I considered making this an April Fool's joke, describing Goddess of Victory: Nikke as an action shooter you can play on your phone with one hand, how the characters have great designs with thighs thicker than their waists and breasts bigger than their heads, and how you can experience great storytelling, like having a threesome with a couple of bunny girls. And it's not that any of the above is untrue. I did initially pick this game up as something casual I could play while sitting on the can, because clearly a game that sells itself on fanservice and gameplay consisting of looking at five pairs of jiggling asscheeks can't have any depth or difficulty to it, right? Well, for better or worse, I've been playing this for a year now, and I now take it competitively enough that I can rarely bring myself to play it on a phone anymore.
But let's get serious. What kind of game is Nikke? Sure, it's a gacha game, but that only describes the monetization system, not the gameplay. More on that later. If you look at the gameplay, then at a surface level, you could say it's a third-person shooter. You control a team of five characters (Nikkes) crouching behind cover, and aim at waves of enemies, occasionally taking cover to dodge incoming attacks. Some stages are instead boss stages, but they function mostly the same, with perhaps a few slightly more complex mechanics.
But this isn't really what the game is about. You see, each character has a role to play in a party, and has several passive and one active ability. The real game is assembling these parties, depending on the different restrictions, advantages, and disadvantages various game modes and stages have. There are over 120 characters in the game (so far), and I quite actively use about 40 of them. And it's not just about choosing which characters go together, as each character has several different ways to upgrade them, but the pace of aquiring materials for these upgrades is not as fast as the pace of new characters coming out. New characters who may or may not replace one of the 40 I'm currently using and building up. This forces me to also make decisions on which characters I can expect will stick around in the meta for longer, and which will be replaced soon, distributing my resources accordingly.
There is still skill involved in the shooting part of the game, knowing which enemies to target, where the weak spots on bosses are, and when to activate your active abilities, which is why I rarely play on a phone anymore. A lot of the combat is actually difficult, which is rare to see in a mobile game, but very welcome. The difficulty is largely artificial, gated by stats, which is gated by materials, which is gated by play time, but there is still a very meaningful difference in how far someone can get based on their skill. And so opinions may vary, but I do consider Nikke to be more of an idle/incremental management than a shooter game.
Of course, a lot of people are put off by gacha, so I think it's fair to discuss how progression works in this game, and how monetization ties into it. As most gacha games, progress is gated behind daily income, carefully controlled by the developers. You're expected to log in daily if you want to maximize your progression. At first, progression is fast, and you can spend several hours playing every day, but that slows down the further in you get, eventually reaching 0.5 to 1 hours average per day. Mind you, you still get well over a hundred hours of gameplay on the first month, which itself should be enough if you don't care to continue at a slower pace. For me, half an hour is a great amount of time to avoid burnout while still offering variety and something to look forward to each day.
Progression happens by aquiring new characters for gems that you get from many places in the game, and then by building those characters. There's a different game mode for each type of progression your character can have. Campaign has one-time battles and permanent progression in two different difficulty modes that you have to "push" to earn passive income to increase character levels. Simulation Room gives skill level up materials. Interception gives equipment materials. And Union and Solo Raid each give another different type of equipment material. It took me about six months to max out how many rewards I get each day from Solo Raid, nine months for the Simulation Room and to beat the normal mode of Campaign. It will probably take another few months to max out Interception rewards, over a year more to finish the hard mode of Campaign, and for some rewards of Union and Solo Raid, you're ranked against other players, so you'll never get to the top. As time goes on, more and more is added, so it will take even longer if you start playing now. That is to say, you'll feel like you're progressing towards new heights for a very long time, whether or not that is something you like.
While technically almost all of these materials are purchasable for real money, everything except gems is very expensive for how little you get. A 6 euro subscription gets you a bit more than a week's worth of gems each month, and each progression material alone is roughly five times as expensive. A new character you want comes out about every 2-3 weeks, which is enough time to earn the gems to get that character for free because the odds are extremely generous. Duplicates give a very minor boost to power and are not necessary at all. So, for dedicated players, buying gems doesn't help much, and buying other materials will require several hundreds invested each year to see a noticable difference. What I want to say is, you don't need to pay, as long as you play, because very few people are willing to pay enough to beat you by paying more. They mostly beat you by having played longer. I genuinely believe that most of their revenue (excluding the top 0.1% of spenders) comes from selling skins.
All of this isn't too important anyways, as most of the game is PvE. The PvP mode is not very popular, as it matches you with people who started at the same time, leaving you forever out of the top ranks if you ever decide to take a break from the game. The only rewards there for ranking well are gems anyways. So if you're a casual player and don't care about getting every character that comes out, you can ignore PvP, skip dailies as you see fit, and just progress at your own pace. If you're competitive and actually care about your performance, you'll get enough to perform well just by playing every day and planning well.
Oh, and a quick shoutout to the story, music, and art. The characters are lovely animated 2D sprites with insane levels of detail. It feels like they're 4k resolution, with individual stocking threads being rendered at high enough zoom levels, and like a hundred moving parts and small details or texts on the characters' clothes and bodies. I know that's the main initial draw of the game, but it's an absolute pleasure to look at.
The music is easily in the top 3 among game OSTs I've heard, with hundreds, if not over a thousand different tracks. New campaign chapters get their own album. Each boss gets their own music. Each area gets their own music. Each menu gets their own music. It's crazy.
And while the story isn't that stellar, it's consistently enjoyable, and definitely good as far as stories in videos games go. What I like the most though is that it's concise. Other gacha games should take note. Very little filler. No bloated dialogue. No annoying companion overexplaining everything you've just experienced.
This review turned out longer than I would have liked, but if any recent game deserves it, it's this. It is by far my most played game over the past year, and I see myself playing it for at least a year more. I would highly recommend it for fans of idle games who want a bit less idling, and a bit more gameplay, management, and just overall thinking. Alternatively, you can come for the voluptous waifus, I won't judge. Paying is entirely optional as the game has very generous gacha rates. And everything that is not gameplay is well done too. It can be daunting to get into live service games after they've been accumulating content for 2.5 years, but I don't think anyone's too late to join yet. I'm sure the barrier to entry will increase as time goes on, and the playerbase will decrease, as is the norm with live service games, but Nikke is one of the few games that has been slowly increasing in popularity after launch, so I remain hopeful for at least a couple more years.
