Kemono Friends: Kingdom

Downloaded this game for a road trip, genuinely a fun game. It starts feeling underwhelming since the initial mechanics are “level character, throw at enemy, win” but as you keep playing, new mechanics open up and the catapult system goes from a novelty to a genuinely fun mechanics. The rates are extremely generous and I’ve set my eyes on a banner and got both the advertised ssr with a duplicate within 160 F2P rolls from the story mode. Love this gameplay, love the art, love the UI, love the IP, and my favorite part is the voiced dialogue. Some things are still extremely janky, and the English dialogue has that translator funk, but genuinely enjoyable experience overall. TLDR: above average gacha, has the generosity of azur lane and the nerdy teambuilding we all love.

The good: Neat gameplay with the style of Angry Birds meets RPG. There are strategy elements that typically revolve around withholding buffs to release one super strong attack so unless you vastly over level the content it isn’t very fire and forget. The game is very well optimized, loading and menus are very snappy. Anime girls are cute if you are into the kemonomimi, aka anime girls with animal features, style. Dailies are fast to grind. Gameplay isn’t punishing as you lose no stamina if you back out of a stage. The paid rewards seem really good too so the bundles mostly appear to be good value. Overall, very cute and colorful with a lot going for it. The bad: Lack of QoL features. Lots of tapping for the park/resource section so a “Claim all” and “repeat” would help wonders there. An “Auto-Hike” to choose friends for the dispatch hike to match the criteria would be nice too. Leveling units could do with some streamlining as you need to back out to the main unit screen to move to the next one to strengthen. The ugly: Mostly grammatical. The game needs some more attention to the translations and grammar. While the story is relatively simple, at the time of this writing I’m mid-chapter 4 and notice a fair number of spelling errors, a fair amount of incorrectly used commas, and lots of unneeded ellipsis so a pass wouldn’t be remiss. Overall I am pleasantly surprised and hope the game does well as the worst bits are mostly streamline and grammar related rather then the gameplay look itself.

First off, the UI is amazing, I'm pretty sure I get like 60 fps? Though, if you do want to conserve battery, there are options for that (pretty accessible). A lot of gacha games that feature a lot of different game modes (like tower, raid, main story, etc) gets really clouded and messy sometimes on the main screen, but for this game, it isn't messy and I don't seem to mind it. Every game mode in this game has a purpose, rather than having useless game modes for the sake of looking like a game that you can do a lot in. The story is thorough as well and I LOVE THAT I CAN SKIP DIALOGUE SCENES AND HAVE A SUMMARY OF IT so I don't have to miss out on the story!! Never knew I needed that, but now I know I do. Characters are easy to level up but I assume in later levels it gets harder for the challenge. Characters are also cute, they all have their own personality and voices.