Something that surprised me about Miko Note is that they allow me to play the game while the 3GB or so initial download ran in the background. Of course, this does result in my game hitting loading snags every now and again, but this will not be affecting my impressions of it since that’s hardly fair.

PRESENTATION

The story beats are fully voiced (except for you, the player character), with the sprites having loops of Live2D animation. They don’t have mouth flaps, and I think the loop is sometimes just a little bit off, but it does look good and the voicework is alright. Unlike my impressions with Heaven Burns Red, the characters don’t immediately stand out, which is fine, really. We don’t need more Rukas in this world, I promise you.

The game looks perfectly serviceable, with cute characters, though I feel some are slightly overdesigned (more on the god side). The tutorial segments are fully voiced, which is honestly quite helpful for someone who doesn’t know the language. Hurray for contextual clues!

3D models and effects are alright. Maybe they look a little plain when rendered like that, but it’s not a big knock against the game. SSR kami get Live2D animations, and you can put two characters of your choice on the homescreen. The background can be changed if you have any others, and of course, they will have their homescreen lines too.

GAMEPLAY

This is a turn based battle game, with a simple triangle advantage weakness chart (green > blue > red > green). Your miko can equip two “kami” each, which affects their stats depending on whether they’re the main kami or sub (100% stats for main, +10% from sub). The kami equipped also indicates what element attacks your miko have, making for a relatively flexible loadout. Not only that, these kami can also build up over time to unleash a stronger version of their base skill, which is separate from your miko’s individual “skill”, unleashed when you chain enough of the same element together.

There’s some strategy involved in which an attack requires a certain amount of skill points. Say that you have 10, so you can only use skills that cost within this limit. I’m sure at some point you can just go unga bunga DPS and don’t care, but for now, that’s the pretty simple combat.

Both your miko and kami can be levelled up to unlock more skills, with the kami being the harder ones to do since they have a lower maximum level cap than the characters. Unit levels are also capped to your account level, and it’s actually pretty funny to see how quickly the enemies scale in difficulty (level 11 with close to 2k HP to my level 8, barely 1.2k HP).

GACHA

The gacha is meant to get more kami, with a 3% rate for SSRs, the highest rarity. There’s a “spark” system of sorts, where you get shards of the featured character after 50 pulls. I’m not sure if this is a system I really like…

While not “gacha” per se, you also have the option to summon more kami with a recruitment system, like Arknights, Girls Frontline and Azur Lane. You’re allowed to reset the 3 given parameters 3 times each and hope for the best after enough time passes. Don’t really think it offsets the shard spark though.

IN CLOSING

Well, it’s not a game for me, I suppose. The flexibility in skills is interesting, but the difficulty scaling just feels off. It encourages you to exploit the weaknesses, though that can only go so far when the miko having those skills have their own weaknesses and low stats to contend with. It’s really easy to see the level of grinding that awaits.

While I said that the connection issues wouldn’t affect my feelings on this game, what I’ve experienced isn’t worth the trouble going through for more. By all means, if you’re willing to put in the time, Miko Note is a serviceable game.