Various Thoughts

So I’ve now cleared all of the game‘s 1-5 star Gate/Encore missions and 1-2 star Repeat missions for chapters 5 and below.

I tried to clear each chapter’s star-levels fully up to my level before advancing the story, and that appears to have been a mistake. The optimal path looks to be running each mission once at 1-star for the XP boost while rushing to the Chapter 5 story mission to quickly unlock the various Shadow Energy drops. Because you’re going to need a ton of that to upgrade your shadows and then you can go back and clear the highest levels possible to automatically clear the lower levels. Gold isn’t an issue so long as you sell any Hunter Reports you acquire and you’ll get more than enough hunter coins to recruit everyone just by clearing maps, playing minigames, and doing dispatches.

The second chapter introduces Encore battles, which allow you to play as a group of three hunters you’ve recruited. These are a lot of fun and provide some much needed variety. Then the fourth chapter introduces the Strike Team, which is basically just a bonus source of cosmetics, hunter coins, and Designs. I’d suggest focusing on raising Management and Capacity while getting the Bounty option to C and ignoring Network completely. And of course the fifth introduces shadow summoning and your Shadow Monarch form while the sixth provides two more shadows to summon (add them to your party on the Party Formation screen).

Thanks to the hunter team battles I think I’m actually going to end up playing this to the end.

Current stats:

Level 47 (Agi/Per 100, Vit/Int 52, Str 25) wielding Knight Killer dagger and Black Falcon II gun, with left-side Assassin & Ruler skills and dagger tree mostly maxed out. Ruler Overdrive with Dawn of Rule special skill and the rest of the special points in physique. Artifacts are Black Lion armor and a 2/2 mix of Behemoth and Gate jewelry, all rank 4-5.

Ingris shadow is at Elite 9 with full rank II growth while Iron and Tank have full rank I growth at Common 1. Strike Squad is at D, A, C, S and all hunters are recruited.

My support hunter party (full rank II growth, all skills at 4, best weapons that don’t require Advanced Manadium) consists of Bora, Chae-Young, and Esil. The solo hunter party (same skill and weapon level as support party but growth is at the first level of rank III) meanwhile is Emma, Hae-In, and Joohee. All other hunters are equipped with at least the second weapon of the type their unique is and everyone’s fully equipped with artifacts (with the exception of two bracelets).

This game is basically your standard beat-em-up action game (think along the lines of Darksiders) with an assortment of RPG systems acting as modifiers layered on top of it.

At base level you can dodge, block, perform basic attack combos, switch between your two weapons, use three active skills (two character and one weapon-related), and have a sort of limit break attack. On top of that you then have attributes, armor and accessories, a variety of passive skills divided into three separate skill systems, and even recruitable NPCs who provide various effects.

The main focus of the game, as you might expect, is grinding for XP and materials while improving your scenario clear ranks; the storyline is very rushed and you shouldn’t expect anything from it if you’re not already familiar with the series via either the Anime, novels, or maybe comic (which this is based on). As a result I’m not sure whether I’ll play much longer since I’m both not very good at action games (my clears tend to be A-rank at the highest) and not particularly fond of re-playing the same scenario multiple times.

Around Chapter 4 is apparently where it opens up with the ability to send out hunter teams, so I guess I’ll try to reach that point and then see how I feel about continuing.