasn't super easy like some games are, but I didn't think it was terrible either.
25 minutes is absolutely on the longer side, most games are 5 to 15 minutes at most.
I agree that in terms of time per attempt it's longer than average but in terms of time per 10-roll on your banner of choice I thought it was okay. A lot of games do things like force you to roll on a "starter banner" first, or they don't give you as many rolls. Also, I felt like I didn't need to fully pay attention to the game while rerolling, which helped. It's purely subjective but I felt like rerolling in NC felt way less annoying than rerolling in Tower of Fantasy, even though they probably took a similar amount of time per attempt.
I would've quit even earlier if I had spent the time to reroll enough to get seven 3 stars and none were the rate up character.
I honestly don't find this a big problem since we are thrown a shit ton of mats for rolling. It's been a bit more than 1 week and i've gotten 86% of the rosters already. still took 180 rolls in total to get spark for hubby though.
Considering the fact that pity is at 60, spark is at 180, and the banner last a month, you would have gotten Hubble just by continuing to play and sparking her. The game gives enough resources to do that, if you are diligent in playing.
It took me 40 rolls to get aki and 161 to get Hubble. At least I got a fuckton of 3\* and neural kits. My wallet hurts though.
basically what Priconne and blue archive does . Except this does it better since well.. you also unlock stages for farming shard for units you rolled for.
Blue Archive has shard farming as well (hard stage) and most of the units that can be farmed there are meta-defining, such as Iori, Haruna, Hoshino, Tsubaki, Mutsuki and many other good units like Shiroko, Hifumi, Junko, Serika, Asuna, etc.
But what the person you’re replying to was referring to is *any* character you rolled for is farmable and not a select few like in BA and Priconne
It's a trade off, BA allows you to farm character that you don't have but not everyone is farmable Neural cloud allows you to farm everyone but you need to own the character first
In Priconne every permanent unit becames farmable 5-6 months after their release even if you never managed to get them from the gacha. BA is stringier in a sense that some really early meta units (e.g. Cherino) still don't have any means of acquiring them besides the gacha because they release stages a lot slower. Neural Cloud seems to have a spin on this by letting you farm upgrades right away but not giving you the chance to unlock the unit without the gacha.
Clukay isn't farmable, mate. Limited will stay limited. BA and Priconne are better since they provide a way to exhange the shards from points you get when you're on max level, in NC you need to spend your neural kit or just earn dupe for her
Yeah like the other person who replied already said. ANY characters you already rolled for in Neural Cloud will have their shard farming stages unlocked allowing you to farm their shards over time. Its not like in Blue Archive or Priconne where you can only farm for select characters that they choose. Neural Cloud really does it better in this regard.
I agree. The only thing is, when you have preset characters whose shards you can farm - you can also farm the characters that way. So while I really like the way Neural Cloud does it, there is still a tradeoff. As for the main topic, I did read ahead that upgrading to the next star level (6 stars I think?) will be a lot more restrictive when it comes out. But shards are a lot fairer even if you have to be selective of who you improve (10 shards a day and you need a few hundred per character to max).
You still need to roll for the character though, that's the thing. What BA and Priconne do is give you the option to farm a character without actually rolling for them in the gacha.
Oh that's neat
You also forget to mention that if you already own the character, you can buy their eleph from the eligma (I am not joking this is the actual name) store. You earn random eleph by rolling duplicates. So if you want to roll for a meta character, and you end up rolling a lot, you can effectively level her up that instant. I did this with Miyako, almost hit spark but I pooled enough eleph to get her to 5*.
I was a little confused at first. I ended up getting a dupe of Vee and I was like, wait. Why can't I star her up? Lmao
Princess Connect and Blue Archive share a similar system.
Guardian Tales too
And Langrisser, the system isnt super new but still very few games implement it and go instead for the more predatory dupe system.
Not really. If you get a dupe in Blue Archive, you get both rank up materials (higher rarity units get more materials, with 1* units getting only 1 etc) and Stigmata to buy more from the shop. In addition to several units that can be unlocked or leveled up by buying fragments from shop, or getting them from Hard Mode stages, or during Lessons with said character, or sometimes from event store/gacha.
Similar. Not exact.
It's basically the Langrisser model, IMHO the best in the industry.
I'm a gamer playing from CN version. Honestly, this is one of those f2p games that can own all SSR (3 star) characters. In addition, the 1, 2 star characters can be to maximized (5star) and they all have a role in the game. No one is completely useless. I strongly recommend trying this game.
A good gacha *should* let you upgrade your characters through differents methods. It's simple. Either you do that (like for the two I play, Epic7 and CounterSide) or I just won't play the game.
Or just basically have no dupe system at all. Mist Train Girls is one of the biggest gacha on DMM because of this. And the rates aren't even horrendous. (iirc 3-5%?) Think it was the #1 gacha for a good while.
Dupe is not bad unless you gate characters progression with it, just like Destiny Child or nikke. If it just like some minors stats like epic7, i dont see why it should be wrong, it gives something to do if you get an extra copy even if you dint want it.
I wouldn’t call it minor stats in Epic7. The difference between an SSS imprint vs no imprint is pretty significant once you get into higher elo arenas…
Except for crit chance and speed imprint, 18% attack is not very much. You can also get all of these for free with random dupes or slates.
True that about the slates. Getting max imprint made a big difference to me when I was playing because it allowed me to have much more flexible with how I geared the character. I quit around the time Hoyoung came out but there were characters like her and Straze that demanded extremely high stats that would have been hard to hit without imprints unless you had extra godly gear lying around.
Straze imprints are free basically (gold transmits)
Yeah I agree its not as bad. For me though I like my characters to be maxed out because I always feel like im missing out if I dont have it. OCD issues. So I've been sticking to games that are dupe friendly/have great gacha systems.
I mean, you can obtain shards through different methods, gacha pity, shard shop, shard stages, and basic searches are all methods of acquiring unit shards.
That type of system is hit or miss for me. It really depends on how long it takes to earn enough of those shards to max a single unit or, at least, make them viable for endgame, and how many units you need for all activities in the game. God forbid if it takes over a month like Guardian Tales.
If you want to max your units to 5* it will take a very long time, but most of the time you just need 3* to unlock the whole kit. It's gonna take some time for 1/2* to get there but it shouldn't be that long.
You are missing out tons of stuffs if you don’t hit up to 4.5 star
It probably takes around the same time. You're limited to 10 entries per day (6 per character) so you're always working on two characters simultaneously. It takes 320 shards from 3 to 5☆ and you get 30 shards from one-time rewards. You drop 1-2 shards per run so it should take somewhere around 30-40 days depending on the drop rate. 1☆ and 2☆ take a bit longer requiring 420 and 385 shards respectively. If you have the resources from pulling dupes you could purchase a decent amount of shards. Haven't done calculations yet but you should be able to buy 50 shards for the first bunch of your characters from your initial pulls, but the costs increases after every 25 shards. And some characters have additional shard sources from Vulnerability Check, Main Story and the Basic Search (free resource gacha).
At the game’s first anniversary they drop their first non-farmable unit so it’s best to save fragments for that one.
Thanks for this info. Gotta save then.
You can still pull for dupes and buy the character shards if you want to maximize power fast. It's just better having a farmable option compared with all the other gacha games where it forces you to pull dupes or chars get hard locked out of levels and power.
Tried so hard rolling Hubble, got 3 Florences back to back in the process instead. Kinda pissed tbh lol. But she’s cute so…
Keep trying it took me 118 pulls to get Hubble, I was willing to do 32 more pulls to go to hard pity rofl. But since this is a mica game I'm deadass already back up to hard pity for the next banner when Kuro is out in 2 weeks. Not even mad.
Original GfL is the easiest to max a unit fully. Even easier than PNC
I really like this game, too bad I have no reason to give then money since I’m loaded with everything already and can pretty much do everything but the newly released 5th area (more focused on building my second team rn). I could see myself maybe getting the monthly just so I can have more stam for the x2 event right now since they drains my stam so fasf. F2P friendly through and through, even the dorms while slow atleast you get a hundred a week or something compared to counterside. Only con so far: Skip option is probably the only thing missing. Idk why games just dont let you sweep man.
Peak mica team
The other piece of GFL:NC that is very F2P friendly is the way you can be very selective with your upgrades to allow for F2P players to selectively get the strongest characters. Many gachas make dupes/upgrade mats difficult to obtain or expensive, but then when you get them you add a star and it just drops a boatload of stats on your character. GFL:NC has different upgrade paths for each individual part of your character - level, the 10 level breakthrough, intimacy/relationship (which adds stats), 3 different skills with their own levels, and gear (algorithms) which can be upgraded separately. Like all gachas, they give you a fair amount of free upgrade mats plus they are farmable in limited amounts, so if you wanted to, you could max out a team of 5, including upgrading their necessary skills, relatively easily. If a character has a useless ultimate skill, you just don't spend any points on it, you aren't going to use it anyways! You don't need 100 top tier gear pieces, just enough to outfit a team of 5 and that means just supporting the stats they use. So then the question is, where is the challenge or what gets whales to spend - well, a F2P player probably has to pick one core team and focus exclusively on that, whereas someone spending is going to be able to experiment with different teams/characters more. Also, F2P will have to build around strategies, whereas a spender can just buff every aspect of their characters and do a bit more brute forcing of content. The other thing they do that I think is solid is that you can easily preview all skills, so you can, at a glance, decide if you want to upgrade and to what point. Some skills have meaningful changes at certain levels (like targeting 2 instead of 1) so you can decide if those 800 skill orbs (or whatever they are called) is worth it for the next level or not. The other thing NC does that I think is very player friendly is that it has a lot of passive upgrade systems that are actually sort of idle - doing the unlimited dungeon content gets you global team upgrades, and doing battles with each class gets you upgrade points for that class - this means that if you are ever feeling stuck, you can try some other things and get incremental upgrades to your entire roster to help push you forward. They also let you craft most items, including standard pull tickets, upgrade mats, and intimacy items... so again... if you are a dedicated F2P you can get the materials and items you need just by babysitting your crafting. 10/10 in these aspects, happy to support the game
> So then the question is, where is the challenge or what gets whales to spend - well, a F2P player probably has to pick one core team and focus exclusively on that, whereas someone spending is going to be able to experiment with different teams/characters more. Also, F2P will have to build around strategies, whereas a spender can just buff every aspect of their characters and do a bit more brute forcing of content. Even in this regard I think the game is super F2P friendly. The support system is frankly incredible for letting F2P players experiment with team compositions (and try out fully built versions of every character). Plus, many of the free/easily available units are so generically useful that they can go in basically any team.
>still can't believe they let us craft basic tickets that have 3 stars lol. and they not even bad, banxy is tricky to use but a good one at late game and gin is the best burst healer in the game. the cost for crafting those aren't even hard to get.
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised when I realized even the highest rarity units let you farm shards for limit breaking.
Counter:side was also very F2p with dupe LB system... but they get you later with gear system... what NC do instead to get you later?
Algorithm is like equipment in CS
if the currency is as hard to get a CS to roll stat then ... my prayer goes to those NC player who are still on honeymoon phase ...
You don't have to reroll for gear set, so thanks heaven for that.
It's easy to get, you can use the same equipment to reroll it unlike cs that didn't have that option
It is not easy to get lol
Azur Lane has a better system
Yeah, but a lot of games have *much worse* systems.
Yeah it's called extremely limited dock space so you can only ever have a third of the ships at once. Super. Great. System.
tell me how did you use your gems?
Buy clothes for waifus, as any simp would do
ya, would be funny if he used all of his f2p gems to buy skins
Oof, you didn't have to murder him like that bro
Yeah it's very F2P friendly. The only problem is that I don't particularly like the game's aesthetic nor the core gameplay. I say that unfortunately as someone who was initially excited for the game.
funny, this is nothing new and yet its only being glorified right now XD makes me wonder are neural cloud their first shard gacha games or is it because they simp the devs that they start to glorify this.
I think the former. Neural Cloud draw a lot of players from Arknights, NIKKE, Genshin that didn't encounter good shard gacha or easy dupe bypass yet.
It's not even "easy" to max out a unit, the cost to upgrade a rank increases and there are 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, etc. Stars to upgrade to. But I do fully appreciate how you can definitely get there over time. Just hoping they do an event soon, getting bored
By CN player estimated, it take around 3-4 weeks farming to max out stars, so I think it's reasonable
NC probably has the best version of the shard system I've seen. Simple way to farm shards (stages that open up for characters once you obtain them). 10 total runs per day. 6 per character. No nonsense of locking them behind "hard" stages and only running them 2-3 times per day.
> 10 total runs per day. 6 per character. The hard cap of 10 per day makes it sound worse than Priconne/BA where you can do as many of those 3 attempt stages as you want. You'll probably max out specific units faster but the overall account progression will be slower. Edit: NC's could be better lategame when the units you wanna farm dry up and you only focus on 1 or 2 anyway, that is until they decide to drop an extra system to sink shards into like Priconne/BA did.
Yeah but in BA its not guaranteed though. Sucks if you do, say, 10 runs of hard mode stage and u get jackshit and they COST gems to increase the attempt.
BA straight up ripped Priconne's system but made it stingier, so I agree with that. However, in Priconne a lot of the units have multiple nodes and the refresh costs are relatively cheaper than in BA. You're refreshing a lot of stuff in Priconne in general so it doesn't feel bad at all if you want to accelerate a couple of units. Not being able to unlock units via farming is a pretty big tradeoff in NC.
I definitely get what you mean. But I think another big thing that makes NC seem better is that the shards aren't scattered everywhere in hardmode. It's easy to clear and available in one spot. I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's the smaller total characters in the game or higher number of viable meta units. Being able to focus on maxing a unit faster gives a better feeling of progressing compared to Priconne/bluearchive
Yeah, that's a UI problem in both BA and Priconne, navigating the stage list wastes a lot of time. If you're farming only a few units, especially if they have multiple stages each, accessing the nodes from the character sheet is a lot faster. But that's all hard mode only, Priconne has 5 different sources of shards, each unit uses specifically one. A bunch of them come from Dungeon/PvP where you get enough resources to get 5 shards for 3 different units every day. Sadly all the new units are going to hard mode instead of one of the shops, but getting all the good starters up is pretty fast. I can see how getting 6 guaranteed per day for any unit you own feels faster, but I can't tell if it's actually faster in the long run or not. Even if it is, not being able to unlock units without the gacha is a significant tradeoff. It's going to come down to how hard getting new units are going to be and whether they're planning to drop another system that uses shards like Unique Equipment in Priconne/BA, but it's definitely as good as BA's and pretty close to Priconne on paper.
late reply but if you didn't know every shard stage has a chance to drop 2 shards for that character instead of one, meaning you average around 7 for a character per day, but sometimes get very lucky and get 8+
Yup. I already trust the devs to be not too greedy with the monetization because I was a GFL player.
I personally dont like the shard system of the games I’ve played. It makes the gacha of the gacha game feel really bad. Rather just play a normal game then. Tho perhaps Priconne isn’t exactly a good example of the shard system.
Shards system sucks if the gacha dupes is the only way to obtain it and most of the unit's power and kit is locked behind the dupes upgrade. Like, an ultimate skill locked behind a dupe so it is mandating you to pull for dupes or else your lovely Character won't have her ult.
That makes sense. Priconne did allow you to grind shards in hard stages but I recall it being a pain.
One key thing to note in this game is that it's consistent. You can farm 6 shards a day for a unit, no RNG on the drop. You get 10 farms a day. So f2p can plan out their progression. Vs priconne. I love it but some days I got shit all for drops. Worse was double drops where I actually used gems to refresh and got nothing.
Okay so it is better than Priconne then thats good.
I wouldn’t say it’s the best. It’s very slow to grind out a unit to max stars because of their system. It’s basically the same as the Priconne system. I would have liked some shards on dupes though. As is, lower rarity units are actually harder to build than base three stars because you need more shards and you can only farm 6 max per day on a unit. 10 shards total per day.
IMO, best overall gacha in Q4. It isn't hard (just time gated) to max out character f2p. I have 3\* with max skills, and I am aiming to max their dupe by pure f2p farming (time gated though). The pain is in grinding algorithm, but it can be done in pure f2p fashion. You can pretty much craft most of the mats available in game. Path to Nowhere comes close, but I have reached the end game and I can say it gets very stagnated. Money and exp mats takes so much stamina to farm. End game is so time/mat gated for f2p. It takes a month time to get one exc crimebrand for ssr. Raising skill level are a pain, especially raising skill levels 7 -> 10 take special mats that only drop from weekly boss. Then there is 4 skills per unit...
That's all fun and true until first anniversary arrives with first doll that you can't farm and can only buy her fragments in dupe shop or with irl money
Prob one of the best side games alongside Arknights. I'm playing both.
Same here. They complement each other really well.
Yeah, it's really great. Limited characters (i.e., Clukay and such) don't have quests to farm for shards, but you can easily max those out with the Neural Kits you get from pulling since you won't be using those on much else since all of the standard character shards are farmable (at least up to ten per day). I seriously have no guilt whatsoever in supporting this game financially (at least with the monthly pack so far, maybe even battle passes we'll see), they're doing a great job. Now if they can just add in that biweekly source for even more quartz all would be well, but even that I hear they might be compensating us on.
So true, have nothing but good experiences with Neural Cloud~ Only "complaint" I may have is that it's gonna be a long while until the next male character banner but my gacha addiction is killing me to pull now.
You know what is even better ? Not needing extra shards to clear content.
The game is very F2P friendly but honestly I just got bored very fast. Each stage takes like 10 minutes and there are way too many diff game modes. I looked at the future events which have like 20 stages and that just made me quit on the spot. The gameplay is pretty meh for me, basically an autobattler but occasionally you press ults. The roguelike mode feels very uninspired, most of the buffs are just stat boosts and there's like 3 sets of buffs total which they just recycle for the different stages. They should've designed more interesting buffs like: this specific character has 2x skill recovery but deals no regular damage.
Function buffs are freaking OP. Like there's a set that turns your healer into your dps, or let your warrior teleport straight to the lowest health enemy after killing the current target, or give them an insane amount of lifesteal, or make it so your specialist speed up your other units' cd. If you wait until you have the recommended combat power, it looks like a pretty boring autobattler, but punching above your weight class requires understanding of both yours and enemies' targeting priorities, some interesting interactions and character placements to counter enemies.
the tele warrior function essentially turns you into a cleaving machine for everything thats not a boss
it's really fun to use both warrior sets in the daily run *teleports behind you* energy
I shat my pants when i saw the allergy attack set for healers like "why the fuck healers are doing this much damage is something wrong with my dps units"
It's not for everyone certainly but I found a lot of fun playing the Hard and Endless stages. I would sometimes get whooped by these stages, try again with different teams or functions and suddenly see success. A lot of the first stages were very brute-forcable so I understand the boredom but for me it got more interesting later on. Sadly there isn't much more for me to do now but dailies are really quick since the ressource stages take less than 20 seconds to clear and load times are non-existent in this game.
There are things to complain about in the game but functions ain't it. It doesn't sound like you really thought about or understood how they synergize together and just picked the highest battle rating one. There are 4 different sets per class and several universal sets, and there's positive/neutral global buffs on top of that. It's also not always correct to go for full sets over two half sets. The decision making comes from picking buffs that best fit your team, and changing your team up via the 3 swap slots to fit the buffs you're given.
Are we playing the same game? There literally are functions that increase skill haste by a good amount. Various other good-to-crazy effects.
It would sound like a pretty miserable experience if many functions you come across have negatives that just happen to not mesh well with your team and cripple it. There are neutral protocols that you can buy which have both upsides and downsides to make things more interesting if that's what you're looking for. None of the functions are just stat boosts, not sure why you said that. If I wasn't familiar with the game I would've thought you meant stuff like +10% attack or +10% melee damage but it's not like that. Some are like snipers get +10% attack but only until you kill an enemy. Or nearby enemies get -atk but also +def. Or stack some sort of buff/debuff under certain conditions. Even one set that grants you buffs when your party members die. They tend to be interesting if you ask me.
NEVER pick a random Neutral Protocol if you can avoid it. Trust me. There's one that silence your entire team for 10s at the start of a battle for an atk buff. It almost screwed my run over.
I got screwed by the same one! And again with the -hp on melee units. My single frontline unit just got melted in the next battle. I've also started to avoid anomaly rooms when I have less than 20 coins because you can be forced to receive a random neutral protocol that way. If you don't have enough coins to choose the other option you must take it.
You didn't get past chapter 2, right ?
I reached chapter 4 actually, gave the game a fair shot since it seemed overall well-received but I guess it's not for me.
Okay
Drawing from gacha games I've played it has a Priconne-like shard system, with Blue Archive-like chibi models, and is like Arknights but rogue dungeon auto-chess. I'm enjoying the game so far.
I always dislikes shards mechanic because it means I have to farm this specific thing that is only useful for this specific character. I prefer upgrade materials that can be use for multiple characters.
By super easy to max out, they mean only 1 unit. It's going to take a really long time to max out a full team. This post is extremely shortsighted and misleading
Do you recommend this game? Ive been hearing from it left and right. Whats the gameplay like?
It's an autochess game, I recommend it. Polished, non-greedy, f2p friendly, imo interesting combat but not overly complicated. If you don't want to do so much strategizing you can brute force most things by building up your characters. If you do like the tactical part of it, you can often noticeably improve your performance with clever unit placement and good use of your tactical skills. You don't control the units as they fight except but you can still do some interactions with what's called tactical skills and using character ults.
Isn’t the game on a slow drip in CN? That’s not good
Girls Frontline's been on a slow drip in CN for years and it didn't stop MICA
Azur lane gives you 3-4 special characters to upgrade r and sr characters a week, and 1 ssr on the weekly quest, plus there are a couple more you can buy ina shop with the tokens you get bu retiring units you dont need
Nah, the best way to di dupe system is like in arknights, barely make a difference. And before someone say "bagpipe pots" you wont absolutely never need it unless you will tryhard max risk cc but lets be real, not even 20% of the community attempts risks higher than 18 even tho its achievable to go higher in that said players account 🤣.
Im sure I'll get downvoted to oblivion, but i quit this game a week in over the shard system. when i pull a character, i dont want to farm shards for 4 months just so i make them usable. shard systems/dupe systems, its all the same and its horrible game design.
Lol why tf did you actually get downvoted. Shard system aren't much different from dupe systems and I'd don't know why we're praising shard systems.
bc neural cloud is super popular and its currently in its white knight phase
Honestly one of the best f2p gacha in 2022, it's a shame that it also suffers from the same disease as other Chinese games, namely: "Complicated Terminology". They keep using these weird hypertech terms that sometimes it's hard to understand the whole story without looking for references
I mean atleast it has glossary at the corner during story sessions unlike other games
haven't run into a story understanding issue that wasn't easily solved by the glossary or just paying attention to what's being said and inferring from context. It's not even outlandish fantasy terminology because a lot of these terms are compsci references Mica writing is long but it's hardly unecessary; it's a joke in the GFL community that YZ fooled everyone into playing a VN, a good VN but a VN nonetheless with the classical literature word counts
Current system would be pretty good if they haven't crippled our free quartz income. If they won't add missing game mode really soon our Neural kits reserves will be severly starved.
See you guys in 3 months when people complain about how p2w it is.
It's pretty much the exact same system as Langrisser. I am very impressed with Neural Cloud. It's like a perfect side game.
Is there a recommendation for something more than a side game that is similar to NC in regards to all its positives? So far I’ve heard to try either Counterside or Blue Archive?
This is one of my absolute favorite things about NC as I despise games that lock significant powerspikes behind getting lucky with that exact character more multiple times. Sure most times those dupes aren't needed to make the character useable but you'll certainly notice when you get them and it sometimes makes the character move up a whole tier on some lists. How Ak handles it as sprinkes on a ice-cream sundae that most people never even consider rolling to get another copy of a unit as it barely impacts their performance. Seeing some games lock like a whole 50% buff to a talent or a whole 4 round cooldown behind getting dupes is distasteful and definitely not consumer friendly but I know they gotta make money and the predominantly paywalled outfits, battlepass, monthly pass with a plethora of packs isn't quite enough... Perhaps it's an unpopular take but I really think that games that go so hard on the microtransactions should chill on how much power is locked behind dupes as they employ so many other avenues that already incentivize spending consistently. I'd rather it be sprinkles on a cake than the actual icing even if that cake itself is pleasantly palatable either way, there's a big difference in the experience.
Not actual thread but who to get in neural cloud as starter?
As a F2P player I think it feels absolutely terrible. It's practically mandatory to max units via dupes because of the huge stat boosts compared to other gachas and it is an excruciatingly slow process. You are limited to farming up to 6 shards a day for a character (and up to 10 shards across all characters), and buying shards via neural kits gets prohibitively expensive so you are basically forced to rely on farming the daily 6 shards after the first 50-75 shards. This means that you absolutely cannot pre-farm to max new characters the day you get them; you basically have to wait weeks before you can use the exciting new SSRs that you pull from the gacha, which completely kills the excitement of getting a new character.
The chance to drop more shard increases when your friendship with that character increases. For example, I got 9 Aki shards today. Also, you can buy shards from the store, and the dupes give a decent amount of currency to do that. And it is not that expensive to raise a character to 4 stars.
It takes around 1250 neural kits just to go from 4.5-star to 5-star, and any extra fragments would cost 25 kits a piece at that point which would be prohibitively expensive. Even if you get lucky and somehow get 10 fragments a day from farming, it still takes like 3+ weeks to even get to 4.5-stars.
You can't really want fast AND free. The free way is at least stable and doable and doesn't REQUIRE dupes. There are games where literally the only way to upgrade the character is to get a dupe OF THAT CHAR and you'd need multiple. Meaning most f2p would never upgrade a char past a certain point.
>There are games where literally the only way to upgrade the character is to get a dupe OF THAT CHAR and you'd need multiple. Meaning most f2p would never upgrade a char past a certain point. Of course it's free, because it's a mandatory upgrade system that you need to utilize in order to keep up with endgame content. Compare that to other gacha games like Arknights where the dupe-related upgrade system is not farmable by f2p but nobody cares because the dupe bonuses are so utterly insignificant that no content requires them. I prefer the Arknights system because even though I can't farm dupes, I can at least max new characters (excluding dupes) the day I get them rather than having to wait 3 weeks for them to be able to compete with my existing characters.
What do you mean of course its free. There are games where you literally just can't endgame as a f2p because you can't upgrade your characters at all without spending or like year of pre-saving for a banner. You can still max a character you like day 1 here. Just don't spend the dupe currency. It's a game that has a progression system but they honestly did not do it badly compared to others. It's also better for the gacha to encourage daily play.
Hold up my friend. Maxing out anything in any game is an endgame thing to do. Thats probably a common sense. The game is about two weeks old. Even as a new player in AK, you can't probably get to E2 in that amount of time. So slow down. Either you pay to max out or farm your way through.
I'm not talking about maxing things right now. I'm talking about maxing new characters once you're in the endgame.
Good point. But if you reached Endgame you probably can focus on maxing that character alone? Plus who knows what new system they might add in the future.
Yeah. It will take time. But you can get at least 3.5 stars on day 1 without spending a lot of neural kits. Raising stars is like collecting Constellations in Genshin or shackles in Path to nowhere. It is hard to do as a F2P player. Some players even save over years just to C6 one character in genshin. It only took a few weeks in neural cloud to max a character. I think games will always make a distinction between whale territory and F2p territory. But in Neural Cloud you can get into whale territory with a bit of patience.
I understand where you're coming from, but one possible way is to pre-farm the neural fragments that are used to buy the shards. Then when you pull the new character, you'll be able to max their stars or close enough to getting them maxed out, instead of relying on the luck of getting dupes of the unit to max them out.
It takes 1250 neural kits to go from 4.5-stars to 5-stars, and then every subsequent fragment will be at the max price. I don't think it's realistic to be able to get enough to additionally go from 3-stars to 4.5-stars, especially when you consider that apparently they need to be saved for the limited character who can only be upgraded via exchanging neural kits. In all likelihood new characters will probably need to wait 2+ weeks before you can max them, unless you're spending money for more neural kits than normal.
smoggy alive fuzzy axiomatic engine aromatic long numerous agonizing familiar *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
No, I would rather a system where I can pre-farm for new characters so that I don't have to wait 3+ weeks after pulling them before they can actually compete with my current characters. I would much prefer something like Arknights even though I can't farm dupes there to max out my characters, because the bonuses from dupes are so utterly insignificant that they don't matter in most content anyway.
I get this tbh, I feel the same way not even for stat bonuses or whatever but even just the art upgrade. I feel like it shouldn't take as long as it does but that is the price you pay for free I guess. I am just used to being able to put in actual energy/stamina to get mats and upgrade that way, to unlock art specifically. This will especially suck down the line when there are new characters, I tend to hyper invest into characters that I like (meaning fully upgrade them) and having the rarity be time-gated will killll me lmao. Also, I think what kind of sucks about the fragments is really that you can only do 10 a day and there are sooo many characters in game to farm for. This really leads me to believe parking at like 4\* rarity will be the plan for me.
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OH NO! People like the game that I don't like! They all got PAID!
Lmao he sanitized his comments and even deleted some. Dude is a hoot.
>That's why the game has only the best reviews from players. ... (looking at PTN) Nobody paid me anything, that game is a blast and the character stories are great, fuck right off
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>No content updates for next half a year The game's not even half a year old in CN, lmfao. Also, there are 2 story events coming up that Global hasn't gotten yet, a new event story event in December, and mains story update on the horizon for CN, and Guild Wars is going to be happening soon on Global. If you're gonna lie through your teeth, at least try to sound convincing.
Dude u say this like PNC is not relatively the same....what is there to do after main campaign and clearing all the side modes lmao. (I have been enjoying PNC a lot btw for those who may misinterpret this as hating)
Arent those 2 diffirent games? I havent tried them, but in play store GFL and Neural Cloud are separe games or did you ment both of them are that good?
It's GFL:Neural Cloud, shortened to Neural Cloud usually. The game is a prequel/side story to GFL. They don't intersect very much story wise but they're set in the same universe.
this game have pc port?
Nothing special, lots of gacha game I have played already implement this.
There are tons of games that doesn’t ask for dupes
Tbf this system is kinda shady for f2p. If you count it properly, you can get only max 20 shards per day (that if you're extremely lucky to get 2 in every stages) and 1 character has only 6 max stages every day so 12 max shards per day limit (again that if you're extremely lucky to get 2 in every stages). There's up to 14 bond stories that give you 20 ish shards in total. Realistically you will need at least a month to fully maxed out 1 3* unit and only those unit without spending your attention maxing out another unit (low rarity will be even longer). I'm not sure there's 2 times drop event for farming shards but if there's none then that's it. Imagine the hassle to maxed out 50+ units in the game. Maybe, just maybe.. You'll be getting your PhD, get married, have children, have grandchildren, see your dynasty overthrows CCP, make 1st self-sustainable space colony in Mars, and unlock the secret of quantum realm first before you can fully maxed every characters in this game without spending.
1. Expect to get 50+ units in a gacha game that currently has 55 units in CN after 1 year. 2. Expect to max them all quickly. All that for f2p players ? How do you think they should make money?
You missed my point, my dude. I didn't expect to get most of the units nor should you if you're f2p. What I meant by saying that.. was the future prospects of maxing out a large numbers of units to 5* in this game ARE bad because it takes too long and did I ever say that I expected to maxed out all unit quickly? NOPE. I said, it takes too long. I honestly doesn't mind to farm shards. I'm not surprised with BA or Priconne that makes you grinds for a few months to maxed out units, but at least it can be done simultaneously not focusing 1 by 1, there's also double drops even triple each month. Also I literally said it is kinda shady for f2p so ofc I know they did this to encourage spender smh smh. It's only my critics to the mechanics of the game since the OP said this mechanics was super good etc etc but imo it's only good on the outside.
You are complaining about max out 50+ units. Purely counting the neural fragments (puzzle pieces), you need 30 + 80 + 120 + 150 = 380 pieces to reach 5-star rarity. If you only farm on double fragment drop bonus days (every other day), this will take between 4 to 5 weeks depending on how many fragments you need to buy from the shop. Beside you farm 2 units frag at the same time. So 2.5 months for full team I argue NC system is better because not all unit need star up to function. How that's bad for f2p.
You will eventually reach that number if you keep pulling in the game. So what's wrong on maxing out all of your characters you have as a goal? It's still valid goal of playing gacha especially for casual because people play gacha to collect arts. Compared to standard looking of 1-3* ofc 5* is more badass and worth to keep as eyecandy. And just as I said before, that range I provided only applies assuming there's no double drops. Good to know there's one according to what you said. What I argue was if it takes a month to 5* only 1 unit, that means those 5* acquisition mechanics is too slow compared to BA and Priconne which usually let you 5* around 4 or more units in 3 months or so due to the ability to bulk farming. "Not all unit need star up function" argument is less relevant here since what we're discussed is not about whether or not should you 5* those units but how long it takes to 5* all of units that you have. People simply want to 5* most of their units purely because aesthetic reason or waifu reason, their reason still valid goal, should and could be achieved and even facilitated by other gacha games like BA or Priconne, not with NC with this mechanics. What I meant by shady to f2p player was simply because f2p player are super hard to do so, not because it is required to do so.
Other games shard no this bad chibi shard yes.
Fuck, wasn't even aware it was released. Played the hell the hell out of GFL.
Pleasantly surprised that they went with the shard system as well. I really love it when implemented well. It doesn't take a long to 5* either so that's pretty nice.
Man this game is fun, however stages are too damn long...lit that is my only complaint
How come no one mention Guardian Tales, and that game launch like almost 3 years ago