When I started writing about it Arknights Last year I had completed three quarters of the main story. In every way, I considered myself a bit of an expert on this gacha tower defense game and basically considered it real-time chess with anime catgirls. Many months later I realize that I was very, very wrong. It’s not chess. Despite its emphasis on tactical strategy, this is real Arknights should be played at lightning speed.
One reason this has taken a while to realize is mastering Arknights is inherently timed, no matter how good you are at existing strategy games. That’s because the rarest gacha characters have pretty low drop rates, and even if I was lucky enough to get a rare, it can take weeks of resource farming to fully unlock their abilities. And you’re going to want that, as each character’s unique unlockable abilities give them a completely different role in team composition. I played a careful planning game until I figured out what their most unique niche was. But the real fun came from the quick improvisation.
I started playing with less rare characters for one simple reason: Rare characters are more expensive to invest in. Since the starter characters had fewer (and easier) abilities, they also made it impossible for me to adapt the popular strategies I saw on Youtube.
But these Three and Four Star Characters (which I affectionately call interns) are decent. In fact, the three-star Kroos can do more damage than four-star characters in its class. But in ArknightsNo damage per second everything. Can a character hit multiple enemies at once? Can they hold multiple lanes? Do they have the cooldown to kill an elite enemy, retreat, and then do it all over again? Are they cheap to use or do I have to wait for the mount points to regenerate? These were not questions that I had to answer in the initial phase.
Despite completing four story chapters in the first few months, I didn’t really understand the meta, so I mostly stuck with my favorite interns. I planned the maps carefully, but I really only had one strategy: block all exit points with hulking defenders, protect them with healers, and surround them with snipers. It seemed like an absolutely foolproof plan! That is, until the tougher bosses came along. I’ve tried to slow them down with slower, quick-response characters. My snipers were working overtime to keep up with the rate at which enemies were breaching my defenses. I got away with it for a very long time because Cuora is one of the bulkiest defenders in the game. I had counted on her to stick with my entire strategy.
Then one day I failed using a strategy guide. It was devastating. I didn’t have the exact specialist character the streamer used and I had paid dearly for it. My best girl Cuora let me down. Or did she? I had always followed a heavily defensive strategy rather than a flexible approach focused on gunning down most enemies before they could ever reach them.
There is a huge divide in gacha communities as to why they should invest in certain characters. Some invest in their favorite personalities, while others are committed to the “current” gameplay meta. While paying attention to the usability discussions, I assumed that each character is interchangeable within their archetype, barring the performance differences in their rarities. This was a mentality encouraged by older gacha games like the launch build of Fire Emblem Heroeswhere characters were no more complex than stat batons you would use to beat your enemies.
I was also put off by how the gacha community was approaching Arknights. In almost every single game in this genre, communities maintain rankings of which characters are the best in their respective niches, which is important for planning which characters to spend premium currency on. I went to websites to research which characters were worth the investment and which weren’t. As a result, I’ve overlooked a lot of units with specialist roles.
Arknights is a strategy game where great units can’t make up for a mediocre tactician. It would require a lot of resources, but I couldn’t really figure out what these characters’ niches were unless I spent weeks investing in each one. So I stopped playing the main campaign for a few months and focused on grinding. while before New events often overwhelmed me, I could finally walk in blind. It wasn’t because I knew the enemies or the maps. That was because I knew my characters’ strengths and weaknesses well enough to know exactly what to do with them. Even if the map spawned a surprise horde or an uncomfortable intruder, I would neutralize surprise with my confidently aggressive tactics. I was no longer a general under siege trying to hold a fortress through a battle of attrition, but a warmaster creating my own ways to break the enemy’s offensive.
When freezing slugs crawl onto my base, I send Lapland to silence them before they hit my chokepoint. Multiple enemies with heavy armor? Silverash can melt through her defenses even when there’s a wall in her way. If my guard wasn’t dealing enough damage, I would turn off Warfarin’s ability to turn her from being a pure healer to a sacrificial attack buffer. The game is so balanced that even the “weaker” units have a unique role to play, such as being cheap enough to use early on.
When I really know what I’m doing, I get into a flow state where I play cards at double speed. I finally understood why the most common criticism of his strongest offensive character was “Surtr makes the game too easy.” Tactics aren’t needed when your attacker is simply erasing enemies from the map. Recently I’ve also removed Surtr from my teams or switched to her weaker second skill. Time and failure have made me a better strategist than the newbie who’s been trying to get them for months.
Who knows what kind of player I’ll be next year?
