Omg do NOT play this. It's basically the board game mode from the DRV3 endgame but expanded into a whole game. And it sucks!!! It had awful gacha elements that presumably you pay full money for (I ended up playing my English copy on my Japanese Nintendo account since that's my default one and as such I couldn't connect to the online features which, I am pretty sure, were just "pay money for the good gacha coins") and the jist of the game is you have to complete
50 TURNS with everyone to complete it, so you gotta roll that gacha.
All there is to this game is development mode, battle mode, and the gacha spinning. In development mode, you pick one of your available characters (that, outside of the three protagonists from the main games, you must spin a gachapon machine for) and then you must do 50 whole turns on this massive board game to level them up and get them to learn special skills. Events with other characters happen periodically and randomly the bears might show up and give you a boon or a debuff and you can also land on squares that will show you a little skit with some other characters and your chosen character. And you have to do this for all 65 characters to see the overarching story. That's 3250 turns! Every 10 characters taken through development mode will unlock more "story" chapters and upon completing those, you'll get permanent buffs in development mode like extra starting money or permanent multipliers to your levelling process.
Once you have trained a character in development mode, you can use them in battle mode, which is basically a very boring battle tower where every fight has a several rounds with a bunch of enemies and there are like hundreds of floors and none of them are fun. You can use drops from the enemies to craft progressively better gear which is also very boring. The UI for managing your party and gear is atrocious. It's extremely frustrating, but once you clear certain floors in this mode, you get the option to purchase power ups in development mode to clear different areas of the game board faster. Most battles will also give you the basic currency to roll gacha, but not the one that gives you good cards.
There are also "achievements" in the game (thank god I didn't get it on a platform that tracks them outside the game). These give you a better currency than the battle one for pulling, which will net you better cards. Did I mention that in addition to having 65 characters, each character has different four different rank cards you have to pull from worst to best? The better the card, the easier it is to level them up in development mode and the higher tier cards will unlock unique cutscenes. There are a lot of achievements to get with some of them being simple "see x number of scenes with character y" or "complete stage z of the battle tower" but then there are some progression based achievements with requirements like "do development mode with every card of every character". (That's 13,000 turns!!!!!!!!!!)
Anyway the basic rotation of this game is you take a few characters into development mode, get as far as you can on the board, take the completed character into the battle tower and get as far as you can there, then go collect any achievement rewards you've obtained and spin the gacha hoping for better character cards or someone you like, and then repeat. Forever. It's so tedious and it stops being fun about 10 characters in (since at least for me that's about how many characters I actually
like in the series). Development gets much better once you pass the 30 character mark but then it's also kind of discouraging because like... it feels pointless to go replay characters you picked at the start cuz you liked them which means you're putting more effort into characters you either don't like or don't have much of an opinion on and it just gets so boring so fast.
I will say that story-wise, I did kind of enjoy this. I liked the individual chapters, short though they were, and the finale chapter although terrible in execution. (You have to use the first game's protagonist's basic normal card and progress through the board game with no other characters around and without all your buffs and you fight hard bosses and if you fail at the end and don't have a good enough party made from before that to step in for you, you're SOL because you can't train anyone else up or go back.) Anyway execution aside, I liked the story and I liked the character interactions. They weren't shy about putting surprising characters together and having them interact and I'm always a sucker for "everyone comes together to win" endings.
I think the game should have given you better buffs sooner so that the board game wasn't so hopeless for most of your attempts at it and instead of making you do it 65 times as all the characters, it should have been like... 30 tops to finish the story. Let everything else just be optional. I know it'd mess with the whole "everyone needs to collect a friendship shard" thing but who cares. By the end of the game I was just getting everyone to 99 and then continuing to try to land on the level up spots that did nothing because it was faster than landing on any other spots as I tried to whittle down 50 turns over and over again. Quite miserable!
I'm sorry can you tell I spent way too much time on this stupid game? I've been playing it on and off for months because it's so repetitive and boring. But the game is due back (I've renewed it over and over again at my library for six months since I first started the DR replays) so I hauled ass to actually finish it before I returned it because sunk cost fallacy told my brain I had to see the end of the story.
Sorry for the questionable screenshot but the best part of this game was pretty early on when the first event I got on my fave character was basically the terrible brainrot OTP on a date and that's what I wanna commemorate in my journal. >_> It was all downhill from there. (Actually that whole run on the board was pretty good to me, now that I think about it. ^q^ Nearly every choice I made with Komaeda led to Hajime. Good times.)
