DanMachi - Memoria Freese

[mikebrand83]

Also known as Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Memoria Freese, or just DanMemo, it is a turn-based mobile RPG game based on the DanMachi anime (based on the LNs) that has recently received an English release (courtesy of Crunchy Games) on iOS and Android

As you can probably expect of a typical Japanese mobile game, it has a gacha for drawing of different rarities, with characters and character variants of higher rarities having better stats and skills. Like a cross between FGO and FEH (to use two prominent examples that I expect just about everybody here will have played at some stage), you can level up and promote even lower ranked characters. Though unlike FEH and more like FGO, character variants that start at lower rank will always have slightly inferior stats and skills compared to characters with higher starting rank.

On the plus side, there's at least three super easy opportunities to get free tickets for guaranteed 4* unit rolls: Login for 7 days total, login for 30 days total, and clearing all of the Rookie Missions. Plus two more, but those require clearing very hard difficulty missions. Regardless, 3* are more than adequate for most of the content you'd play, especially since they're easier to upgrade early on, while upgrading 4* units requires stuff in higher difficulty content, that you'd probably need upgrade 3* to complete anyway. Also, the game has an auto-battle mode where the AI will actually use skills and specials... Even if it's inefficient as hell, lol.

On the down side, the game doesn't have a nice and simple option to download all data unlike FGO. Which is a huge pain in the butt, since the game is approximately 80% voiced lines compared to FGO's 10% (or FEH's maybe 5%). So unless you're playing while connected to WiFi (or be lucky enough to have the option of unlimited mobile data), the game can be murder on you data allowance if it starts download and you don't close the game promptly.

[mikebrand83]

For those who are even vaguely interested, but haven't tried the game yet, right now is a really, REALLY good time to start.

The new gacha has a guaranteed 4* character for your 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th sets of 11 rolls. That means with a little bit of effort, you can get at least four or five 4* units in the span of a week while staying entirely Free-2-Play, without even having to mess around with re-rolling.

[Arraxis]

I'll give the game a go. I rolled Elf Saber at 3* - Saber's VA - and a magical elf lady at 4* who seems to be one of the main characters. I don't want the show so I don't know who they are. lol. It's pretty cool that there's a lot of VA, though. Some of the minor characters just get a grunt in the side story stuff it seems, which is a shame, but almost everything is voiced.

EDIT: Keep in mind that 4* in this is this game's equivalent of 5* in FGO. And there's a lot of different versions of the same characters, even of the same rarity. I have Elf Awakening Lefiya, for example, but she has like 4 4* versions and 2 3* versions.

[mikebrand83]

EDIT: Keep in mind that 4* in this is this game's equivalent of 5* in FGO.

Yup. And Assist characters pretty much play the same role as Craft Essence (boost to basic stats, as well as having special effects).

Also, this game’s equivalent to FGO’s grail and NP is basically combined. Summoning additional copies of the same variants of a character gives you “Bond” tokens, which allows you to limit break them once you’ve maxed out normal leveling. I believe you can also acquire universal Bond tokens as rewards for some events.

[Arraxis]

I was wondering what the bond tokens were for. I was about to ask about them. I got a 4* Assist - the Black Cat Chloe - that nullifies a physical attack apparently. Is that a single attack for the whole run, or does it reset after each battle?

[mikebrand83]

Assist skills are cast at the start of every battle, so 3 times if a run is split into 3 waves.


Talking about physical attacks, the auto-battle AI tends to go Full Retard when it comes to using Bell. After you’ve equipped the Hestia Knife on Bell (which scales with his level) as his weapon, he’s actually an incredibly strong physical striker (even the 1* version the game gives everybody from the start), especially using Rapid Slash to finish off an enemy before they get a chance to counter attack.

You wouldn’t know it from the way the AI uses him though, because it virtually always prioritises Firebolt instead, which only uses his mediocre Magic stats. ???

[Arraxis]

Firebolt is useful only when the enemy is weak versus it~! And I've got a magic heavy comp anyway with my two Loki elves.

[Elvis Strunk]

So I finally decided to download the game and give it a shot. Well, I downloaded it before but didn’t end up doing much. Anyway, I managed to get the 4* version of Bell, as well as Riveria and Hitachi. Also got a 2* version of Liliruca, which isn’t very impressive, but I remember liking her character in what little bits of the show I watched, a couple years back. Haven’t started doing much in the game, not entirely sure where to begin or if I’ll stick with it for too long, but it does seem like they put some pretty good effort into it.