Let’s have a little talk about RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS.

I finally succumbed to the advertising, and downloaded Raid: Shadow Legends. It couldn’t be as bad as everyone made it sound, could it? My Free Company on FFXIV is always making fun of it, and I can kinda see why?

The advertising is pervasive (it kept being played during my German lessons in Duolingo). They paid Youtubers to promote the game, then denied they were paying them.

But those advertisements… finally worked on me.

I downloaded the game. And you know, for a gacha game, it’s not really that bad. Now, going in, I didn’t know exactly what sort of game it was. I thought it might be an RPG where you take a character and go through some sort of plot and at some point come up against a big boss. To some extent, this is what you do. You do form a party, there is a thin story in the campaign mode, and you do come across bosses that you must defeat.

But, this plot is completely subsumed by the overwhelming gacha mechanics.

After your party of heroes is completely overwhelmed by an encounter with a dragon for which they were entirely unprepared, a goddess called “The Arbiter” allows you to resurrect one of them as your hero. These heroes are broadly separated into Tank, Damage and Support roles, and affinities drawn from Spirit, Magic, Force and Void. (Spirit, Magic and Force have a rock-paper-scissors relationship to one another).

You must then battle to defeat enemies and perhaps persuade them to come to your side. Most normal bosses can eventually join your party, along with their minions, making it so that if you have a really tough time against a certain encounter, you may be able to get them to work for you instead of against you.

Like any gacha game, your heroes have different rarities and different ranks. Most of your time in R:SL will be working on ranking up low ranked heroes so that they can be fed to your higher ranked heroes to push them even higher. In a marked difference from the last gacha game I played, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, you don’t need to find duplicate units to rank up a unit; any unit of the same rank will do.

Earlier fights in the campaign can be defeated with any random group of heroes. As you work through the campaign, you’ll find you’ll need heroes of specific affinities in order to move on. Some of the timed events make this explicit: the Ice Golem event I’m playing in the screenshot above comes in several flavors depending on which affinity you’re targeting.

Gear is dropped from battles or bought from the Marketplace. It, too, is ranked and leveled, and it, too, can be leveled up and ranked up. All gear belongs to sets such as Life, Defense, Divine Offense, Life Steal and so on, that improves their abilities based on how many items in that set your champion is wearing.

So this is Raid: Shadow Legends in a nutshell. You go as far as you can with what you’ve got, then you go back and grind up new heroes and new gear until you can move further.

R:SL has plenty of tools to help you with the grind. They allow you 30 “multibattles” per day — entirely automated game play that lets you level up new heroes unattended. All battles can be automated on a battle-by-battle basis as well. The game AI isn’t fantastic, but if this is a grind battle, it’s perfectly adequate.

The “energy” spent in battles comes easily; the “silver” used for upgrades is plentiful; the summoning crystals used to get more food (common heroes) for your champions come easily. There are several quest lines that reward you for gearing up and leveling up your champions. There is an arena system where you can take on other players in a non-interactive, fairly stress-free battle. There is a clan system and various clan-only battles, but as I haven’t joined a clan, I don’t know what they entail, though I imagine it is more of the same.

TL;DR: Raid: Shadow Legends is yet another gacha game out of thousands. The mechanics make it easier to play than most I’ve tried. It’s something to pass the time for awhile. The advertising for the game is amazing, though.