Gacha Tips/Notes from a JP player for Star Ocean: Anamnesis

Now that the game is out here, figured I’d share my experience with the game. I’ve been playing the JP version since launch. Obviously, a lot of this assumes that things will stay the same in the NA version, which may not be the case, but for now here are some thoughts.

Gacha Rates

The gacha rates in the game are actually pretty good as far as mobage tend to go. The 5% chance for 5* characters includes both Ace and non-Ace. The rate in JP right now is actually 6%, with featured characters on any given banner at 1% each (maybe they will increase it in NA in the future). This is superior to games like FFBE (0.5% per featured 6* character) and FGO (0.7% per featured 5* character). A downside is that you do also have to roll for weapons (in JP currently 8.5%, with featured weapons only 0.6% apiece, but they do have Step Up banners that increase rates or guarantee featured weapons). Although you do get free weapons through events and such, for the most part these are inferior to the gacha weapons. The meta revolves around using elemental attacks to hit weaknesses and you’ll be wanting to assemble as wide a variety of elemental weapons as possible.

Unlike many other mobage, you only ever need to pull one copy of a given character, which is nice. Extras will help but unless you’re a mega-whale you’ll mostly be relying on limit break items. It’s not required to LB weapons but doing so adds stats and extra factors, and you’ll have to have 6 of the same weapon to max LB (until Magical Hammers are added way later.)

Gems

Another way that SOA is significantly more generous than other mobage is the sheer amount of free currency you get. In JP they’ve averaged giving about ~50000 a month, so enough for 100 character rolls (or more weapon rolls). This comes from daily achievements, login bonuses, campaigns, and exchanging Maze of Tribulation tokens. No guarantee they’ll be as generous in NA of course, but if they do, you can still do a significant amount of rolling even as a F2P.

Tickets

The game will give out tickets of various types: 4-5* tickets, 5* tickets, and 5* Ace tickets. These tickets work as a floor effect – so on a 4-5* ticket the chance of pulling a 5* is still only 6%, it’s just that everything else is a 4*. The tickets don’t get a boosted chance to draw featured characters like the banners do, but featured characters (including limited) are still in the pool. So it’s worth hoarding tickets until a character comes out that you want.

Limit Break Items

It may seem hard to accumulate limit break items at first but eventually you’ll be accumulating them at a much faster rate. The reason is at some point you’ll have max limit broken all of your 3-4* characters so everytime you pull another one in the gacha they get turned into a LB crystal instead.