The Dictator's In...

Story

That godawful Chapter 2 catfishing plot aside I'm enjoying the storytelling. Things definitely start off slow, but being a small-time Anomaly Hunter in the big city is quite an experience. Zero, despite what impressions made me think, is their own character. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized this character would be speaking, responding, and reacting to things without player input sans the obvious self-insert moments like at your apartment properties and businesses. This really gives the story a chance to be an actual story and not just us, the player, faffing about in the setting with moments that force us to be important. That said, there are still some issues both minor and not so minor taking me out of the story.

The tone of the setting isn’t really consistent. It’s trying to be a slightly edgier Saturday morning cartoon (a... Saturday evening cartoon?). It’s playing a lot of things fast and loose, letting the Anomalies be threats within side quests and random world encounters, but not really letting them be a true obstacle or thing to fear most of the time in a game where hundreds if not thousands were killed/mutated in the intro cutscene by an Anomaly. A lot of issues with Anomalies are more akin to pests and wild animals than otherworldly phenomenon barely understood by man. While I understand that’s to keep things light in the intro… I dunno’, there’s already a lot of hints to just how dark and threatening the setting is.

As for the story itself, I’m mixed. I liked Chapter 3’s little gimmick of stealing invites and walking around high society despite being bottom-tier in the setting, I like the Sterry Express crew bouncing off of Eibon and I consider it the highlight of the intro chapters. I didn’t care much for the stinger involving the Scarlet Letter, but it’s whatever. Most of these ‘Mysterious Evil Organizations’ just aren’t fun to watch given gacha games have a tendency of making them feel too inconsistent between being cartoonishly evil and morally gray pragmatists. Only OG Arknights has really squared that circle, and I still consider that a lightning in a bottle moment. As much as Chapter 4 was a massive gut punch given the increased stakes it still fell flat due to having so many moving parts around the NPC focal character not… really being that engaging of a character. I honestly can’t even remember her name, only that she was a part of a massive family that messed around with immortality and paid the price for it. Really, Chapter 4 should have been setting the seeds for Daffodill’s past and learning more about the Scarlet Letter like the stinger implied. Not helping was the chapter trying to make us take the character with one of the worse character designs I’ve seen in a while seriously despite how little of an impression she made despite her design. Her connection with Daffodill is the only interesting thing about her and not even the fight scene at the end was done well compared to other gacha games I’ve played. I could go on, really I could, but I’ll stop myself here since I’m trying to give my quick thoughts.

Gameplay

It's... as good and standard as any open world gacha is gonna’ be as of 2026. Enough gameplay to feel like you’re doing something, but enough progression gated behind artifacts and skill levels to make you wanna’ grind for optimized stats. It’s got the typical 3D gacha game setup. Character swapping and rotations, elemental reactions, some light unique mechanics for each character like Nanally's wall walking and Hotori's time stop, the list goes on. It's fine, but it's not doing anything new and it's got the same issue as every open-world gacha in that I could honestly play a 20-buck action game and get the same or greater amount of complexity with less of a time sink, and even better character designs.

Life Sim Activities

This is probably the most unique part of the game and I'm very mixed on it. On one hand it's very unique and gives the game a lot more activities than the usual grinding affair of most gacha games. On the other hand, a lot of these mini games feel really half-baked and the amount of Fons you need to actually purchase the ‘free’ items in the game is almost insulting as of having a week of consistent playtime. I think of all the activities the driving ones like the races, taxi, and delivery mini games are the most fun, but the driving mechanics are so spotty they're only barely passable by the standard of driving games. The cafe minigame is fine, if a bit boring once you hit the groove of things. The rhythm game is trash and barely works and I don't think anyone would argue that. The tetris clone is... fine, could run a little smoother and allow us to use T-Spins, but it works. Really, all the minigames just feel like further time wasters. Unique time wasters, but clearly the game’s main focus is on the combat and optimizing characters for the endgame mode of Beyond the Rails. Who knows, I might be proven wrong, but I’m fairly confident about my predictions here.

I kid you not, my guaranteed 6-Star was flipping Last Rite and I nearly cried tears of blood. The budget does NOT allow me to whale more than five bucks this month due to the move over the next few weeks and me having to be a real, responsible adult with real world obligations for about 14 more days. I legit saw Last Rite and thought God finally decided to show me the errors of my gambling ways and addiction to fake anime women.

However.

God is merciful, kind, and knows the hearts of his flawed, failing, human servants. Thus, in the many, many, many cosmically and sardonically humorous ways He often does to show me how much of a pouty drama queen baby I can be, I get TangTang on the literal next ten pull after doing some random sidequests to grind gacha resources.

The game is overall fun, but I've got my nitpicks. It seems I’m two-for-two with complaints about controls because the dash button being on X and not B like 90% of all other action games I’ve played caused a lot of issues until I just switched the controls to something that made sense [A- Jump, B-Dash, X-Attack 1, Y-Attack 2 for the record]. Speaking of the dash button, it and general dash inputs don't feel good, as if you mash the button a little too fast (especially for Asaru) you can get stuck doing a dash attack where you meant to just close the distance for a normal combo attack. It reminds me why DMC and Bayonetta had you double-tapping forward for moves like that so that the dodge button didn’t cause accidental inputs. Equally, this game commits the grave sin of many other action games by having platforming segments in it despite the annoyingly slippery controls when attempting precise movements (see my dash button complaint above). Again, this isn’t the only DMC-like to try that, but it’s always annoying when the game stops to do platforming that ultimately wastes time and shows just how bad the precision in this game is.

But it wasn’t all nitpicks and bad moments. The story was honestly my favorite part. This game didn’t take itself seriously much to its benefit and every other cutscene got a smirk and light chuckle from me due to the dialogue and how well the characters played off each other. The voice acting was top notch in terms of being a silly action plot and all the voice artists doing an absolutely fantastic job with the lines they had, special shoutouts to the voices of Kanako, Amelia, and Chidori. My favorite character overall was Amelia, her combat style rewarded aggression and her super mode made a lot of the later stages tolerable when most of the enemies spammed projectiles from off screen.