Games worth discovering

REVERSE: 1999 - Will It Survive the Time Itself? [Review]

2K View2023-11-08

I have many good things to say about this game, but it’s not a perfect game by any means at all. Great artstyle, unique concept, interesting main plot, and pretty decent music. The art direction in this game is very good, which is something that I think is extremely important for games nowadays as a tool to differentiate themselves from the rest of the gacha games market.

The game took a setting and tone I rarely see in the gacha game market. Their take on designs, from vintage looking art style to other-worldly looking disastrous events and enemies are pretty well done.

The overall vibes reminds me of BioShock series because of its vintage and rustic look. And also, I’m currently hooked into Marvel’s Loki series, which the story revolves around time traveling into the past and future. For visual presentation alone, this game does look artistically fantastic.

As for the story, well, it’s kind of a mixed bag. But visual alone won’t make a game objectively good. Gameplay matters the most if we wanna decide whether a game is good or not.

I got to level 30 just yesterday, so I think I have a pretty decent understanding of how the game works. If there's something I got it wrong or maybe you find it very biased, please let me know by leaving a mean comment down there. Here is just my own honest opinion on the game based on my knowledge of the game, things I like and I don't, and overall rating for the game.

CORE GAMEPLAY 🕹️

It's a very simplistic card mechanic like you’ll see on some other skill card based gacha games like the Seven Deadly Sins or maybe FGO to a certain extent. Every characters has 1 of 6 Afflatus that has stronger/weaker mechanic, like elements in Pokemon games. Each characters has 3 different skill cards, 2 for basic skills and 1 for ultimate, that are called Incantations. Depending on character roles and the number of stars it has, these skills may have various effects on cast, like; higher damage multiplier, more potent buffing/debuffing effects, or the abilities to apply negative status/debuffs/damage-on-time onto enemies that may last for certain number of turns.

Each regular round starts with random 7 skill cards of active characters with only 3 Action Points given for each turn. The number of actions per round may vary depending on the stage/mode or when someone on your team is downed. You can drag a card next to the same card with the same number of star rating to combine them to get higher multipliers or sometimes a different effects for some characters. Speed is a non-existent mechanic here, because you’ll always go first before your enemies. Which is very weird to me that there are many people dubbed this games as a turn-based JRPG.

The very simplistic turn based mechanic could be a good thing, but also a bad thing, especially on later game. The reason why I don’t see any real gameplay here because of its “you go first” turn based mechanic and the RNG. The game is missing a lot of basic mechanic that usually belongs to a good turn based game. There’s no speed related mechanic that would dictate the turns and pacing of each round. There’s no deck building, because every single character only has 3 skill cards, and they’re randomly generated on each round.

Harder stages in this game feels more like DPS check rather than harder challenge. With enough time and resources you invested in your team, you’d be able to steamroll the majority of contents even if you ignore the elemental weaknesses mechanics. Got stucked on a stage or level? Just go farm for materials and upgrade your team and gears.

ART DIRECTION & STORY 🎬

The story served in a visual novel-esque format, and is quite slow most of the time. It could even get really slow sometimes to a point where, I kid you not, I fell asleep and woke up with an empty battery in the morning. (Yes, I play the game before bed because the game's daily server reset is at 8 PM on my local time). I feel like the game sometimes purposely make the story vaguely convoluted just to make it sound complicated and deep.

The story starts with a pretty vague pilot episode that, me as the audience, don’t really get where's the threat lies, the consequences, the sense of danger of this phenomenon called the “Storm”. Some translations are filled with typo, weird choices of words and tone, both on its subtitles and the voice acting.

Some lines sounds amazing, some sounds vaguely coherent with not much weight in it despite how long the dialogs sometimes. Tho, the diversity of its cast members makes it anlot more lively with characters from different background of time period, nationalities, some of them even speak with their accents or a different language. As of currently I’m writing this, the main story only has 4 main playable chapters right now.

Its very early for me to talk about the story, but it might get better on later updates. Tho, they seriously need to fix the pacing of it. Because outside of the story and Artificial Somnabulism, which is kind of an end-game content here, there isn’t much content available for me to enjoy in the game right now.

Translation errors are pretty common in this game to a point where people are actually accusing the dev using a non-human or AI tools to do the translations and writing, LOL. I even saw some comments online about this supporting cast in the story named Madam Z, which some people accused the devs using an AI tools to generate her entire voice lines.

I understand what they’re trying to say about here, because her voice lines often sounds odd at times, but I couldn't find any legit source or concrete evidence here about this AI allegations so far.

THE GRIND ⚔️

This game gets extremely grindy once you reach account level 25+. There are so many items, resources, basic currencies, needed to be invested to a single characters, especially once your character reached Insight Level 2. And that’s not even including their individual gears, and the Wilderness (which is basically a dorm-like micromanagement in a form of city builder mini game). The Wilderness is extremely tied to your account progression so much that you need to actually spend your precious stamina to upgrade your crafting bench and stuff in there, which is I think is a horrible mechanic.

Farming materials in this game is just atrocious. There are TOO MANY things to farm but the energy needed is extremely limited, and it takes ages to reach full energy. With a very slow energy regen rate, so little amount of max energy pool, and soooo many things to level up, you’d only play the game like, what, 5-10 minutes a day or so. And to make it WORSE..

Every dropped items are RNG. And not just that.. Some items aren't even available to get from a special dungeon/farming stage, they'd be on so story stages. Not just it's cost so much and it's also RNG, with a probably you will not get the item you need. With my level 30 account, I only able to have 185 max of stamina cap and it’ll magically disappear after like 10-12 times of auto-play farming, and thats it.

Character building and progression is such a major part of the gameplay loop, you practically forced to grind hard to be able to progress further. AND to make things EVEN WORSE, the game would tax you with stamina literally for EVERYTHING, including the main STORY. This energy efficiency problem alone could probably prevent me to play the game further than this.

THE GACHA 🎲

I also have some problem with the gacha system here. The basic rate of getting the highest rarity unit in the game, which are rated 6-stars, is 1.5% with the probability of you losing it by 50/50. It doesn’t sounds as egregious as Genshin’s 0,6% chance, but we need to take its extremely diluted pool into account here.

I'll take Genshin for example (since it's popular). Unlike in Genshin Impact or their latest game Honkai: Star Rail, there are only 3 different rarities. But in Reverse 1999, there are 5 different rarities, from 2-stars to 6-stars in the gacha pool.

And let’s be honest, probably there isn't a single soul out there will use any 4-stars characters or below especially in later game. You can’t even use them as fodders, they’d just sitting down there on the bottom list of your character tab menu.

With its energy and resource scarcity, overly tedious and extremely time consuming material farming, makes me don’t even want to spend my free currencies on the gacha banners, let alone spending a dime. Right now, I have so many 5 and 6-stars character left underleved or even at level 1 because I don’t have enough energy or time to level them up.

Bluepoch, if you want me to spend money, at least make it easier or more efficient to build characters. Why would I spend money on new characters when knowing that my previously acquired units are still basically on the level of literal babies? I got both A Knight and Sotheby from their banners, and the next patch update is right up in the corner coming in couple of days, but one of them is still at level 1. I don't care how great your new characters are, I'd probably need another 2 months to build them.

FINAL VERDICT 🌠

This game has potentials to break into the currently crowded gacha game market. With each one of them has one or two different things to offer, this game offers a lot of its quirks and uniqueness that you can’t really find in other games in the same space and genre. But I feel like its current version has so much things which are executed poorly that actually hinders the game.

Poor localizations, storytelling that often drags, etc, I think all that can be fixed relatively easy and could be done in less priority right now. The devs should be focusing on this energy cost efficiency problem first, because it’ll affect every players once they hit later levels sooner or later. People would just stop playing the game, unless they're patient enough for the next 12 monthz where their Wilderness is at max.

I initially thought the gameplay would be similar to other turn based games I played on my phone like 7DS or Dislyte, something that I already familiar with. As someone who mainly play games on PC, I find this game is a bit boring in general. I'm so used to with the idea of turn based JRPG like Persona and DQ or RTS games like XCOM and Shadowrun.

To me, there's no actual gameplay here other than story related contents. It's basically a visual novel with combat mini games and a gacha system. And it's definitely not for me. But maybe be it's for you, anyone who's reading this terribly written "review". It's visually pleasing for the eye. Combat is simple and easy to understand. Extremely grindy but still very casual friendly.

Mentioned games

9.2