Arknights: Kemonomimi Apocalypse

Remember Bionicle? It would seem that what has this to do with a series of a strange designer from the Lego company, but looking at it under the magnifying glass of a retrospective, I noticed the “correct” approach to its advertising. Serious and even to some extent pretentious trailers for good alternatives, and the lore is filled with quite serious topics. Usually this approach is not often used, and even more so in donato-ransomware for Android. And then right out of the gate, right after the success of Girls Frontline (where the advertising was typical, but the plot did such crap with the characters), Arknights is knocking on the door of a typical anime fan with a high degradation coefficient. First, he shows cute girls with horns, ears, tails, and a bear girl with a book “Marxism-Leninism”. Well, how can you not smile?? No.

From the very beginning, Arknights pours on you a bucket of justified and unjustified cruelty, mixed with interesting characters, mysterious lore, and the whole explosive mixture is seasoned with compositions of the band Starset. Of course, such a forbidden technique attracted the attention of not only me, but also other fallen ones, for whom throwing money at the monitor in order to get a rare HD picture with an attractive chick is the norm. And since about a month has passed since the launch, we can calmly talk about what Arknights is both in terms of lore and gameplay. Well, in general, everything is not just like that, you will soon understand why, but.. Welcome to the world where in order to survive you need to understand your death.

The world of Arknights was once casino-palm.com/ the same as we imagine our near future, but at one point, everything went wrong. Disasters, in the form of very powerful storms of unknown origin and meteor showers, began to systematically change the topography of Terra, and at the same time destroying cities, thereby society began to degrade. Many technologies were practically destroyed, and peoples began to lead a nomadic lifestyle, because otherwise there was no way to survive. By the way, about peoples – despite the fact that many call themselves people, for us they are Ancients, humanoids with human appearance and features of animals or mythological creatures, the fate of, roughly speaking, “pure” people is not known. This could go on for a long time, until after a couple of subsided catastrophes, a key element in the development of civilization was found – Originium.
This previously unknown material was an ideal source of energy, which is why nomadic life moved to another level when the first Modular Cities were created. Each of the city’s districts was a separate module that could be disconnected and moved across a different type of landscape, and a powerful computer and forecast teams predicted the occurrence of the Catastrophe in advance, which allowed the districts to disconnect and evacuate in a relatively short time. Also, the mineral itself had interesting properties that if the correct manipulations are carried out, it begins to bend reality at the will of the operator, thereby giving birth to another branch of technological development – the Art of Originium, or simply Art. Thanks to one element, peoples began to develop to the previous level, but as it happens, you have to pay for everything.
Here we come to the side effect – Oripathy disease. When using the Art or simply through careless contact with originium, originium crystals begin to grow inside and outside the patient. Not only is there no cure, but all those infected have a 100% mortality rate – eventually, the disease progresses so much that the entire body is covered in pure originium crystals, which break down and turn into fine dust, infecting others. From that moment on, in many countries of the world, a systematic catching of the infected began – they were expelled, isolated in reservations, and also committed genocide. So, if you are unlucky enough to become infected, you have only two options – fight or quietly accept your death. We play for the first option, but with our own vision.

You are Doctor. Friends, although maybe not exactly friends, freed you from the cryo-chamber. The problem is that you’ve lost your memory. But as it turns out later, you are a key figure in a very large pharmaceutical company Rhodos Island, which, in addition to producing medicines, has a larger and more complex goal – to cure or at least alleviate the plight of the infected. And right out of the gate, you meet a violent extremist group, the Reunion Movement – their goal is the same, but since the oppression of the infected occurs at a systemic level, they intend to destroy the heads of state in order to build a new future for the infected. Actually, you feel the cruelty of their method of warfare firsthand when, due to a damaged power supply system, the city of Chernobog was unable to move, thereby falling under a meteor shower. You have to figure out this hellish mixture of words and destinies, perhaps by directing fate in a peaceful direction.
And if you think that only in the plot you will get such a good portion of edge crap, then nothing like that. Even the main character himself, when compared to other games of this kind, is not a positive character – he sent operatives on suicide missions in order to complete his own tasks. And there’s no need to talk about some operatives – their biography ranges from a completely ordinary person to a walking cabinet with skeletons that scare the rest of the organization. And some are imbued with strange, chthonic and viscous (Sanity its a curse… Madness offers the only freedom. Cthulhu Fhtagn). Not to mention a bunch of simply mysterious lore elements and Easter eggs that cause severe SPGS among players. But no one would need all this if it weren’t for the gameplay.

It just so happened that before Arknights two games were released that radically changed the approach to jerking off gold, dick, chicks and other things, so the developers had to do something according to the trends of the new trend – interesting gameplay, interesting plot, minimal jerking. As a result, we have an interesting tower defense, with increasing quantitative and qualitative complexity. With the first point, everything is very simple, your operatives receive more characteristics and the enemies also become proportionally more complex, and by quality we mean a variety of conditions in combat scenarios. That is, in the first couple there will be nothing complicated, but then there will be subtleties in the specialization of operatives and conditions on the map, and all this dictates the tactics of the game. For example, the entire map may be covered by a huge fog, which causes damage to all operatives, or the map is dotted with pits or has an area of ​​the map that is not sealed with a wall, where you can throw opponents with a special operative. You need to take all this into account and, most importantly, you need to push for it.
Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss]. The advantages are related to the fact that many materials can be quickly farmed or crafted in a personal database, and this is convenient to do, since the description of the material contains links to grind missions. The disadvantages are related to one simple problem – for some reason, not all missions with farming some material are available, which is annoying, and some resources can only be obtained after completing an extremely difficult mission. But most importantly, my favorite tactic works – fill the base with tasks and give up on the game. And now about knocking out the operatives.

Loot boxes or gacha work here in two variations: recruiting, which is needed solely to get certificates, because something useful comes out of it extremely rarely; gacha events in which there is a guaranteed chance of getting five stars. The second will be the main supplier of combat meat, which is why you will have to farm originium, which is the main currency for gacha. Is it worth it? In fact, yes, since the game is still gameplay (which is surprising in the context of gacha games), the operatives are useful and unique in their own way, even the most seemingly useless operatives with three stars(KOKODAYO. ) can become very useful figures on the battlefield at high levels. If this bothers you, then here is a useful resource – there you can look at operatives in perspective, compare them, calculate the costs of leveling them up, and much more. Extremely useful resource. And now for the plot.

You don’t know yet, but soon you will probably understand this spoiler… Anivey, the game has just been released, and there is a time difference between the English and Chinese versions, so for now only one evaluative conclusion can be drawn from the plot thread – it’s normal. First, it plunges you into the thick of things, introducing you to allies and opponents, and only then slowly showing how it started and why. And there is something to demonstrate, since Reunion members have their own special motives for committing atrocities, and the victims are not so simple in their thoughts. The only minus of the plot is that, like in all gacha games, it is about the characters around us and their choices, not ours. Of course, for one simple reason – we are not a full-fledged character, but only a blank that can be conveniently adjusted to each player. However, is the cruelty that was promised in the trailer present?? The answer is that one of the Reunion members made zombies out of his fighters and a bunch of dead bodies. I think this is sufficient in the early stages of the game. By the middle or by the very end, the story will calmly reach genocide or a psychedelic journey into the depths of madness, I’m sure of it. In principle, this can be said about the entire game – perhaps it will become even better in later updates.
And with this in mind, we come to the conclusion. Arknights is, in its own way, a “revolution” in the genre of gacha games, at least among those known to me. The gameplay doesn’t bother you with unnecessary things (the stone in Grandblue), it can give you something interesting besides clearing (the stone in FGO) and personally I didn’t need to smoke tons of manuals (the stone in Kancolle). Well, and most importantly, the world, which will not be helped to become a little better, a hellish mixture of words and destinies, and an upward desire in the name of change. Tired of Raid Shadow Legends? Then download Arknights from the imaginary link in the description. And that’s all and metal to everyone!