— #Gacha #Review —

6/6
Love and Deepspace — First Impression Review

This is a tough one.
Allow me to summarize the whole thing with: "Great concepts and some very well-made elements, but also full of terrible ones. The true reason for which it is so popular and profitable while being so flawed, is that there is no other game in the market that gets close to what Love and Deepspace does, thus having an absolute monopoly."

I want to use a more bullet-list style for this, as I can't be bothered to go into writing a full-fledged review for what, at the end of the day, is just a first impression review.

Pro:
+ Insane graphics, with one of the best skin renders that I've ever seen in a video game, especially with sweat/wet effects. Absolutely stunning.
+ Good English voice acting
+ Good writing of character dynamics in the main story (with the protagonist reacting in quite natural and human ways to what would be the usual otome tropes)
+ Beautiful chill OSTs
+ Great backgrounds
+ Good customizations and environments
+ Possibility to have custom widgets
+ A lot of different features, such as minigames and texting.

Cons:
- The visuals are dragged down by the fact that they're too heavy for most phones and the game is not available on PC. And the lower resolution looks like absolute shit, with a lot visible artifacts.
- The combat system is pretty pointless, and the lack of PC port is an issue here as well as said combat system seems to have been though for being played with a controller.
- Combat also comes with a lot of levelling and equipment mechanics, which in their turn come with pointless farming stages. Additionally, the combat uses the screen horizontally, causing a weird switch between horizontal and vertical every time that you go in and out of it.
- The login takes an insane amount of time, which makes the whole experience worse also since changing application temporarily (such as going to a message app) might result in the game requiring to login again.
- Extremely low amount of pulls.
- Scenes (especially intimate ones) with characters are locked behind the gacha mechanic.
- The cast of characters is not very varied, with them even being sufficiently stereotypical.

Conclusions:
At its core, Love and Deepspace is a dating sim with insane visuals, and the gacha mechanic can even have a conceptually good way of making the quantity of content feel less overwhelming. However, the low amount of pulls combined with the drop rates and the fact that it is not always possible to choose for which character to pull, results in players missing out on details and lore about the characters.
Its other dating sim mechanics are pretty varied and quite good, but everything regarding combat is awful.
Normally, these issues related to gacha and combat/farming would push a lot of players away, but when there is no competition whatsoever for such a visually beautiful dating sim, they will have no choice but to remain.
One could think that one day we will have a LADS-killer, but as of now that seems unlikely, as all major companies and nations making mobage refuse to see the potential and the amount of return of investment for high budget otome games, probably due to an unwillingness to make this kind of content for a female audience even if it is clearly profitable.