Blue Archive

46% of the longer reviews discuss the change, more than any other theme. As reviewers describe it, the old spark let you pick any featured student after 200 pulls, shared across banners running at the same time. The new system gives a 50/50 chance at the featured student, guarantees it by 200 pulls, and resets once you get it. Players complain that they lose the choice when two or more banners run together, that securing two students can take up to 400 pulls, and that leftover currency no longer converts into upgrade materials. "The old system rewarded you for getting lucky early. The new system can punish you for it."

Reviewers also point to what arrived alongside it: a paid package offer that pops up after you pull a featured student, rebate tickets that were added after the backlash and then expire, and an announcement they felt came with little notice. About 8% of the longer reviews on the change talk about lost trust or refusing to spend. "I won't spend any more money in this game as long as that threat is looming," wrote one Global player, and others say they will leave once the system reaches Global.

Some reviewers defend the change with arithmetic: counting rebate tickets, average pulls per featured student come out similar or better. Critics who accept the math object anyway: "Even if the numbers are technically better by some conjured metric, 50/50 just feels bad."

Grind and resources come up in 9% of the longer reviews. Students' levels are capped by your account level, AP runs out quickly, and upgrade materials, artifacts and skill books are limited by daily entry caps. Long-time players say the roster keeps growing while income stays flat, and newcomers say late-game raids assume years of investment. "My daily energy reserves aren't even enough to upgrade a single artifact (just one out of three) from T-2 to T-3 for ONE character out of thirty."

Technical complaints appear in 8% of the longer reviews, and most were written in the launch month. Players report login and connection errors (error 10009, warnings of an "unstable connection", endless maintenance screens), crashes when resizing or switching the window (several say on AMD cards), pink or purple broken effects, black screens, and clients stuck "unpacking game resources". "Every time you try to resize the game, it crashes. AND crashes AMD drivers." Several launch-week reviewers later edited their reviews to say a patch had fixed their problem.

A small group dislikes the pop-up offers at login and after pulls, and the paid battle pass that locks cosmetics and a character interaction behind it. Several read these as warning signs for the game's monetization: "The introduction of a new purchasable Eligma package, complete with a pop-up advert whenever you obtain a PU Student, is very worrying in its implications for future monetization."

Long-time mobile players describe the Nexon account system as a major hurdle in moving to Steam: the client silently tied Steam to the wrong or an auto-created Nexon account, Google login was missing at first, and some lost access to years-old accounts. "Linking my existing mobile account shouldn't feel like defusing a bomb." Later edits note that an unlink option helped some players, while others say support could not recover their account.

Players ask for resolution and windowing options, a visible cursor on bright menus, controller support, rebindable keys, a dark mode, Steam achievements, and access to the web events that the Steam client could not open at launch. "Do wish the resolution can be changed though."

The main story is mostly unvoiced, and some players find that it makes long chapters feel cheap next to rival games: "Stories aren't voice acted which makes all of the character feel flat and the game feel cheap."

Some players report mistranslations, misspelled names and toned-down character lines in the English script, and a club chat filter so strict that ordinary words come out as asterisks. "The Forbidden Words List is the entire Webster Dictionary including personal names."

Some players object to Nexon Game Security, a kernel-level anti-cheat, in a game they see as mostly single-player, and to its late addition to the store page. Others say it does not remove itself when you uninstall the game. "Kernel level anti cheat for game that is mostly PVE contents is NOT OK." A few Linux players report it blocking them, while others say it runs fine under Proton.

Players in some countries could not play at all, and others found the Steam client placed them on the wrong regional server, cutting them off from their existing Global account. "Was immediately disappointed that I was immediately locked to my region and not allowed to access my global region."