Grand Alliance – 2020 First Impressions and Thoughts

After playing through so many terrible games recently, it’s refreshing to play through something that just doesn’t suck.
Now right off the bat we’re introduced to the game with an animated cinematic and plenty of story. We’re introduced to the main cast of characters and the characters look great.
Then we’re thrown directly into a small tutorial battle – a tutorial which actually only lasts a few minutes, which was refreshing. I hate when tutorials take 20, 30 minutes to get through. I know how to play mobile games, man!

Speaking of battle, the game like most mobile games take place predominantly within instanced battles. You have Missions, you have Chapters. It’s about what you’d expect.
Each Chapter, each Mission has a story that pushes you through it to unlock new areas, to unlock new characters. The Gacha rates from what I noticed were pretty bad though. I did over 20 rolls I think, and got.. pretty much no heroes.
Which was weird considering traditionally at the beginning of games they give you a handful of mediocre characters and say “here ya go. These are the kinds of things you CAN get if you spend money on me!”
But that was fine. The heroes I got were more than fine. The zones you could enter were interesting. They allowed for you to freely roam around the area, engaging different groups of monsters and – well, speaking of the combat..

I mean the combat itself isn’t bad. It isn’t as flashy as I’m used to in more modern mobile games but your abilities still felt like they had a bit of substance.
I’m a fan of both turn-based and action combat in mobile games. But at the same time, Grand Alliance didn’t actually allow for me to fight myself. Instead, I would direct my heroes around the map and cycle through their available abilities.
I couldn’t actually attack outside of the couple different abilities per character. And interestingly enough, the characters themselves didn’t have unique abilities. You had a selection of abilities that you could equip on your heroes before deploying them in battle.
This made heroes feel.. less like actual individuals? I guess. Since I had several characters all with the same skills. Granted, sure, this made it easier for me to find the perfect team as I wasn’t as limited by “OP heroes” per se, but it made collecting them feel pointless outside of their base statistical advantages.

Graphically the game looked pretty good. The environments looked good, the character models – both in-game and during the story were pretty high quality. They’re very reminiscent of many games I’ve seen in the past so they didn’t really stand out but the females were as hot as ever.
I think the only issue I actually had with the game was the fact that it heavily encouraged me to auto-play it. Literally as soon as I entered the game it was like “This is how you auto-play,” followed by “auto-play is the best way to play the game – I’M JUST SAYING!”
So I let it auto-play for me and ended up enjoying it less than I would have otherwise. That’s one of the things I really enjoyed about Guardian Tales – the fact that there was no auto-play when first running through the game and the areas.

Overall, I found that Grand Alliance was a solid game. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing special but it looked and played pretty well. Well enough where I could definitely consider including it in a “top RPGs on mobile” list, but I don’t believe it’s good enough to warrant more of my time unfortunately.