Rate top gamesUnpolished game in all aspects with a lot of bugs and a problem with servers and ping.
«Buggy as hell»
«Disappointment of the year»
«Boooring»
Other reviews3
TLDR; ToF excels at few and is bad at many. *I do not believe that powercreep was what killed the game,* since it started dying even before powercreep, and other games have bad powercreep and are still popular (like HSR). What is killing it is lack of polish and devs that don’t understand how small issues can break your game if they’re compounded. The warp server changes little and the issues that casual players feel the most are still there. Bc of this, ToF will continue to be unable to hook in new players.
So, I played at release, ~200 hours over a few months. But stopped playing bc of lack of polish. Imagine my surprise when they announced a soft reboot/global warp server, and none of these issues were fixed. This game died from a thousand papercuts when it first came out, and it’ll happen again.
First, both systems are unoptimized. No dedicated keybinds for many of the buttons on pc, and all of the tutorials say “tap.” But the mobile port looks very bad.
ENG voice acting is awful, and I heard it doesn’t improve. It’s clear the VAs aren’t shown what’s happening on screen. Sometimes delivery *is* good emotionally, but it doesn’t *match* what’s happening in the scene (most apparent with fight scenes). I don’t think they give the lines of the other char they’re supposed to be talking to, either, bc some back and forth dialogue just sounds super stiff/repetitive. One char is just text-to-speech. While I could tell ppl to use the CN/JP voice acting, the small text sometimes overlaps w/ each other so it’s unreadable, and gets cut off if it’s too long, so if you care about the story then ENG va is kinda required.
Now I actually think the worldbuilding is strong compared to other gachas. But not how it’s presented, and that’s the snake eating its own tail. Bc the story is presented so poorly, ppl stopped caring about it, and bc existing players don’t care about the story anymore, Hotta doesn’t bother trying to make the story better. Thus, new players who actually DO care about story are turned off from the game. Rinse and repeat, and the story will never improve. Same thing with the ENG voice acting.
Early character design was bad. It did that mecha sci-fi thing where chars just have mishmashed pieces of plastic on them and weird metal abs. Going from genshin—which basically *mastered* gacha char color palettes, accessories, and silhouette harmony—to ToF was painful. They’ve improved, but keep in mind that the early chars will be eyesores. There’s also legitimately zero dark-skinned chars. Even Genshin has a few.
Char integration in the story is bad. Now that gacha is gone, maybe they’re trying to go for a Warframe-like story system, where side quests are where you learn about playable chars’ lore, and their involvement in the main story is kept to a minimum. This is fine, but it sticks out like a sore thumb for ToF’s genre (anime rpg). It’s just so hard to feel connected to any of the chars. Ex: the first playable char you meet in the main story (NOT counting Shirli bc she wasn’t playable at game release) was King, and his introduction doesn’t do him justice. He’s the announcer for a fight ring, and his only purpose is to explain the rules and who your opponents are. After this 1 minute of talking he never appears again. Instead of only making him the announcer, they should have also made him your final opponent, giving a story twist and making him look cooler.
UI is still bad. You have to navigate through like three menus just to fish, the menu with all your options still looks bad even with the redesign. The buttons are in groups, except the group labels are tiny and tucked in all the way to the right of the menu. These labels don’t pop out and your eyes have to actively be searching for them. Settings is still disorganized and no borders/containers dividing each setting. After months I still didn’t understand how most of the menus worked/what they did. Maps for some areas are unreadable bc they don’t show elevation well. It’s worse when places overlap, so you end up tracking a quest and it’ll be miles above you with no obvious route to get to it. Map doesn’t show how things are connected elevation-wise, or where you can teleport to get to the place you wanna go to.
Side modes are half-baked. There’s a housing and pet system, except you can’t customize the furniture in your house, nor can you interact with your pet beyond putting food in its bowl. It can’t follow you, can’t roam around the house, and will leave if you forget to feed it. Which, since you can’t do much with it, you will probably forget it exists. There’s also a “custom island” system in the gacha server, sort of like Genshin’s housing. Except once again, you can’t actually build any custom buildings/furniture. It’s more of a town idle game where you build a chosen set of uncustomizable shops in certain spots, and you can get resources from them at intervals. The warp server then removed this island gamemode.
Sound design is fair except everything sounds slightly muffled/far away from the mic. Bc so many enemies have shields, you hear the same plastic-hitting sound for a while, getting bored. Relatedly, combat stales towards midgame, since so many enemies have shields and just tank your hits. Doing this over and over gets boring, and the visual effects/rewards weren’t enough to keep me hooked. There’s actually a fair amount of depth to combat; there’s a lot of combos each char can thread together. The issue is the content isn’t hard enough to justify doing anything beyond button-mashing, and I don’t really know if the endgame modes have enough depth to make you learn combos instead of simply getting/upgrading better chars. Genshin was similar—it feigned combat depth by putting timers on everything and made you “learn combos” that would kill enemies faster. In reality, it just made you hug the enemy, press the same buttons but faster, and tested how much rng you were willing to put up with.
Gacha: I might be dumb but the new server still has gacha—it’s just streamlined. You farm rift shards which let you pull for a char/weapon, and the one you get is random. The banners aren’t timed, but rift shards can still be *BOUGHT* with real money. This is literally gacha, and the only gacha they completely removed was for matrixes (genshin artifacts).
Finally, they removed the daily feature where you could hide a device on the map for resources and other players could steal it. Not a big deal, but it was cute.
Positives: ToF mastered *scale.* Every environment truly feels vast, like you *are* exploring an unknown world, but not so big that it’s overwhelming, and not too empty it’s underwhelming. This is a very hard thing to get right, and even though Genshin/WuWa/BotW does this very well, there are many times in these games where areas feel smaller than they should be (like Genshin relies a lot on the same lighting tricks to give the *illusion* of far-ness). But I have never experienced this in ToF, and everything feels *vast,* without your char feeling small/invisible. When you start approaching Mirroria, you can’t help but stop and marvel at how you *are* actually stepping into a giant, floating city that feels size-accurate to when you’re also in the city itself. I don’t doubt other regions look equally as amazing.
Worldbuilding. I actually think the worldbuilding is the best out of any gacha. It has a lot of outer space nonsense, but doesn’t have so many roaming parts that it becomes hard to follow (like HSR). It deals with a post-apocalyptic world, but the world does not look bleak or dreary. It’s similar to BotW in that it’s bright and beautiful, which actually makes you want to explore rather than creep around in a dark, broken environment. There’s a sense of emptiness to it, like after the disaster, nature reclaimed what were once civilizations. Ppl still live worrying about radiation and lack of resources, but everyone did their best to makeshift and go on with their lives. There’s a sense of hope and renewal that most similar games don’t have.
So, I played at release, ~200 hours over a few months. But stopped playing bc of lack of polish. Imagine my surprise when they announced a soft reboot/global warp server, and none of these issues were fixed. This game died from a thousand papercuts when it first came out, and it’ll happen again.
First, both systems are unoptimized. No dedicated keybinds for many of the buttons on pc, and all of the tutorials say “tap.” But the mobile port looks very bad.
ENG voice acting is awful, and I heard it doesn’t improve. It’s clear the VAs aren’t shown what’s happening on screen. Sometimes delivery *is* good emotionally, but it doesn’t *match* what’s happening in the scene (most apparent with fight scenes). I don’t think they give the lines of the other char they’re supposed to be talking to, either, bc some back and forth dialogue just sounds super stiff/repetitive. One char is just text-to-speech. While I could tell ppl to use the CN/JP voice acting, the small text sometimes overlaps w/ each other so it’s unreadable, and gets cut off if it’s too long, so if you care about the story then ENG va is kinda required.
Now I actually think the worldbuilding is strong compared to other gachas. But not how it’s presented, and that’s the snake eating its own tail. Bc the story is presented so poorly, ppl stopped caring about it, and bc existing players don’t care about the story anymore, Hotta doesn’t bother trying to make the story better. Thus, new players who actually DO care about story are turned off from the game. Rinse and repeat, and the story will never improve. Same thing with the ENG voice acting.
Early character design was bad. It did that mecha sci-fi thing where chars just have mishmashed pieces of plastic on them and weird metal abs. Going from genshin—which basically *mastered* gacha char color palettes, accessories, and silhouette harmony—to ToF was painful. They’ve improved, but keep in mind that the early chars will be eyesores. There’s also legitimately zero dark-skinned chars. Even Genshin has a few.
Char integration in the story is bad. Now that gacha is gone, maybe they’re trying to go for a Warframe-like story system, where side quests are where you learn about playable chars’ lore, and their involvement in the main story is kept to a minimum. This is fine, but it sticks out like a sore thumb for ToF’s genre (anime rpg). It’s just so hard to feel connected to any of the chars. Ex: the first playable char you meet in the main story (NOT counting Shirli bc she wasn’t playable at game release) was King, and his introduction doesn’t do him justice. He’s the announcer for a fight ring, and his only purpose is to explain the rules and who your opponents are. After this 1 minute of talking he never appears again. Instead of only making him the announcer, they should have also made him your final opponent, giving a story twist and making him look cooler.
UI is still bad. You have to navigate through like three menus just to fish, the menu with all your options still looks bad even with the redesign. The buttons are in groups, except the group labels are tiny and tucked in all the way to the right of the menu. These labels don’t pop out and your eyes have to actively be searching for them. Settings is still disorganized and no borders/containers dividing each setting. After months I still didn’t understand how most of the menus worked/what they did. Maps for some areas are unreadable bc they don’t show elevation well. It’s worse when places overlap, so you end up tracking a quest and it’ll be miles above you with no obvious route to get to it. Map doesn’t show how things are connected elevation-wise, or where you can teleport to get to the place you wanna go to.
Side modes are half-baked. There’s a housing and pet system, except you can’t customize the furniture in your house, nor can you interact with your pet beyond putting food in its bowl. It can’t follow you, can’t roam around the house, and will leave if you forget to feed it. Which, since you can’t do much with it, you will probably forget it exists. There’s also a “custom island” system in the gacha server, sort of like Genshin’s housing. Except once again, you can’t actually build any custom buildings/furniture. It’s more of a town idle game where you build a chosen set of uncustomizable shops in certain spots, and you can get resources from them at intervals. The warp server then removed this island gamemode.
Sound design is fair except everything sounds slightly muffled/far away from the mic. Bc so many enemies have shields, you hear the same plastic-hitting sound for a while, getting bored. Relatedly, combat stales towards midgame, since so many enemies have shields and just tank your hits. Doing this over and over gets boring, and the visual effects/rewards weren’t enough to keep me hooked. There’s actually a fair amount of depth to combat; there’s a lot of combos each char can thread together. The issue is the content isn’t hard enough to justify doing anything beyond button-mashing, and I don’t really know if the endgame modes have enough depth to make you learn combos instead of simply getting/upgrading better chars. Genshin was similar—it feigned combat depth by putting timers on everything and made you “learn combos” that would kill enemies faster. In reality, it just made you hug the enemy, press the same buttons but faster, and tested how much rng you were willing to put up with.
Gacha: I might be dumb but the new server still has gacha—it’s just streamlined. You farm rift shards which let you pull for a char/weapon, and the one you get is random. The banners aren’t timed, but rift shards can still be *BOUGHT* with real money. This is literally gacha, and the only gacha they completely removed was for matrixes (genshin artifacts).
Finally, they removed the daily feature where you could hide a device on the map for resources and other players could steal it. Not a big deal, but it was cute.
Positives: ToF mastered *scale.* Every environment truly feels vast, like you *are* exploring an unknown world, but not so big that it’s overwhelming, and not too empty it’s underwhelming. This is a very hard thing to get right, and even though Genshin/WuWa/BotW does this very well, there are many times in these games where areas feel smaller than they should be (like Genshin relies a lot on the same lighting tricks to give the *illusion* of far-ness). But I have never experienced this in ToF, and everything feels *vast,* without your char feeling small/invisible. When you start approaching Mirroria, you can’t help but stop and marvel at how you *are* actually stepping into a giant, floating city that feels size-accurate to when you’re also in the city itself. I don’t doubt other regions look equally as amazing.
Worldbuilding. I actually think the worldbuilding is the best out of any gacha. It has a lot of outer space nonsense, but doesn’t have so many roaming parts that it becomes hard to follow (like HSR). It deals with a post-apocalyptic world, but the world does not look bleak or dreary. It’s similar to BotW in that it’s bright and beautiful, which actually makes you want to explore rather than creep around in a dark, broken environment. There’s a sense of emptiness to it, like after the disaster, nature reclaimed what were once civilizations. Ppl still live worrying about radiation and lack of resources, but everyone did their best to makeshift and go on with their lives. There’s a sense of hope and renewal that most similar games don’t have.
«Buggy as hell»
«Disappointment of the year»