Gacha game recommendations friendly to F2P (2024)

What are some solid gacha games that are friendly to F2P and easy to catch up on. Just had two new additions to the family and I find that my time to play games right now needs to fit into 5-10 minute bursts and quite often single handed while one arm has a sleeping baby.

I have a Switch for the times that both hands are free so I'm not terribly interested in full fledged mobile games and I actually like Gacha mechanics. So please I don't need convincing that I should be playing Civ VI or FTL on my phone instead of Gacha games. This is meant to be nothing more than a quick distraction.

So far I'm into Puzzle and Dragons and Fire Emblem Heroes but inevitably there's some downtime with both games and I wouldn't mind starting a third so I'm not baited to spend money. I love the team building and Match 3 mechanics in PAD while I enjoy the pseudo-PvP aspect of FEH building defenses that other real players attack.

I've tried Fate and Dragalia and haven't been too fond of them. Both are too heavy on story and demanding on a phone battery. I'm not sure I like the RTS style in Dragalia and Fate just didn't click, mostly because it was a lot of fluff around little gameplay.

Thanks!

EMT0 said:

Honestly OP, everything has a gacha game. You're better off listing some of your favorite IPs so we can give you recommendations based on that

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Hmmm; I've never been hard core into FF so I never gave Brave Exius a spin. I'm a big Nintendo fan but FE Heroes seems to be the only old
IP doing that. I'm into the Marvel cinematic universe. But really Puzzle and Dragons is kind of a non-IP franchise (minus the collabs) and I loved jumping into that. Point being I don't really care about the IP too much it's more about the gameplay, F2P generosity, and sleek menus making it easy to load and get a quick play session in.

I'd suggest Mobius Final Fantasy. Have played for a year and never spent a dime.

It might start slow but as you play you will find to have a good amount of freedom to play when you want to.

Kalentan said:

I'd suggest Mobius Final Fantasy. Have played for a year and never spent a dime.

It might start slow but as you play you will find to have a good amount of freedom to play when you want to.

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What's the gameplay style? Turn based RPG? How is it different than Brave Exius (or is the same thing?)

I would recommend Granblue pretty easily. I've spent a little money there but I was F2P for more than a year and a half without complaint.

I do think a lot of its structure is similar to Dragalia and you said you didn't like that. Granblue doesn't eat battery like Dragalia though. Granblue has a lot going for it in characters, music, game design, and story. I'm not sure what you dislike about the story in Dragalia but I definitely liked Granblue's story better.

lt519 said:

What's the gameplay style? Turn based RPG? How is it different than Brave Exius (or is the same thing?)

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Never played Brave Exius but it is turned based but you control only one character. The main gameplay loop is unlocking the tons of FF Classes and FF cards (skills) and combing the two. There's a fair bit of depth to knowing what's best and as it adds more mechanics like a sub deck (job changing) that you can do in battle. It's got a fairly interesting setting and story that gets better as it goes on and features good ENG dubbing for the most part.

Graphically it's one of the bests.

Edit: to give examples of classes, there's non specific ones like Red Mage, Warrior, and Paladin and so on but then there's cool unique ones like the FF14 Paladin which works different than the standard Mobius Paladin.

Fantasy Life Online if you're willing to learn to play it in Japanese

Decent gacha rates and freebies

Qvoth said:

Buriedbornes

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A rouge-like seems to go against the Gacha style collection of units I'm going for.

TheBryanJZX90 said:

I would recommend Granblue pretty easily. I've spent a little money there but I was F2P for more than a year and a half without complaint.

I do think a lot of its structure is similar to Dragalia and you said you didn't like that. Granblue doesn't eat battery like Dragalia though. Granblue has a lot going for it in characters, music, game design, and story. I'm not sure what you dislike about the story in Dragalia but I definitely liked Granblue's story better.

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Honestly it was more the RTS that I didn't like in Drgalia, I never really enjoy managing multiple units on a battlefield or moving in a top down space. Turn based is more my jam. The story was fine, I also just prefer a minimal non intrusive story, PAD literally has no story and I've pressed skip on every piece of dialogue in FE Heroes since I've started it.

It really depends on the type of "F2P Friendly" you're talking about.

Because there are two gacha games I've played that are F2P friendly but in different ways.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper is a fun ATB style battle game. No real plot to speak of. It's F2P Friendly because it's gacha rates are rather high compared to a lot of these sorts of games, you get a guaranteed SSR if you do a 10 pull, and the game throws tons upon tons of free currency at you by this point.

The other is Fate/Grand Order. Which has hilariously low gacha rates, splits the gacha between gear and units, and is rather stingy with currency. On the other hand, it's F2P because rarity does not matter near as much. You can clear all the content the game has with just the units you can get from the "Free" gacha. Plus the game will periodically give you free SR units with events and several of these units are literally some of the best in the game.

Of course, FGO is hilariously story heavy (you skip through FEH's plot which is fine as it's beasiclaly pointless, this is not the case for FGO.) The story is actually a big part of its appeal and most of the rolling people do on the gacha has little to do with gameplay power so much as them coming to love that character through its plot

Mozendo said:

I loved, Super Monster League and Knights Chronicles.
The reason why I don't play them now is because after a certain amount of time the game just turns a bit to grindy for me, but I still put over 100 hours and you can get premium currency by just playing normally.

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Super Monster League seems up my ally.

ByteCulture said:

Epic7 you get like 30000 diamonds per month and it looks and plays awesome

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This looks like it fits the bill as well.

Are there active Era communities for either of these or y'all go to Reddit for them.

Epic7 has amazing animations and an actually good story, so it is a good pick. I do have to give the usual gacha disclaimer about it having a few fan service heavy character designs, but it isn't the most egregious I have seen.

Dragalia Lost is fun and charming. Some people think it gets repetitive after a month or two, but I strongly encourage you to try it out. The devs give out a lot of free summons as compensation too.

I think both games have pretty active Era communities, and there are multiple ResetEra guilds in Epic7.

Granblue is almost painfully f2p friendly, to the point where the paid progression path can take the equivalent of thousands of dollars to even compete with the f2p options, but if you get into it, you'll find yourself needing more than brief 10 minute blocks of play.

You can enjoy reading the story events and main quest without much effort, though.

Dragalia and Fire Emblem Heroes.

Hortensia Saga if u know japanese.^_^

Personally the only gatcha game I like is star wars galaxy of heroes.
The game is very "friendly" with f2p as long as you don't mind the getting most OP new chars the 2nd time around.
So what is the gameplay:
It is a turn based combat, you use 5 characters. The game has the usual buffs, debuted,etc. The cool part is that each faction has a different play style. For example rebels hit hard and have a lot of counters. Sith usually stun and debuff hard. Imperial troopers become stronger each time they kill an enemy target.
Game modes:
The game is mostly single player, the multiplayer Is mostly leaderboard, you never gave another player directly

• Campaign- levels made for you to grind gear and chars. Generally very easy once you level up. Divided in light side and dark side battles
• Arena - you have 5 mins to battle. The higher you go on the leaderboard the higher the payout.
• Cantina - levels where you can use both light side and dark side chars. Gives different chars
• Galactic war- 12 nodes of teams for you to beat daily. Hard until you have a few strong teams.
• Events -every day there is usually an event where you have to use X faction and it gives some rewards. This is late game and you will probably miss them a lot.
• Legendary events - the most powerful character return every few months. Luke, Yoda, revan,etc this means every month generally has around 2 legendary chars. They require specific teams to unlock so the first time legendary char is added you are not going to unlock it.
• Guild raids: there are 3 raids. These are generally very very hard.
• Guild events: every week there is a guild event, either guild Vs pve or guild Vs guils

Another cool thing is that whenever a new char is added you get an event to try it out and you also get the char at 3 stars (you can leveled to 7 stars after a while)

Edit - in my opinion it is f2p friendly because the game allows you to unlock everything by playing for free, you can probably complete most of the roster in 2 years, less if you are really good. I play for around 1 year and I am just missing the 2 newest chars. (Obviously I don't have the resources to make every char viable at the highest level). Paying literally just makes you have stuff sooner.

lt519 said:

Super Monster League seems up my ally.

This looks like it fits the bill as well.

Are there active Era communities for either of these or y'all go to Reddit for them.

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Just a typo its 3000 Diamonds... its like 30 Pulls a month. I already got some of the strongest characters for free +/- some of the special events

But this is the Reset Era Thread

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ep...-1-25-better-than-dragalia-losts-rates.76399/