So I should start with a flashback to March of 2021, when everyone in my home state was still dealing with pandemic lockdowns. We had some of the more severe restrictions in the nation, and everyone was pretty much dealing with it in their own ways.
My method of choice was watching a whole lot of videos of people walking around Japan on YouTube, since going to Japan is one of my favorite things to do and it was completely impossible at the time.
Anyway. In one of these videos, I saw a video billboard advertising a mobile game that promised a combination of cute girls + kemomomimi + guns, and I quite naturally went immediately to google to look it up. This was, if timestamps can be believed, on March 28th.
Sadly, I immediately found out that it was a Japan-only game. Well, it was written by a Korean team so I’m certain it was also available in Korea, but I didn’t know that at the time.
Eventually it got an English release, on November 8th of the same year. I downloaded it day one, eager to find out whether it was as cool as the brief glimpse of a trailer playing on an Akihabara billboard had made it seem.
And, I’ll be quite honest, I did not like it. There were, yes, cute girls with guns and some sort of weird thing going on where they all attended different schools in a city made up entirely of schools and administered by a student council government and who also regularly engage in shooting each other a lot because they all have possibly-mystical halos that prevented them sustaining any real injury. You’re assigned to this city as sort of a combination teacher/troubleshooter thing.
Your character is not a cute girl with a gun (it’s unclear what your sex is, and your strongest weapon is a tablet computer) and does not have one of these possibly-mystical halo things so you are infinitely more delicate and vulnerable than any of the students you are teaching, but that wasn’t really a turn off. I mean, it’s not exactly rare to see someone’s highly specific fetish turned into a video game.
The gameplay, however, did not exactly excite me. While you set up teams of six characters to clear missions, you don’t really have any sort of direct control over any of your team members. Gameplay boils down to watching them run from left to right through some admittedly very charming levels, automatically shooting and taking cover as they go. You do get to control when they use special attacks, which adds some strategy to it, and I understand that high level Blue Archive play involves a LOT of micromanagement of this, but it did not hook me.
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It is cute though.
At the end of every level, you get a victory screen featuring your chosen characters, though this again was kind of disappointing because I’m not a huge fan of super-deformed characters and there is a world of difference between the gorgeous cel art used in the story and the character models used in gameplay.
So I kinda mostly dropped it after the prologue. I left it on my phone and tablet, and occasionally I would log into it and run through a couple of the game’s missions, but I never started the story campaign so I was very limited in the things I could do. It was fun enough just to watch bars fill up, but not fun enough for me to go beyond that.
Then the pandemic ended, and Japan eventually opened up to tourism, and my wife and I spent a week touring cultural sites and a week binge shopping in anime shops.
And, yeah, there was a fair bit of Blue Archive merch even though I didn’t recognize most of the characters on display. I did buy a mouse pad with a fox girl on it.
The mouse pad / desk mat in question.
So that could have been the end of it. However. Around about the time I came home from our trip, I was reading news about the impending December 2023 Comic Market and how it was organized by content, and I was moderately stunned to find that it had two entire display halls devoted exclusively to Blue Archive doujin merch.
Like, obviously this game was A Thing and I probably should be taking a second look at it.
So, early November I booted it back up and started trying to figure out how to get further into it.
One of the first things I discovered when looking up resources was that there was an infamous wall, roughly halfway through the main story, where people tended to get hard stuck for days or weeks at a time while they leveled up characters so they could get past the mission.
This didn’t sound fun, and I definitely didn’t want to be getting into a story and then hit something like this, so I looked up the level requirements for the mission. It’s a mission with a recommended level of 57, and people report that you can get past it as low as level 40 if you have the right characters and the right strategy, but I am a somewhat brute-force type of guy and decided I would just level up to 60 before even starting the story. This is possible because going through the tutorial missions when you first start the game opens up a few ways to spend energy, and spending energy converts directly to experience points.
So I did that for three months, and finally started the main story, at level 61, on February 17th.
As a side note, one interesting thing that Blue Archive does is that it gives up a way to sort of save up for characters by running hard mode missions. So, even if the gacha system is being stingy with your waifu of choice you can eventually just buy her outright.
It took me until February 3rd, but I eventually added the same wolf girl who had gotten me to fall down this particular rabbit hole back in 2021 to my roster.
Anyway. I found some guides on reddit saying, without a hint of guile, that you could easily finish the entire story at level 50 so I figured that being level 60 meant I could just coast through the whole thing and skip the grind. Thankfully I did not actually stop grinding. More on that in a bit.
Tonight – March 19th, so that’s a month after starting – I finished the main story.
I’m not sure I can possibly describe the proper insanity I’ve been put through in the last month, but I am certain that it was worth it. Yes, even though for like three months I was loading a game for 5-10 minutes every day only to burn energy and turn it into XP without really ever playing it. It was Just That Good.
In the fine tradition of JRPGs, you start off doing menial tasks for your grandfather’s farm and then eventually kill God, though in this case the “menial tasks” involve trying to help the last students of a bankrupt academy avoid eviction or helping a school club avoid being disbanded and the “killing God” is, well, actually it’s not entirely far off from that.
Like 95% of this involves reading and staring at mostly static images with a very minimal bit of animation to them. Occasionally you actually do some of the run left-to-right sort of combat missions but the vast majority of the game is a literacy check.
They are, however, very PRETTY static images. Like, both the art and music in this are way too good for the price of admission.
You get your crazy assassin maids.
You get your tiny girls casually carrying ship-mounted railguns
You get your cute girls driving very fast away from explosions
…and your poster child for I Can Fix Her. No. No, you can’t. She’s Best Girl tho.
And this screenshot which I am including for reasons that I hope are obvious.
Basically you spent like 40 or 50 hours getting to know a huge cast of characters at different schools, and then the Final Story is another 10-hour long story where everyone you’ve met comes together to solve an earth-shattering crisis and, well, kill God.
OK technically you do not kill God. You’ll just have to play it to find out. And I profoundly recommend playing this game, even if you don’t basically grind for three months before you even start. I would in fact really recommend NOT grinding for three months before you even start because that would be insane.
HOWEVER.
Let’s talk about walls and why they are so obnoxious in this game.
I quickly discovered that the reason for the infamous midpoint wall is that it’s the first time that the story mode of the game asks you to use your own characters, rather than giving you a set of pre-assigned characters who are tuned to perfectly clear the mission and move on.
Through the first four main story volumes, you have to do this twice, and there’s a bit of a repeated fourth-wall-breaking gag where the Bad Guy asks you how you’re going to defeat him and you do this:
OK about that. While I did eventually throw some money at the gacha system, I didn’t wind up using the character from it in any of the story missions. So I will state, very firmly, that you are 100% able to clear the game’s main story without dropping a penny on it. This is not typical for gacha games, but this one is exceptional in that regard.
If you’re curious, it’s because I wanted the fox girl from the mousepad I bought in Japan and she was on a limited time banner. I spent less than what a regular game release would have cost in the process so I consider it a donation to the publisher for making a very enjoyable story.
So if we’re talking about only the first four volumes of the story, there are only a couple of walls and they aren’t too high.
And then there’s the fifth volume, or the “Final Story” volume. I suspect most of the guides I was seeing on Reddit, promising that I could coast through the game at level 50, were written before this volume was released, because there is a single story chapter in this that is basically wall after wall after wall.
I was level 68 when I hit this, with a lot of leveled characters, and was humming happily along until I started hitting levels that knocked the hum right off my face.
One of the drawbacks of my approach to grinding is that I had gotten tons of levels… but very little actual gear for my characters, since I’d just been replaying intro missions over and over again and not playing higher level missions that dropped better equipment. So I had highly-leveled very flimsy characters.
Fortunately, the game has a system that lets you borrow characters from other players, and that’s the thing that got me through the chapter.
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Level 87 kitted-out and fully-skilled 5-star character for 40,000 credits, when I have 40 million on hand? YES PLEASE.
I have a couple other minor quibbles with the last chapter, like the part where you have to fight five bosses in a row… and them fight them AGAIN for story reasons, but there were too many absolutely glorious moments for me to have more than minor quibbles.
Like, you know the bit in every good action movie featuring a team of heroes where the Good Guys are on the ropes and the Bad Guys are leering in anticipation of victory and then someone off-camera says something sarcastic or super understated and it’s like ohhhhh buddy we are ON NOW? The last volume in particular is just that, over and over again, with all the minor characters you last saw ages ago and have lost track of.
It’s a simple and horribly overused trope and I am right here for it every time.
So to sum up.
Tiny girls with railguns: 1
Combat maids: 5
Homeless tactical bunny girls: 4
Writing: 10/10
Gameplay: 3/10
Art: 10/10
Music: 10/10
F2P friendliness: 10/10
OVERALL RATING: 12/10 just download it already. There’s sadly no PC client or console version, but there are Android/iOS/iPadOS versions. I’d recommend hooking up an external monitor or mirroring your phone to your TV, because the art deserves to be seen on a big display.
And, finally, thank God I am not in Japan and I do not have ready access to merch or I would be considerably poorer at this precise point in my life.