A Veteran Stans Honkai Impact 3rd

I've got about a thousand logins on this game, so I do have a bias, but for a good reason and I'll try to be fair in my review.

Story

From my experience guiding new players through the game, it could take anywhere from a couple weeks to a month and a half to get caught up with the story where it is now. Admittedly, the presentation is a bit rough to start, given it was made in 3D action format for the average phones of 2015. Early on, it relied somewhat on out of game manga, visual novels, and animations to support the story, most of which are very good and high quality imo. What you get for your time is a fantastic, heartfelt experience, with amazing character development and maturity. I don't think anything else has me so happy to cry. Also, it has the best portrayal of a villain in anything I've seen or read. Every arc has one or two fantastic, true to drawn-anime-style animated shorts, and if you decide not to play the game I would *highly* recommend to go check them out even though they're spoilers cause if youre not gonna play, you'd never see them anyways. It takes a lot of time to go through at this point but I don't think you will regret a single hour of it by the time you're done.

Gameplay

The gameplay is action-based 3D combat sortof like a fighter game, but more casual for the majority of non-competitive content. The combat is super snappy and satisfying, especially the bullet time. At first, you usually start with older Valkyrie battlesuits that aren't quite up to the modern standard, but it feels good as you use newer and newer ones and the feedback and feel of the gameplay gets smoother and more responsive. There's plenty of opportunity to try new or recent battlesuits, and usually newbie events will hand out free S-Rank Valkyries (SSR/5*), and it's also common for recruitment events to give them our for free. The main appeal of the game to me is the story and fun, wacky limited time events, of which the best ones sometimes have reruns for new players after a couple years. There are also competitive PvEvP gamemodes which can provide a great challenge, but as a f2p player or light spender, don't expect to get to the top of the leaderboards without a lot of effort.

Gacha

Overall I'd say the game is very f2p friendly, so long as climbing the leaderboards isn't your impetus for playing the game. The gacha has hard pity garuntees and a soft pity mechanic, so 99% of players have the uprate characters by 90/100 pulls. HI3rd is made by the devs of Genshin Impact, Hoyoverse/Mihoyo, so I'll use genshin as a comparison point. Hard pity is 100 rather than 180 for characters, so crystals are about the same value as primos. however, generally Honkai is much more generous and characters and gear is more accessible. You can expect to see half a dozen banners at the same time, typically, instead of 2 or 3. Also, it's not uncommon to see banners that rotate through 9 characters and 15 gear sets in two weeks, which makes everything easier to get. For an example of how gacha rates are better, a piece of featured equipment (4* base, equivelent of SSR/5* in genshin) is garunteed every 10 pulls in a gear banner, and that equipment is already at max potential - no need to farm for special unique materials, and no need to pull dupes to refine them. a gacha 5* weapon can be upgraded to its max 6* form with zero crystals spent. You do need 4 gear pieces for the full set, but aside from being able to trade dupes for the right gears, typically there are comparable f2p craftable/farmable alternatives that can be used, and mix-and-match is much more viable in Honkai than genshin and can result in wacky and fun builds, some of which can even change competitive meta. Also, Its not uncommon to see big events hand out like 20+ pulls and free outfits or free 5* valks, not counting farmable crystals and other mats from the events.

Conclusion

Overall, I'd super recommend giving it a try. Please play until chapter 9 if you're not feeling the story yet, which can be done in a day or two (the 34 at the time of writing chapters get significantly longer as you progress), or like I recommended, go watch some of the animated shorts if you feel like you're probably not going to try it. I'm not overstating when I say this game has had a big impact on my life and it means so much to how I view media and empathize. I hope you can enjoy it as much as I have.