Worst Gacha Ever | Evertale

Have you ever wondered what it’d be like if Pokemon were a horror game? Because that’s what Evertale advertises itself as. And, admittedly.. that’s about as far from accurate as you can get.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome to the first episode of “Worst Gacha Ever.” A series where we play through every single Gacha game and analyze what the game does right.. and what it does wrong.

Evertale is publicly known to advertise itself as something it isn’t. You’ll find advertisements all over the internet attempting to trick potential players into believing that this is in fact a horror-esque Pokemon game.
On the contrary, the game is a very light-hearted, cute Anime-RPG, with little frog people, furries, and a whole lot of booooba. Literally, so, much, booba.
Upon logging into the game – they remind you of all the booba you haven’t yet spent money failing to obtain. Every Boss fight in the Tower of Trials consists of scantily clad women. The most overpowered characters you can recruit channel the power of booba to grow even more powerful.
And while I’ve played quite a few Gacha games recently, I daresay this is the most blatant use of oversexualization in an attempt to convince players to spend money I’ve seen yet.

Evertale revolves around generic RPG hero #642: Finn. A kind, compassionate brown haired sword-fighter that also happens to be a human-magnet for the hottest women on the planet.
Finn is a weak, completely useless 3 star character. When beginning the game I was of the impression that I should attempt to max out his level. Boost him. Equip him with the best gear I could obtain, because he’s the main character. Evidently he’s going to be an important, integral part of every team composition.
Boy was I wrong. Finn is a 3 star character, and no matter what you do – no matter what happens in-game, Finn remains a 3 star character. There is no ascending him to a higher class – a higher quality. Meaning he’s restricted to being level 30, has no access to Mastery. Limit Breaks. Awakenings. Potential.
He’s one of the most useless characters you’ll come across, and I wish I’d known this at the start before wasting so much time and effort into various 3 star characters I’d recruited. You know if it were a female main character she’d have a slew of upgrades. Alternate outfits. Anything to incentivize players to spend money to keep her relevant.

Let’s talk about your Units real quick. By selecting the Units tab, you’ll have access to the Forge, your Inventory, Mercenaries, your Battalion, the Power Up section, Fellowship and Story team.
The forge is pretty self explanatory. You can convert your characters – duplicates you don’t want to use to Awaken heroes into items.
Your inventory – thus far, seemed more or less useless to me. You can use it to keep track of how many of which item you have I guess.
Mercenaries are heroes you can equip and select, allowing your friends to use them if and when they need.
Your Battalion lets you create various different Platoons, each with their own characters, weapons, accessories. Platoons are used, as an example, for content like the Tower of Trials.
You can upgrade your characters using the Power Up tab. You can Awaken them, Boost them, increase their Potential. Limit Break them, level them up, and increase their Mastery, providing beneficial elemental advantages.
You can do more or less the exact same thing for your weapons, with the exception of Mastery. Providing a surplus of options to increase your heroes’ statistics across the board.
The Fellowship gives you advantages dependent on how many times each hero has been Awakened.
And finally, you have your Story team. This is where you form your group to tackle the main narrative of the game with. You select your party composition, equip their weapons, their accessories. And then you jump straight into the main story.

The narrative you follow isn’t bad. It’s a fairly basic story – one that I’ll admit didn’t retain my attention for too long.
You’re thrown into a linear world straight out of a JRPG from the 90s. There’s no overworld, but you have full control over your character at all times. You move through a variety of different areas, each with their own unique aesthetic.
Deserts. Snowy mountains. Forests. Weird.. other dimensional rifts in space and time. Each area had grass you could encounter monsters within – like in Pokemon. You run into the grass, and after several steps you encounter an enemy that takes you into a separate, instanced encounter window.
You don’t catch the monsters you engage out in the wild, though. Rather, you encounter NPCs out in the world. Via the story, and through Summoning. Those are characters – monsters you can recruit.
Each area is connected via a town. You move from town to town, with each town consisting of 2 screens in total: The initial load-in, a short, horizontal map that leads you to a building on the far right, and then a building where you talk to the NPC that takes you to the next zone, which leads you to the next town.
And that sums up the entire game, more or less. The narrative pushes you through to new areas, that are blocked off until you visit the town and unlock them. You can buy weapons in towns, but they were so inferior to what I obtained through Summoning that I didn’t bother.

Summoning is where you’ll really become unbelievably frustrated with the game, and come to realize that you’re probably better off wasting your time and money in something else.
Gacha rates, from what I found online, come in at a mere 1% for SSR units. I’m almost level 80 as of recording this, having played it for the last 2 weeks, and I’ve thus far acquired not a single SSR character.
Googling around, the sentiment seems to more or less mirror my own: The rates are horrible. Having low rates doesn’t incentivize me to spend more money to obtain the characters I want.
On the contrary, it makes me feel like it would be a waste of money, and instead, turn me away from spending anything on it because I know how unlikely it would be for me to successfully obtain what I want.
This might not necessarily be as bad if there were a Pity system in place, but there isn’t. Which means you’re not guaranteed an SSR character.. ever. You can go weeks, months, years and not obtain a single high-rarity unit.
But I mean.. they definitely know how to appeal to their playerbase. Looking through all the banners available – all you see are hot waifu-bait. Every time you log into the game, they throw hot waifu’s in your face, as if that’ll influence your… hey, what’re you doing! No! Don’t give in to temptation!
C’mon, man.

Outside of pursuing the main story, you have a selection of activities to partake of via the Battalion Warfare function.
War of the Realms.. no, wait, that’s locked. Alliance Quests.. which our Alliance is too low to really do much with. I probably shouldn’t have been randomly clicking “join” on every Alliance. The Tower of Trials, which is a mode that auto-battles waves of enemies for you.
Every minute you accumulate currency and XP that you can obtain by clicking the chest in the middle of the screen. You can use the Exploration feature to obtain additional rewards. You can also Fast Forward to obtain even more rewards atop those. Totaling an exorbitant amount of resources.
And most importantly, you can challenge tower bosses – I made it to Floor 57 before hitting a wall and being unable to progress any further. At that juncture, the cute little schoolgirl you see there absolutely stomped me. And I’m not saying I was entirely against it. I mean look at her.
But she made it look like the first 56 floors were an introductory tutorial.
The Arena is.. well, a mode where you deploy units to auto-engage other players’ units in auto-PvP. I’d say it requires skill and strategy but that’d be a blatant lie.
There are Raids present, but even at almost 3,000,000 Combat Power, I was too low to participate.

There’s a Training Dojo. Admittedly, I didn’t really do anything with this as I didn’t really have an affinity with my Charizard. I know Ash would be disappointed in me but every new season he ditched his Pokemon, so I feel as though he has no room to talk.
You’re given a pre-selected team, and have to defeat enemies to obtain currency and items to Awaken your pet if you still use it. Which I don’t. So again, it felt a little useless to bother with.

And finally, there are events. Things like The Day of Dragonfire, Kiss of the Vicious Rose, Grove of Wishes. These were events that were going on as I was recording footage, anyway.
Each event consists of a story associated with it and a sequence of battles one after the other. What you’d expect, honestly.

Do I have to mention that there are dailies? Because there are dailies. “Use x Mana, Fast Forward, Fight in the Arena, Win an Alliance Quest.”
Completing Daily missions earns you additional currency, so you can upgrade your heroes and your weapons further.
You have daily login bonuses to incentivize logging in.. well, daily. And that’s about it.

I invested 2 weeks into Evertale. After seeing advertisements for it everywhere online, depicting it as some type of dark horror Pokemon, I was intrigued.
It turns out it was merely false advertising in an attempt to sell itself as something that it wasn’t. And that was the first red flag.
Graphically, Evertale actually looked pretty damn good. Waifu’s look fantastic. Environments looked detailed. There was enough in terms of varied biomes that it always felt like you were genuinely in different areas of the world.
Combat was manual-exclusive for story battles, along with NPC battles you’d encounter out in the world, which I appreciated. Auto-combat was activated for random encounters, the Tower of Trials and other lesser important game modes.
There was a lot to do, with plenty of reasons to continue to log in daily.
However with its horrendous lack of Pity and Gacha rates, it’s such a terrible experience that becomes progressively more difficult as you begin to realize you’re highly inhibited by your team of heroes that would be so much more powerful had they just implemented a Pity system in the first place.

Is Evertale the worst Gacha game of 2022? Hardly. They have a shady, underhanded, downright scammy approach to advertising which is an issue I found immediately, and that alone is cause for me to never recommend this game to anyone.
And other than its rates and lack of Pity.. it’s actually a fairly average game.