Arrowmancer Review – Gameplay Over Gacha

Arrowmancer is unlike any other free-to-play mobile gacha game out there, making it a surprisingly fun experience for me to review. You can create your own characters and slap them onto a custom banner. It’s quirky, ingenious and is a breath of fresh air in this huge market of gacha games. There are a lot of things I absolutely love about it, while at the same time, there are also several aspects that could make it even better.

Developed by Sizigi Studios, a small team of mathematicians from MIT, do they have what it takes to devise the formula for a successful indie gacha game? Let’s find out in this review of Arrowmancer!

Story – Witch Get Rich

Arrowmancer takes place in space in what I can imagine as a Cowboy Bebop-like setting. In the prologue/tutorial, we’re introduced to two space witches, Kairos and Fig who graduated from space witch college. However, instead of putting their spells to use, they’re stuck being waitresses at an empty restaurant floating in space due to the crappy economy.

Our witches finally have the chance to show off their skills as they have to save a bizarre Black Cat who escaped from Goons who’re part of an MLM, thus kickstarting a weird journey to start their own company and get rich.

To put it plainly, the story is…random, mainly taking place via chat logs (even though the characters are next to each other?). When you’re not in battle or managing your characters, you’ll mainly be reading through a group chat. Missions themselves take place when you open an attachment in the chat. There’s not much explanation behind what’s going on, so you more or less just go with the flow.

Because almost everything story-related takes place via the group chat without any backgrounds or illustrations like other gacha games, it can be very hard to immerse yourself in what’s going on, when there actually is. Essentially, there is a space adventure happening with some degree of commentary on capitalism, but when it’s being told through “text messages liek dis” it’s very hard to feel invested. I feel that most of this can be mitigated by having an illustration or background to accompany the text to help the player visualise the story. In fact, the opening sequence of the prologue has already accomplished this, so it’ll be great if the rest of the story can have scenes like this as well:

Gameplay – An Insanely Fun Challenge

While it’s described as an action RPG, it’s not the Honkai Impact 3rd or Punishing Gray Raven-kind of action. Make no mistake, it’s still very fast-paced, but the best way I can describe it is Undertale meets Megaman Battle Network. You’re essentially moving your characters around a 3×3 grid in a very specific pattern—a dance, as the game calls it—all while avoiding lasers, hooks, bombs and all kinds of enemy attacks.

The gameplay is incredibly fun. Dancing around while catchy tunes play in the background as you take down your enemies really gets the dopamine pumping. It’s really like dancing in real life. At first, I stumbled around a lot, not knowing what to do, but after a few stages, and having memorised the patterns for each of my witches, I was nailing combos well into the 20s every turn, making me feel like a god.

Unless you’re changing your party members all the time, you’ll mainly be sticking with the same dance patterns. Thankfully, gameplay never feels stale thanks to the enemy variety and different stage hazards. Enemies will cast buffs, debuffs, heal, attack and even summon more enemies. Many of these behaviours result in different forms of attacks, some cover a single square, some make squares deal damage over time for a short while, while some may create a bomb that you’ll need to push away to avoid damage Bomberman style. The variety in enemy patterns is astounding and just when you think you’ve seen it all, a new enemy pops up with new attacks that keep you on your toes.

That said, this is obviously not the kind of game you’ll want to play if you just want to chill and “auto” away (there is no such feature). This is a skill-based game that requires quick reflexes and decision making. Good luck playing this on an emulator—you’re going to need both of your thumbs if you want to excel.

There is one thing that is a bit too frustrating in my opinion. In order to 3-star a stage, you need to not get hit by at all. You’re allowed to get hit by unavoidable attacks, but each stage needs to be a 100% hitless run if you want to get those 3-stars that come with a Gem reward. Even though my team of 5-star witches could easily clear just any stage I’ve encountered so far, being punished just for getting hit once is a bit too much. In other games, a hitless run is usually reserved to challenge stages, but virtually every single stage in this game needs to be completed without room for error for all the rewards. I found myself restarting stages very often like a hardcore rhythm gamer and understandably, the average gacha gamer is not going to enjoy having surgical precision just to 3-star a stage.

Music – Slaps

Arrowmancer has no business sounding this good. Literally, every single BGM, from boss fights to navigating around the menu is really catchy. I went into Arrowmancer thinking that this was a free-to-play game, not Cytus. Seriously, the game’s music elevates every part of it.

Just from my memory, every single song that plays in this game has Japanese vocals. In story missions, a mysterious-sounding waltz with soft percussions gradually build as the singer sings a haunting, goosebump-inducing verse, perfect as I tread carefully to learn new enemy attacks. In Gardens (the game’s side quests), a progressive electro bop plays as the vocalist sings in what I can describe as a fantasy anime OP. Heck, in the game’s main hub, this plays on loop:

Every single one of the game’s OSTs would easily fit in Muse Dash or Cytus. Even though it’s not a huge playlist, the quality is top-notch. Sure, there are other gacha games with killer OSTs like Arknights and Genshin Impact, but need I remind you that Sizigi Studios is made up of 6 people?

Gacha and Waifulabs

Witches range from 1★ to 6★. 6★ units are not in the game, but their mechanics and their pity have been explained, so they’ll probably be added in the future. In the meantime, the rates are as follows, according to the standard banner:

• 1★: 20%
• 2★: 25%
• 3★: 30%
• 4★: 20%
• 5★: 5%

That’s right, gacha gamers, 5★ is 5%, not 0.5%! While 6★ will obviously be lower once they come out, for now, the rarest units in the game have a 5% drop rate. As for the pity, you’ll be guaranteed a 5★ every 40 pulls which is great. We know that 6★ pity will be 200 according to the game’s menus.

As for the price, you have the option of making a single pull for 120 Gems, or 5 pulls for 600 Gems (there is no option for a 10-pull). 600 Gems cost $9.99 in the shop (a more expensive purchase obviously has more Gems). Note that you can earn 120 Gems every day just from completing daily quests.

What makes Arrowmancer truly unique is that for the first time to my knowledge, you can actually create your own gacha character! Through the power of machine learning algorithms, Sizigi Studios have created Waifu Labs, an AI that can generate waifus or husbandos which you can import into the game as either 4★ or 5★ with random stats and abilities that match their rarity.

Not only can you import your AI-generated OCs into the game as genuine gacha characters, but you can also pull for them as well! For the first time in gacha history, you, the player, can create your own custom gacha banner! You can do this by obtaining a Bizcard of your witch and adding them to the custom gacha banner. This is a way to farm dupes and make your custom witches stronger.

While this makes for a truly one-of-a-kind gaming experience, as a gacha game, the characters do not feel as lively as they usually are in these kinds of games. It’s not that the character art is bad (far from it), it’s that all we see are square portraits of all the characters. Even in battle, that’s what we’re moving around. Typically, you can tell a character’s personality from the way they look and dress, but since all we have are close-ups of the witches’ faces, you never get that feeling.

Without a backstory, personality, and even legs, I don’t feel the urge to gacha for any of the characters at all. For a gacha game, that is a huge problem. Obviously, this is the shortcoming of being able to incorporate AI-generated OCs into the game, but it’ll be great if more of the game’s cast or even our own can be woven into side missions and such, anything to improve the waifu-ness or appeal of the characters.

Instructions Unclear

Arrowmancer doesn’t explain everything, which has given me a headache trying to review it. The game explains that you can promote your Witches into managers, but it doesn’t explain what managers do at all. I ended up not promoting any of my Witches because I saw their stats drop if they were to become managers. Without the game telling me if this is a reversible process or not, I ended up not doing it altogether.

Similarly, the game is offering a Starter Pack for $0.99 that contains 600 Gems and 1 “SUPER Waifulabs Import Token.” There is no tooltip, nothing at all in Arrowmancer that tells me what is a SUPER Waifulabs Import Token. I’m not going to spend $0.99 (that’s just over RM4 for me in Malaysia) just to learn what’s a SUPER Waifulabs Import Token in Arrowmancer, even if it’s for a review.

This lack of explanation carries into the gameplay as well. I learned through complete accident that pushing my witch into an enemy causes my combo to end and immediately deal damage to the enemy. Similarly, when I met my first enemy which cast the “Expose” debuff, I could only guess that it’s reducing my witch’s defense as the game never tells me what exactly it does. I only learned through the game’s Discord that energy recharged at a rate of 1 every 6 minutes. Arrowmancer doesn’t explain many of its mechanics, which is a detriment for me.

Verdict

That’s all for this review of Arrowmancer. My hat goes off to the team at Sizigi Studios for pulling off a game like this, one that innovates new ideas and breath new life into a genre that’s oversaturated to the brim. Playing Arrowmancer for this review is an experience I won’t be forgetting any time soon. There are a lot of aspects of the game which I’ve already praised to death earlier in this review like the gameplay and music, but what Arrowmancer really needs to improve on is its marketing. The game barely has any social media presence and according to Google Play Store, has only been downloaded 5000+ times at the time of writing.

I had a blast playing the game. Unlike many gacha games which have the philosophy of “gacha first, gameplay second”, Arrowmancer does the opposite, putting gameplay before the gacha. If you’re tired of the same, stale gacha game formula, I can promise you—you have never played a game like this before.

If this review convinced you to get Arrowmancer, you can download the game through the green button below. Follow the game on Twitter for more updates.

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Arrowmancer

Developer: Sizigi Studios

Release Date: 2022-02-10

Android, iOS

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