YES! And we have the math to back it up!
Reverse : 1999 is known for the unique art style and character design, great voice acting and a story with interesting premise. The gameplay is basically a copy of 7DS : Grand Cross that came earlier, but with some pretty good improvement. It's basically turn based strategy with a bit of card battler elements to spice things up. It's more complex than HSR, but still relatively simple.
But how generous are they in terms of pulls and gacha system? Let's find out!
I play this game since Chinese 3rd Beta and they were very stingy so I did not expect how much they have changed since then. It has been almost 1.5 years since they release in China and 1 year since Global release.
First of all, pulls from your routine :
35 pulls per month! A good number. The 5$ monthly card is a really great deal, one of the best monthly card deal out there, you don't see a lot of gacha that sells 15 pulls for 5$. Unless you want the skin, the battle pass is not that good of a deal here, event if you consider the time-gated materials it offers.
Moving on, let's talk about events.
Just like Arknights from previous post. Half of their pulls come from events.
If we combine the income from both events and natural income within the first year, they give approximately 992 pulls a year! But of course, the year when the game launch obviously has more first clear rewards. So if we calculate the event pattern based on recent event data. We can expect about 935 pulls per year for F2P and 1.1k for small spender.
Source
As for the gacha system. They have 1.5% drop rate with the classic 50/50 system and a hard pity of 70 and a guarantee for the next pity if the first one was not the rate up. Similar system to the one Genshin Impact uses. There is also soft pity system starting after 60th pull.
And now, the collection rate :
81,7%! 101,9% for small spenders!
This number is just estimation based on the odds given. You can probably own 80% of the future units with your saving, but at worst luck it might not be that much. So this doesn't mean that goldfish can guarantee owning all the characters.
Compare to Arknights from previous post with 71,2% collection rate, they seem to be more generous. The amount of pulls alone exceed Arknights, but if we consider gold cert, and orundum farming in base(this one kinda sucks tho), then I think Arknights can still compete. R99 has their own gold certificate too, but they are harder to get, much harder than AK. R99 may have better collection rate than AK on paper here, but in practice they might be on about the same level. Not to mention than the base rate is higher in AK. But that doesn't mean AK have better gacha system. At worst case scenario, R99 pity system gives way more security, on top of that AK's limited banner is just nowhere as good as R99.
As for the dupe system, R99 has way stronger value in their dupes. However, I still don't recommend pulling for dupes in general especially for F2P. Generally speaking, most 6* characters are perfectly usable at P0.
Overall, I will still rank Reverse : 1999 above Arknights in my current generous gacha list. Let's see if we can find a more generous gacha for the next article. Some games I'm currently playing(or played) are not worth it to add into the list. But, there are also many good candidates like Limbus Company, Blue Archive, Brown Dust 2.. and there are some other gacha games that I plan to play in the future.
If you want to try Reverse : 1999 now, the timing is not so good considering the first anniversary event was closed a few days ago. But fear not, units will get their rerun(eventually) and you will have a long time to save. The game is not that hard(until Reveries in 2.3,I'm still struggling on that one)
But is it worth it? For the story, music, voice acting and character? YES! As for the gameplay, it's not their strongest point. As a hardcore TBS fan, I think the gameplay gets old real quick and mediocre at best. Daily loop takes 05:35 minutes, includes 1:12 startup time and we do 2x login a day. Sounds like a good side game? Yes, if you exclude their other routine and packed event contents.
Personally, I think it's still a very good side game, even though the gameplay starts to bore me to death after playing this long. Will keep playing unless there is a better game coming or when the burnout gets too strong.
Thank you for reading all of this. Next post is going to be about Path to Nowhere. I've heard of veteran F2P players claimed about getting all or almost all units there, let's see if the math checks out.