#Yuki Yuna is a Hero: Flower Braid's Sparkle

[vanilla-blessing]

Anime Mobile Game Reviews - Yuki Yuna is a Hero: Flower Braid's Sparkle

For some of the 12 Days of Anime Christmas feature on Vanilla♡Blessing, I’ve taken it upon myself to review the magical girl mobile games I wasted actual real hours of my human life playing using a GameFAQs scoring system. - qb

Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru: Han Yui no Kirameki (Yuki Yuna is a Hero: Flower Braid's Sparkle) is a Japanese mobile game released on iOS and Android to promote the new season of Yuki Yuna, a magical girl anime where the girls have severe disabilities and cry a lot. The eponymous heroes fight monsters called the Vertex to protect the great God Tree and Togo is the one with a worryingly nationalist streak and Yuna is the pink one that punches and they’re girlfriends maybe. It’s basically Glitter Force (PreCure) with more crying and depression.

[Yuki Yuna Muscle Wizard art from the mobile game]

“The mobile game takes place inside the godtree, where the Yuushas are tasked with suppressing the rebelling heavenly gods that are inside the godtree (trapped, I guess?) so they don't break out because if they do the godtree will collapse from lack of divine power and take what's left of the human reality with it. Since they're inside the godtree's world, time is meaningless hence why there's yuushas from all eras.” (source)

This is apparently the backstory but I didn't get any of this while playing it because I can't read Japanese. I think they went to the beach once. The story scenes were mandatory and very long and used the Live-2D arm-wavy and mouth flapping tech that actually looks surprisingly fine for how non-intensive it is. It’s pretty much Yuki Yuna Allstars with multiple copies of characters, although it’s slightly confusing that some of the girls are able to walk in cutscenes when their sprites need mechanical assistance. There’s an absolutely massive amount of motion comic story there, with more on the way, but it seems to be mostly pointless fanservice. It also seems to take place after the events of the unaired second season, which further cements its intended audience as the very hardcore fans.

Lore - 6/10

The gameplay can be described as a line-based defense, where you order teams of auto-attacking magical girls to block waves of enemies that flood in from the left side of the screen, and prevent them from reaching the right side of the screen, sometimes ending on a larger enemy as a boss. Through defeating enemies, you can build up meter to spend on special AOE attacks that you slide to activate, typically clearing many enemies at once. Each stage has three missions that can be cleared for additional rewards, and usually require finishing under a strict time limit instead of the normal one, or finishing a stage without having any magical girls knocked out. Like most of these games, Yuki Yuna has a support system where you can hire another player’s magical girl to round out your team.

[Eventually, most of your teams will end up looking like this.]

Unfortunately, due to a combination of design quirks, the higher difficulty stages have time limits that are stricter than the spawn rate of the enemies, making them literally impossible without abuse of the Critical system. In Yuki Yuna, Criticals happen randomly based on your heroes’ CRIT attribute, and in addition to bonus damage, they add two seconds to your decreasing timer for each hit. This means that many of the game’s systems for rock-paper-scissors elemental affinity, or ranged vs melee, or even higher rarity heroes, take a backseat to cramming as many critical hits into your team as humanly possible in order to survive the time limit, rather than the monsters, who you actually want to stay alive for longer. Since only one magical girl in the entire game has a fast attack speed, ranged projectiles, and a good CRIT stat, your team eventually ends up being 3 copies of her. I don’t even know what her name is. Regardless, the gameplay is honestly pretty fun, and can get to blisteringly fast speeds which cuts down significantly on grinding time.

Mechanics - 8/10

Yuki Yuna was very generous with energy, stocking me up with endless energy refreshing items that I never came close to running out of since level up bonuses stacked, resulting in full refills that went well over the maximum amount, even into later levels. I probably could never get through all of the free energy the game throws at you unless I was playing 24 hours a day. The difficulty system of the game was interesting, but was ultimately made difficult by strange design quirks more than higher monster stats, and was sometimes frustrating to play around. Daily Quests were a choke point, with limited time windows in which to complete them on top of separate, limited resources for entry. These extremely limited quests were also the only consistent source of upgrade materials. Leveling materials (always bags of udon) were plentiful, but the upper limit on the highest rarity heroes seemed to go on forever and require infinite amounts of udon. I only saw a couple players that were willing to attempt to grind the tedious and impractical process of maxing out the levels, and I never saw anyone actually get to max level in my entire time with the game. However, the early stages were quick and I never felt like I had to wait to do anything.

Progression - 7/10

[I think these quests were asking me to complete unreleased content, I never figured it out]

Earning new heroes is done through a gacha system that was very generous at the start of the game’s life, with multiple concurrent login bonuses and plenty of one-time premium currency rewards. I was also able, as a free player, to get all the highest rarity cards I wanted with almost no effort. Considering how terrible the game’s paid rates were, it never felt like I was even expected to spend real money. As the game went on, the persistent quests become increasingly impossible and inscrutable, and a majority of the possible progress I could make towards pulling new magical girls ended up coming down to the login bonus rather than anything I could earn through gameplay. However, I never felt any pressure whatsoever to go beyond free-to-play.

Microtransactions - 9/10

By the law of GameFAQs’ perfect review system, Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru: Han Yui no Kirameki (Yuki Yuna is a Hero: Flower Braid's Sparkle) gets a 40/50. It was an odd, fast-paced action game that had some good aspects, but eventually got bogged down in weird design mechanics and I fell off it after it became nearly impossible to progress. Overall though, I had fun, and it was completely free. The other mobile games i’m planning to review were not nearly as nice. 

- qb magical girl correspondent