Ok so first off, Enstars is really funny in the sense that it is the only fandom I’ve ever had the pleasure of being in where when you ask people if you should play the game, the overwhelming response is “RUN!!!! SAVE YOURSELF WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!!”. Not even in a negative way, most people say it for fun, but also because the rabbit hole goes DEEP and the characters are INSANE (/pos???????).

There’s a lot of crazy lore in the game, some of it dealing with very sensitive topics. There’s a whole “War” and “Revolution” arc in the first era of the game (which happens entirely in high school so… yeah). There’s a lot of other insane things, of which I won’t mention here to save you some time, but it’s highly funny that one time when I looked up “enstars” a while back, Google auto-recommended a list of all the crimes each of the boys in the game has committed LOL.

ANYWAY!!!

I’m not very familiar with a ton of other gacha games, their rates, and how F2P friendly they are in comparison to TWST and Enstars, because I’ve only ever played a handful of gacha games in my life and I haven't enjoyed a decent amount of them which leads me to stop playing them. Currently I solely play TWST and Enstars because of the nature of my content on both my YouTube channel and my translation blog. University keeps me really busy, so I only have enough time to dedicate to those two games.

Now, let me talk a little bit about Enstars! So, it has what’s known as the “Global Servers” and then the “Japanese Servers”. I’m going to talk about both because I currently play on both, so I know kinda what’s different between the two.

🌐Global Servers🌐

So, the global servers are available for download in the following regions:

—United States, Canada, Australia, & the United Kingdom -> known as ENGstars

—China -> known as CNstars

—Taiwan -> known as TWstars

—South Korea -> known as KRstars

(When I say “known as…”, that just means that’s how I’ll refer to them throughout this ask 🙂)

These are all collectively known as the “Global Servers” and which one you’re able to download depends on where you live. If you’re not able to download it because you reside outside those regions, please check this guide (if you have an Apple device) and this video (if you have a non-Apple device).

However, just because they’re all the “Global Servers” doesn’t mean they’re all the same. If you’re on the ENG Server, you can only add and play with people on the ENG Server. If you’re on the CN Server, you can only add and play with people on the CN Server, etc. So if you have friends who already play the game that you want to play with, maybe factor that in to what version you want to download!

Additionally, the ENG Server is about 2 years behind the JP Server, which means it’s a lot easier to plan what scouts (what the game’s summoning banners are called) to pull for and which ones to skip. I really enjoy being two years behind because it lets me come up with a plan to save up for my favs 🙂‍↕️! This guide is something I use regularly to track what scouts are coming up, and as I said before, it goes two years out from the current date.

The Global Servers have a lot of quality-of-life (QOL) features that the JP Servers are lacking, so here’s a list of them really quick:

—There’s what’s called a “Society” in these servers. If you play any other games with a comparable feature, think of this as a clan/guild with a bunch of other players.

—Starry Lives, which are daily lives (that’s what the rhythm game portion is called) where you can get a randomized diamond (summoning currency) amount every single day.

—Infinite/Expert Lives, which are a series of lives you play and at every interval of 10, you get a free single pull ticket.

—Shared Lives, which are short couple-hour long things (that happen I believe once a week but I could be wrong, because I often forget to play them) where you team up with another player to complete a few missions for rewards.

—This one is minor, but I know on Apple devices, there’s an option to turn on haptic feedback when you tap the notes. I really enjoy this feature a whole lot 😅 but it’s not anything too crazy.

—You can display song lyrics while playing the songs in the Lives mode, whereas in JP you can only view lyrics during MV (music videos) mode.

—Autoing Lives, which is an EXTREMELY nice feature to use when you're trying to grind for event cards. Once you get a full combo (completing a live without getting a "bad" or "miss" on notes) on any live, you have the option to "auto" it.

—Collabs!! Global has a mostly-different set of collabs compared to the JP Server. We’ve had Hello Kitty, Link Click, Fei Ren Zai, etc. These usually come with their own banners of 5*, 4*, and 3* cards, and I really love them all.

—Special Events! Global has two additional types of events on top of the regular ones that carry over from the JP Server. One is called the Spotlight Event, which introduces a Global-Exclusive 5* card for each character. Our most recent one was Family X Family Kuro! These events don’t involve playing beat maps like the regular ones, instead they have a slightly different gameplay structure. The other type of event are the merge-like gameplay events where you merge items and sell them to get event points. For these events, it’s really easy to get one copy of the 5* card for free as long as you play! Scouts usually run at the same time as these merge events with additional cards on the same theme; one of my favorite Kohaku cards is actually from one of these scouts (Secret Swan Kohaku).

There’s also this guide on how many pulls you can get per month as a F2P from just playing the game and taking advantage of some of these QOL features.

Also, since I didn't cover the grind of the events myself in this post, here's a video by Deely that kinda shows how the typical grind for an Event 5* card would go without using the paid subscriptions that the Global Servers have. While I believe these events are F2P friendly, I also think they require lots of planning to be able to complete and also require you to set aside some diamonds to be able to get the card.

The big benefit I personally see from playing the Global Server is the fact that the stories are in English, making them very easily accessible. I do also enjoy how generous they are with diamonds and summons, and I’ve personally never spent any money on the game (aside from literally $1 one time for an event) to get my favorite characters, which I’m very grateful for! 🙂‍↕️

🎌Japanese Servers🎌

So, as it’s probably obvious, this version of the game is only available in Japan. It’s missing all of the Global QOL features that I mentioned above, which is… kinda a bummer to be honest, but I think there's still pros to playing this version.

First of all, I do really enjoy playing on this version of the game because I get to interact with the new content as it comes out. It is a little bit of a bummer to play on the ENG Server and miss out on the hype and discussion of new content because the ENG Server won’t get it until two years down the road. If you struggle with FOMO, then not being on JP is kinda gonna suck.

The JP Servers have two different versions of the game: Basic & Music. I'm not going to go into that much detail about those two seperate versions in this post, but I'll give a brief summary (feel free to do more research on your own if you're interested in the JP Servers!). Essentially, Basic is the first and original version of the game that released. It was a card-collector and idol-raising game, which lacked the rhythm game elements many are familiar with when they think of Enstars. When Music came out, it released as a separate entity to Basic. Music added rhythm games, music videos, 3D models, etc. Basic still gets updates and it gets the same content as Music, but it lacks any rhythm games and instead keeps the original 2D gameplay elements of Enstars when Basic was the only version that existed.

I would honestly say basic is more "low maintenance" to play than Music, but you said you like the rhythm game elements, so Basic might not be for you.

Anyway, the main downside to JP is (obviously) that it's all in Japanese, so that makes it really difficult for people who don't know the language to understand the content. The whole reason I decided to start playing is because I wanted to learn Japanese, so I use JP Enstars and JP TWST to learn the language via translating the stories myself (shameless translation blog plug🫣) because I'm insane lol. There are many amazing translators out there for Enstars (and especially quite a few on this app) if you do want to keep up with stories before they get added to the ENG Server, but otherwise you have to wait 2 years for official translations.

💙Ages💙

Since you also asked about character ages, here's a really quick tier list I made of all the ages of the main characters in the game, based on the information of them that's listed on the Enstars Wiki. In my opinion, Enstars has a nice age range of characters, especially with the age demographic of the game kind of varying, especially out here in the West.

💕 Conclusion 💕

One of my final recommendations is pick 2-3 characters max to “Produce” and focus on pulling on their scouts. It becomes incredibly difficult to save up if you’re pulling for every single banner because you feel like it, and I would know firsthand how hazardous for my savings it is to like multiple characters and want to pull for them. (Save yourself LOLLLL). But yeah, the cast is around 50+ characters right now, so you can get pulled in all directions if you don’t pick a few characters to like.

However, I do also know people who just pull for cards they think are "pretty" in terms of design instead of picking any specific characters to like, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with that!

There's also not TOO crazy of a meta, so you don't really need to worry about pulling for "strong" cards in my opinion. I've never looked at a card and gone "oh, this would be really good for meta" because that's not ever something that has been super important to me. I think the highest score of my many teams (cuz you play the lives with a team of 5 cards plus 2 support cards, but the support cards don't affect the score) is around 1.1mil which is pretty good and gets the job done for events I choose to grind.