A promising anime steampunk gacha | Beta Review - Grand Quest

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Grand Quest is an all-new gacha third person game in a world where magic and technology co-exist. A Closed Beta Test is now open to players in the United States and Japan, with plans for more regions coming in later.

Grand Quest is a gacha game set in a steampunk world full of anime and waifu characters. The art style is impressive and while it features gacha and waifu aspects, they’re not over the top and the characters are not blown out of proportions. Grand Quest is seemingly set in a steampunk universe where there is magic and technology, but the world is clean and pristine looking than most interpretations.

The game features an intriguing story where you are a highly talented arcanist student looking for your missing teacher, meeting all sorts of characters and enemies along the way. The story is investigative in nature and feels like a grand adventure of sorts, fitting the game's title.

The played named main character doesn’t actually fight, he just serves sort of a “supporting” role to the main squad which is composed of three main combatants, three supports, and one reinforcement from friends’ characters. The characters are all upgradable, have different rarities, and have unique ultimate abilities that when activated are presented in an awesome flashy manner – which can be turned off if you wish so.

The story is told in multiple chapters and missions, with the missions mostly composed of battles that players have to beat. The battles are generally played automatically, requiring no player input to control the character’s movements and attacks. But there is some sort of control over the automation of the use of items and abilities. As well as the option to focus fire on a single enemy, focus protection on a single ally, or deplete an enemy’s stamina to be able to stun him for a while, with bonus duration when the shield is “broken”.

Each character has different abilities which are upgradable as well, after an appropriate resource and level has been met. There are also three items that you can carry, which are activated in accordance with the three aforementioned options that characters can do: focus fire, focus protection, and break shield. There is also a weakness system in place that closely resembles a rock paper scissors system.

While Grand Quest can function as an idle game for short instances, it is not a full-on idle game, requiring player input to move across missions and quests, plus an incentive to actively monitor the battle, as automation can only take you so far and using the abilities and skills efficiently will generally result in a better performance.

In between the combat missions are cutscenes and dialogues between the characters, some of which are present in visual novel form, some are presented in a more unique animated comic-book style approach that’d be sure to catch the players’ attention. These cutscenes can be fast forwarded and even fully skipped, so there’s absolutely no need to sit through everything if you’re not interested.

Aside from the main story, there are various side game modes that are more focused on gathering resources and rewards, like Gold Rush, Fission Field, and Cargo Escort. They mostly follow the same gameplay format which is participating in combat with your squad.

You can upgrade everything in this game as part of the progression: your characters, weapons, skills, and participate in a gacha system where you can spend in-game resources and real money to draw characters.

Since this is a closed beta test, note that not everything is finalized. Nevertheless, in the current state of the game, I was able to complete a couple of chapters and unlock various game modes with ease. There are no energy limiting systems I’ve encountered so far and this bodes well for the future of this game. So far, this game is promising and I hope they refine it even more.

As for technical issues, I have encountered various performance hiccups during my play, even if I was playing on the lowest settings. Granted, I was using a 2018 android flagship to play the game. Gameplay wise, my only gripe is the absurd hard to use targeting system when manually using the “focus fire” gameplay mechanic on the 'Goods Defense' game mode. Resulting in some pretty frustrating moments when I am trying to target a specific enemy.

Conclusion:

Grand Quest is a fun third person gacha game with a mysterious story and a gameplay that is both fun to play and watch. This is a promising title, and I hope the developers fine tune this game more upon release, to completely stand out among the already highly saturated gacha game market.