The Eminence in Shadow RPG

I have a lot of fun collecting the characters, interacting with them, and seeing all the cool abilities. It’s clear the game had a lot invested in it. That being said this is the most pay to win F2P I ever saw. The game hands out laughable rewards for clearing milestones, 10 gems, that’s the reward you get for pretty much all the milestones. You need 2,800 for a ten pull on gacha. Despite events and everything else that gives you more you’re likely to run out constantly for characters you want. You have to pay to really get what you want and sometimes you won’t even get the characters unless you spend hundred of dollars on just a single banner unless you want to grind 6 months to a year to get a guaranteed. To top it off the game has terrible pacing. About once a month there’s a level cap increase and new missions which means new gear. It doesn’t leave you time to upgrade your current characters effectively so you’re more likely to have more than a few characters lag behind to upgrading. Despite my review I do love this game but there needs to be serious overhauls on gem rates, gacha, and pacing.

When tapping start, theres a bug where if you do not have app purchases available there will be a pop out saying, “Purchase, In app purchases are not allowed.” It makes it more annoying to have to click OK to proceeded onwards. My concern is to why the pop up appears and why there is a purchase when clicking the start on the starting screen. Also, the loading screen then goes black for a good 15 seconds after clicking start, which the loading screen should not take that long because I have a lot of storage and an Iphone 14. The game concept is overall great but fix the loading screen. The gacha system is really bad. There is a humongous difference between the f2p players and spenders are too large, which makes the game too imbalanced. There should not be a paid banner and regular banner. Instead there should just be one banner for the players in which using the “payed” gems just increases the chances of getting the SAME character on the banner so that there would not be any characters that are almost “unobtainable” if you do not pay for. The value of both the payed gems and earned gems are just too big, which later on will make the f2p players quit because its to unfair and the spenders to quit later on after acquiring everything. Make the gacha system with the paid and earned gems more balanced because this will make me quit the game and a lot of others because of the unfairness.

This game is fun in it's own way but the AI loading screen is very slow (takes around 15 seconds to transition from finishing a stage to the next stage). There is also no skip functionality regarding the skill animation so you have to sit there and watch the whole skill animation and at two times speed it's still around five seconds per skill. nonetheless the graphics are very well designed and the gameplay is fun where you can auto most of the stages where in some niche situations, you can manual to surpass more difficult stages. My recommendation to the developers is to first add a skip button for the skill animations and then to speed up the AI loading screens, whether it's for leveling up characters or loading between stages; there are so many different loading screens that it really makes the gameplay slow down way too much. For example, from the moment I press start on a stage, it takes 11 seconds until my characters start attacking, and from the moment I kill the last monster, it takes 16 seconds until I can click onto the next stage. That's close to half a minute that I simply just wait to progress per stage (not including however long it takes me to clear that stage). Quality of life is important for players who like their games fun and fast-paced (: