Even without spending a dime, Illusion Connect on Google Play is an innovative gacha game that offers excellent play value.
What makes Illusion Connect by Superprism so different from other gacha games?
One-time flat-cost purchase
This is the game-changer.
Different people play gacha games for different reasons -- for example, collecting characters, player versus player, seeing the story. Often people new to gacha will complain about the "paywall" that restricts their progress or that prevents them from getting new characters unless they pay. And pay. And pay. Of course Illusion Connect has that feature: You can pay to buy more stuff and play faster.
But for people who want a limit on their spend and still support the company, for people who want to buy quality of life value instead of temporary consumables, there is the "SVIP" status one-time purchase. For a flat fee that's around the cost of a burger and fries, you get regular bonus goodies.
And not just for a week or a month, but forever. This status package gives you "tickets" weekly that let you have a chance at drawing characters to add to your roster -- i.e., the classic gacha lottery of characters.
Of course it's free to play from the start, so like every other gacha game, play long enough to get past the "honeymoon period" of initial gameplay when everything zooms fluidly to hook you. If you decide you like it enough, once you've seen what disappoints and decide whether they can be overlooked -- at that point, open your wallet if you want to support the developers.
If you do spend in Illusion Connect, definitely look into SVIP first.
You can enjoy the characters you get "now"
Even without paying anything, how they handle characters is superior to most gacha games that try to constrict your progress so that you give up in frustration and pay.
Of course Illusion Connect WILL eventually start to slow your progress as you proceed. But overall the resources you get are enough to extensively develop a lot of characters and play them. In the early game this can be done quickly; in mid- to late- game, it is still faster (and much cheaper) than most other gachas.
In comparison, in most gacha games developing a character requires so many resources that often players instead just focus on a few -- making it pointless to actually acquire more characters because you won't have the resources to play them. Or if you did redirect your resources, you'd just be hampering your overall progress just to change your active team. And then how long would that last? Until the next cool character you want to get, possibly paying money to ensure you get them?
Illusion Connect evidently acknowledges that players get characters not just to sit idly in their roster but to actually put them to use and enjoy them.
If you are coming from another gacha game like Genshin Impact, this will feel like a refreshing game changer.
And what do you do when you have a big roster of characters but really need only a single team to go through the story stages? You can participate in various optional non-daily events that require a larger roster, such as their "Miracle" storyline where you are restricted in the type of units, and also the number of times each unit can fight in the multi-staged story. So collecting and developing more and more characters isn't wasted at all.
Housing and Romance
There's some housing and romance elements here that are highly underdeveloped but look very promising. Definitely worth keeping an eye on. They try to touch on key things like dating, patting your companions on the head, moving furnishings around your home, etcetera.
Hopefully this will be fleshed out even more but really it's too soon to tell. It's probable that they just put in some token content to test the waters first and even if they did want to expand on it because of player interest, they probably have to develop the new content first.
The Rest
Of course there's an intriguing story, an interesting intellectual property / world concept, etcetera, but let's be honest -- innovation and novelty is a necessity nowadays, something unique to catch your attention. You'll either like this about Illusion Connect or you won't, just like any other game.
Even here, however, Illusion Connect has little quality of life touches:
- An "Album" where you can review the story chapters (which play out like a visual novel) for players who are keen on seeing the story.
- "Biographies" for each character you want to collect, for the character-collector player.
- Manual combat for strategy enthusiasts who can get much further than leaving it up to autocombat.
- Interesting characters that have their niche in combat no matter their rarity -- simply filling your roster with "SSR" rarity characters isn't the answer.
This shows a lot of promising thought put into the game and hopefully even better things to come as this very recently launched game develops.
HOWEVER ultimately it is still in the style of gacha games where you collect units, grind them up a diminishing returns scale, and progress through combat to access bits of story as you go along. It's just a better thought out game of that genre.
A great site for helpful information is Illusion Connect Wiki, including a pile of still-valid promotion codes.
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