Tales of Crestoria (First Gacha Experience)

So I've never properly played a gacha game before and I decided to pop the cherry with Tales of Crestoria. I would say I'm a fan though I haven't played most of the games because I got into it far later (Zestiria being my first Tales game). But since Berseria was sooooo dang good, I decided to commit myself to this gacha game albeit without spending any money because I never spend on phone games.

Firstly, I realise this is a common thing among all gacha games but the UI is insanely messy. There are too many things to tap on and there are too many options far too soon. Leveling the characters, the memoria stones, summons, guild, arena, quests, missions, raids, exchanges, etc. I suppose seasoned gacha veterans would have adapted almost immediately but for new players, seeing a UI like this is incredibly off putting. Alas, I've already gotten used to it that I can commit to my dailies without much of a fuss (aside from the insanely long load times for this game).

Now, doing the quests, raids and arenas are pretty straightforward and for the most part, pretty fun! The main story is relatively interesting despite pretty bland characters but hey, it's a Tales game and a mobile one at that. As long as it's decent, I'll dig into it. The music, the anime cutscenes and the occasional skits are all very much welcomed. And yes, I am playing a gacha game for the story (mainly). The combat itself is a simple turn based mechanic with a slight nod towards real time strategy but it's simple enough to keep it on auto if you want to.

Auto is my primary way of going through the raids and arena battles simply because those consume way too much time just for basic rewards. I'm dedicated to the story but that's as much commitment as I'm giving. It's still a mobile game and it irks me to even try to get serious in the combat.

Now with any gacha game, we have the summoning feature where you have a chance to get Tales characters across the franchise with varying rarities. There are three rarities within the game: SSR, SR and R. R characters are simply there for show, SRs are playable but lack mystic artes and SSRs are mainly the MCs of each game and they come complete with their mystic artes. What's weird to me about this is the fact that the distribution between each rarity seems almost random? For example, Judith and Tear are both R rarities despite one being a fan favourite character and the other being the female protagonist of the story. But then we have Rita having an SSR (and an R as well) despite both Yuri and Estelle already having SSRs. I understand that if they truly followed the fandom, all the characters would have to be SSRs but really, it's a very odd design choice in my opinion.

Also while I have a whole party of SSRs, not getting Eleanor despite spending over 15k gleamstones is very painful. As I said before, I do not spend money on mobile games so those gleamstones were actually hard earned and eventually the well will dry up without enough story content to get through. It's becoming increasingly apparent how dirty gacha games can be regarding the expenditure of these resources. I don't quite prefer it but I suppose there isn't any rush to this.

Overall, I find Tales of Crestoria to be a relatively fun first time experience for gacha games. I like a lot of Tales characters but 'collecting' them in the same fashion as Azur Lane or Kancolle doesn't really work here in my opinion. I mean this in a good way of course because it prevents the temptation to spend money on it because God knows how much gacha games earn.

And yes, you DO get to choose any character as your first choice even if they are SSR. I chose Velvet because that's the obvious choice.