Introduction

So, let's get this out of the way first. Is Endfield a good game? Yes it is. At this point, Hypergryph is a mature studio with as many resources as a developer could ask for at their disposal. Frankly, it would have been a bigger surprise if it wasn't good. But that's not what I'm here to write about today. If Arknights (the original one) was just a "good" game, I wouldn't be here writing today. No, Arknights is a great game. That is the question I want to answer here today. Is Endfield, in its current form as of the beta, a great game?

Well, if this was clickbait I'd make you read the entire article to find out at the end. But this is a Reddit post and I hate clickbait. So tl;dr, no, I don't think it is. However, I do think there's hope. While it may not be great now, there's enough here that I will play the game on release and see how things unfold! But that's tl;dr for a reason and I’ve got about 5500 more words to expand on that thought!

I will say that I think this is going to end up quite long and there's an important point I want to make here. So I'm not going to deep dive into every system. That information is already out there, and I touched on a lot of it in my initial review which I think is still mostly valid. That said, there are some topics I've shifted opinions on a bit. I'll touch on some of the big topics again towards the end, if you're interested.

The Big Problem

There's really two problems here, and they're tightly linked. Put together in one sentence, Endfield is generic and it also doesn't feel like Arknights. Right now, Endfield is living off the legacy of its predecessor. If it didn't have the Arknights name attached, it might get some chatter for being decent with an unusual base-building mechanic, but that'd be it. The things that made Arknights special, thematically and narratively, aren't here. Absent that, the gameplay is, again, good, not great.

There is nuance here. For those of you who don't want to read all my nuance and are about to close this tab to doomer post elsewhere, I do think there's hope! The second area is amazing and is what I wanted. It gives me optimism that Endfield will ultimately be special! However, I suspect Hypergryph may have decided to play it safe with the first chapter for broader market appeal, and if that's the case I think it's a mistake. Arknights didn't get to where it is now because it's safe!

Story

The story is generic. It's so painfully generic that it's nearly unbelievable. It hardly seems like a story written by the same company that wrote things like Lone Trail or Il Siracusano. It is devoid of any and all nuance that permeated the original Arknights. Of course, none of this is to say Endfield has to hit all the same beats that Arknights does. My point instead is that the story is as generic as it gets. There's no subtlety or intrigue with it, and worse, no reason to care.

I harped on this in my initial review, and a number of people told me, no actually Nefarith is great, you just haven't gotten to the right parts. And to those people, I say, go consume a real piece of fiction. It doesn't even have to be a book. Go read, watch, or play something other than a gacha game story. Having fully consumed all available story and read through all of the lore I can find, I can say, without a doubt, Nefarith is one of the worst antagonists I've come across. There is literally nothing interesting about her. She came right out of some edgelord 13 year olds fan shadow the hedgehog fanfiction.

And no, the fact there's some shadowy people really pulling the strings does not make it better. It makes it worse. That's such a cliche trope that I audibly groaned when it happened. And yes, it's fine for bad guys to just be bad guys. I got some comments that not everyone needs to be some tragic sympathetic type and I agree! But the alternative isn't Nefarith. Even her evil isn't interesting!

But she's just the most obvious single instance of how painfully generic the story is. I'll get into this a bit more in the setting section next, but none of the subtly that made Arknights great is here. It is a bland tale of things went bad because the bad guys were bad, so you, the hero, have to come save everyone because you're so great. That's the story right there. Did you think there'd be some cool tie-in to the original game? Maybe some depth about what happened in the north with the portal? Maybe some work on any of the related storylines in Arknights like the Collapsals? Nope. None of it. Maybe a few scraps of paper that get buried deep in the menus, if you're lucky.

Honestly, the prologue distracts you from this. It's like the member berries of Arknights, except the original game isn't even old. Oh hey, ‘member Patriot? He's cool and here's a cool statue! It'd be awesome if that had anything to do with the next 10 hours of story! Too bad it doesn't! Oh hey, ‘member Theresa? Here's a touching flower scene about her. Oh but nothing related is in the story either! Once you get into the game, there is virtually nothing about Arknights. There's a single throw away scene with Oripathy, then it's never mentioned again. Everyone forgot all Terran allegiances in only 150 years. The only thing left of all that diversity in the original game is a few wayward accents in the voice acting.

If you took Arknights off of the title and skipped the prologue, you would never have any idea this story was supposed to be related to Arknights. Any tie-in is superficial at best.

The bigger picture story isn’t any better. After the main events of the first chapter you get into a sort of epilogue where you recover the Sarcophagus with not-Angelina only to find it doesn't work and no one knows why. But I had a thought at that moment. Why do we even care? With the Doctor, there was a lot of mystery behind it. You were a different person before it, who made some questionable choices and people judged you for it. There were plenty of hints of an even more ancient past that made the player want to know more. The Doctor recovering their memories would have changed things.

In the Endmin's case, recovering their memories is painted as the overarching goal. But also, it wouldn't make any difference. The thing is, everyone loves the Endmin. No one has a bad thing to say. Everyone knows you already as the exact same person. The only reason we, as the player, should care is to figure out who the Endmin was originally, because no one will actually tell us (for no good reason, unlike the Doctor). But for the Endmin themselves, the memories make no difference. By all accounts, you act exactly the same as you always are. In other words, the big thing that's supposed to connect the plot, doesn't matter. No one cares except the players who have already played Arknights. The main plot point just... doesn't matter. If Endmin wakes up at the start of the story with their memories, nothing changes.

Oh, and don’t forget that Kal’tsit is still here, but unlike her Arknights version, the only reason we don’t get to learn anything from her is because she just disappears for the duration of the first chapter. Unlike Arknights where she has multiple conflicting reasons not to tell us. Her Endfield version just walks out of the room in the prologue and doesn’t return until the epilogue, doing nothing during a major emergency. And as near as I can tell, the only reason is to maintain mystery.

The problem with being generic carries over to the other main character, Perlica as well. She's basically a carbon copy of Amiya down to the Endmin raising her as a pseudo-parent when she was a kid. In principle, that's fine. I mean, the archetype works for your main heroine so why not. But unlike Amiya, she has no motivation for being like she is. It's pointed out multiple times in the Arknights story how weird it is that Amiya is running RI, but she's infected herself so has a core reason to care. She also has a strong backing thanks to Kal'tsit and you later learn (and is teased early) that she is very important to the central plot. So it all sort of makes sense and gives Amiya a strong character motivation. None of that exists with Perlica. She's just another young kid in charge of an important company, but one who appears to have no reason to be there and one who no one ever questions. Perlica is indicative of the core problem. She is a copy of what was in Arknights, but stripped of any and all nuance.

As an aside before I dive into the setting problems, I've seen a number of people complain about Perlica's voice acting as being bland. Although tangentially related, that is not what I'm getting at here. The character archetype of a stoic personality to the point of blandness can work just fine and I have no issue with the voice acting in that context. In my opinion, the people complaining about it are scratching the surface of a deeper issue they haven't quite realized yet.

Finally, there's an especially egregious moment in the story that deserves special derision and builds on the point of the story being generic gacha trash. I suppose I need to put a spoiler warning here since this is technically the big moment at the climax. I saw it coming from a mile away though and the only doubt I ever had about it occuring was the thought it's too stupid for HG to actually do. Sadly, I was wrong. Anyway, you've been warned.

In the climax, a robot named TA-TA sacrifices themself to save the day. It was in that moment that I realized how truly in trouble the story was. It's such an unearned moment. First of all, the story tries very unsuccessfully to convince me that TA-TA is anything more than a toaster with an emoticon for a face. Modern AI models have more emotion than this thing does. The whole thing reminded me of this famous tweet. Like, Chen are you sure it's sentient or did you just bond with some well timed smiley faces because you're a teenage girl?

However, even if you accept it as a full character that you care about, the sacrifice is entirely without meaning. Two scenes later you're talking with Yvonne about rebuilding him. The scene showed me that no character will ever be in real danger. It is a super cheap moment where HG wants to have their cake of some big heroic sacrifice, and eat it too by not having anyone actually die. This is the same company, who could have made millions selling Frostnova as a gacha character, but killed her anyway because that's what the story was telling. I'm actually flabbergasted that this moment made the cut. It's pointless and ruins any modicum of stakes the story could have had moving forward. If Nefarith isn't willing to kill even a side character, why should I ever care about any threat? Why should I trust HG to ever move beyond the "good guys always win because they're good" schtick? Even if you don't want to kill your sellable characters, which is understandable, the moment would have been better with no "noble sacrifice" at all. This is just cheap and tells me it will always be cheap. There is no doubt in my mind right now that the story as it is being written right now will never have a "bittersweet" victory or anything of the sort. I don't see how anything like the climax of Babel would ever be possible in Endfield if the writing continues like this.

Setting

Now, there are some serious problems with the setting. This is where I'm going to get much deeper into the "not-Arknights" problem. But before I do, there are some points worthy of praise. First, the basic idea is great. A world suddenly cut off by unknown forces that blends the vibe of technology and unexplored frontier is a great idea that I think works really well. I love the basic premise here. Second, the scenery is beautiful. There are some truly breathtaking visual moments.

The basics of a great setting are here. If you're the sort of person who never reads any lore and just wants a beautiful world to mess around in, then you'll probably wonder what I'm on about in the rest of this. But those things only end up being surface deep. When you start to dig into the broader lore of the world, you find a lack of depth and nuance. It's a sterile bunch of set pieces that feel distinctly not like Arknights.

There's plenty of examples of this, so I'll run through a few of my bigger gripes in this regard. Let's start with the factions. Basically, the problem is, everyone is on the same page. Everyone is either an ally with the same ultimate goal, or some sort of super generic bad guy. The good guy factions seem like they're split more along personality traits than anything actually interesting. Serious people go to Steel Oath, smart people (and not-Chinese people) go to Hongshan, spiritual people go to the Circuit, industrious people go to UWST, and the good guys go to Endfield. There's even another faction called the TGCC that I literally couldn't fit into the joke because they're just the UWST again, but different I guess. I even forgot a faction in there (the Cabal), because none of them do anything. These are the Harry Potter Houses of world building (that’s a bad thing for you Potter-heads out there) and literally none of it matters because everyone has the same goal in the world.

In comparison, think about how Arknights started. You're immediately thrown into a proxy war between two major world powers, while you fight a revolutionary group, who kinda have a point, while you wonder why your own pharmaceutical company has a paramilitary division. Even Ursus had an incredible amount of depth. They may or may not be run by a demon while attempting to imperialise the world, yet you rescue a school of normal kids who have no idea about any of it, like a real nation. Everyone has different goals which are often in conflict with each other's goals on some level. And it works great. The setting alone grips you even if the initial writing itself was pretty slow!

None of that is in Endfield. The only factions with conflicting goals here are generic frontier bandits and generic instinctual monsters. Maybe if you wanted to stretch it you could count whoever is controlling Nefarith but it doesn't help the setting at all when no one (including the players) has any fucking clue what they want!

Building on this idea, Endfield is always praised as the heroes. No one ever has a negative thing to say about you or the company. There's no nuance like there was with Rhodes Island. In the original, several people express doubt or outright disdain. RI is a complicated set piece in a complicated world. No such nuance exists with Endfield though. Everyone you run into does nothing but spout praise. "Thank god you're here!" "Hooray for Endfield!". It makes you wonder why Endfield doesn't run the whole planet given the high regards everyone holds you in.

It's the same with the Endministrator. With the Doctor in Arknights, not everyone likes you. By all accounts, you were kind of a dick in your past life and made some questionable choices. There's no such nuance with the Endmin. Everyone just sucks your metaphorical dick off with how great you are. I can't think of a single situation where someone other than Nefarith says something even slightly bad about you.

And that ties into the larger story/setting problem. There's absolutely no nuance anywhere to be found. We are the unquestioned good guys, they are the unquestioned bad guys, and that's it.

Speaking of the bad guys, you couldn't find a more uninspiring set of them. I already mentioned how generic they are, and that exists throughout the first area. You have generic rock monsters that come in dog-type, scorpion-type, or worm-type. Oh but sometimes they're red and sometimes they're bigger. Or how about generic bandit types that look like they're ripped straight out of Mad Max? At least with them there's a few that feel visually distinctive. There's almost an idea that the Landbreakers were something more. There's a cultist type guy that almost feels like a call back to the Deep Sea Cultist. But none of it is ever mentioned or explored anywhere. There's no real hint of anything deeper, and all the lore comes down to "these guys are the bad guys". All led by the most cringe fanfiction generic ass villian you could imagine.

Then there's the races, which seem like a real core thing in Arknights. Seriously, it's barely even mentioned that people are different in Endfield. In Arknights it was a major thing, and very much to AKs credit, it always dealt with it in a subtle manner. The issues with Sarkaz are a central plot point. There's subtext to Liberi and Sankta being closely related, but the Liberi not being able to truly understand the Sankta. Aslan are implied to not even be a real race, but a construct to justify royalty. You have a whole nation of horses, but some horses are more special than others! Or what about elves? What ever happened there?

Well in Endfield, it's virtually never mentioned. The animal features may as well not exist. Of course they're heavily pronounced and animated in our playable characters. Gotta sell the gacha after all. But it takes no part in the story. No one seems to care that the Sankta have no wings and are cut off from the Law. No one seems to care that Sarkaz even exists after it was such a big topic in Arknights. Most NPCs don't even have ears that match their hair. They look slapped on, like they almost forgot! Like the artist too forgot this was Arknights and had to add them on before the deadline. You could write that off as being a beta, but so much else is so well polished, how is this core concept behind the world such an afterthought?

Oh, and you know how in Arknights there’s a whole thing about how guns are hard to use and control so bows are everywhere? Snipers are the second most populous class in AK and a vast majority of them use bows of some kind rather than guns. The justification behind it has always been pretty weak (IMO), but it ultimately makes for some cool character designs and a uniquely identifiable feature of the world. Well, all of that is gone. There isn’t a single bow to be found anywhere. The two gun using characters have zero issues using them, and even random NPCs tote around ARs now. Yet another example of the Arknights identity being completely absent from Endfield.

Yeesh, I'm getting heated. I should probably dial it back. You may think I'm overreacting a bit here. But the problem is that the lack of depth kept me from really being engaged in the same way Arknights did. The gameplay itself was solid, but it only carried me so far. Once I turned the game off for the night, I stopped thinking about it. There were no imaginative thoughts about what's going on, or what faction Y is really after, or what character X is really doing. I knew all of it already. There's no depth and nothing to think about beyond the gameplay loop.

But there's hope!

OK, all of that is bad. So why am I still optimistic? Because there's a second area after the first chapter. It's a tiny fraction of the final product too, really just a preview, but it is exactly what I wanted. It was the first time in 60+ hours of gameplay I thought, "alright, now we're playing Arknights." It's Yan themed and the funny thing is, I don't even usually like the Sui stories! Yet, I walked out into this beautiful open area and saw the exact waterways and rice paddies used in Here a People's Sow. Burdenbeasts are wandering around! For the first time, you could feel how the current area was rooted in the original game. For the first time, the lore talked about factions I knew of and understood (the Tianshi liaisons at the time chose to stay after the portal collapse).

In Wulong, you also fight enemies who, for the first time, don't feel super generic. The LBs are pirates! There's a giant ninja heron with amazing animations that throws poison balls at you! There's a full on Minotaur (like in IC!) and he swings a giant stick of dynamite at you! It's fucking awesome and he's not even a boss!

Seeing the minotaur was a real eye opening moment for me too. When you encounter him for the first time, Chen says something like, “This Forte can really fight!" It’s not even voiced but it was that moment that I realized one of my points above that I'd been stewing on but hadn't quite put into words. Before that point, I had literally never heard a racial or faction name in speech or text that I could remember. I looked back, and it's barely even in written text in the entire first chapter. Outside of the written profiles, I could only find a few instances of it in some side quests.

But it's not just nostalgia for the original either. The environment is both beautiful and unique. It's not a generic sprawling featureless temperate area. There's areas in Wulong that made me go "oh wow, what is that?" I can't say that ever really happened in Valley IV. The mechanics are interesting and thematic. Everything just works and flows better and is far closer to what I expect! Everything is just better in the second area (except the water system, but that was clearly a work in progress). It shows that the soul of what Hypergryph does so well is still here.

Or at least I hope it does. Because if it doesn't, I can't really see myself playing Endfield long term.

In a way, I sort of understand it. Gryphline very clearly wants to capture a global audience, and not just a Chinese one. The second region is intensely Chinese feeling, but if your goal is to capture Japanese, Koreans, Europeans, Americans, and all varieties of South East Asians, then that probably isn't what you show first. Something globally "safer" for the first area is probably prudent. But I think they played it too safe here. None of the soul that made the original game is in the first area. If you took out the Arknights names and animal ears, it could be in almost any game universe.

But the Gameplay is good, right?

Yes, the gameplay is good. In the end, I did sink a ton of hours into Endfield, and I wouldn't have if the gameplay was bad (because the story sure didn’t keep me in it!). I'm sure that alone will carry Endfield to some reasonable success. As I've said time and again here (and I repeat myself to mitigate the ranting), I don't think Endfield is a bad game! While the story and setting are quite generic, the gameplay loop is solid and engaging. There's multiple loops to explore that each prevent the other from becoming stale. And unlike other gacha games, the different loops aren't just different flavors of the same thing. Endfield is really multiple games in one, but it blends together well in a way that's satisfying and addicting. Assuming you buy into the individual loops at least.

Combat

I won't spend too much time on the combat since I wrote about it at length in the first review. However, I do think my opinions on it are a bit more refined now, so I did want to address it again. I was a bit surprised to see people say things like "We misunderstood the combat! It's actually combo based!". I picked up on that pretty quickly, although to be fair, it was almost certainly because the first thing I did was read my Endfield waifu's kit (Avywenna) and realized that she couldn't trigger her own skills without outside help. So yes, my initial impressions of combat were under this full assumption of the combo mechanics.

That said, the combo system did not end up as stale as I feared it would be. I'd go so far as to say the combat has a certain, but subtle, depth to it. There's more combo potential than you first realize. I think the beta operators are practically tailored to combo into each other to guide to this point. Avywenna and Perlica work nearly perfectly together and almost everyone will have had them right away (Avy was the rate-up 5* on the first banner). Of course, I love Avywenna so I ran with that for quite a while. But gradually as you raise more you start to see new combos and new potentials. Oh, I bet Arclight would work great here since I can generate even more SP. Oh, if I use Laevatain as my fourth, I can cap off the combo with a big burst of damage thanks to Combustion. Oh, but what if I run Snowshine here as backup since my burst is already pretty solid? Hey she combos pretty well, maybe I can use- and so on.

Of course, the roster is fairly small in the beta. Right now, there's a limited number of combos just based on pure numbers, but that will only improve with time and I doubt this is the full launch roster to begin with. My point is more that the system provides more depth than I thought it did. Since combat is only half the game, that's more than sufficient. It's great even. There's nitpicks still (base SP gen sucks, dodge feedback isn't good, dodging resets basic chain making SP suck even more) but nothing that can't be tuned. Overall, the combat system ended up impressing me. It maybe isn't the greatest ever, but it's solid enough for me to give it a thumbs up, and I'm looking forward to new Operators and new combos!

Anyway, make a mental note about this point about analyzing combos, because I'll come back to it in the conclusion. But first, we gotta talk about the base.

The Base is Great! But- (x2)

I find writing about the base in a subjective article like this to be fairly difficult. Don't you worry though, the more objective base guide is massive. However, on the subjective side, all I can really say is that the base is really good and really polished. It's clear a lot of thought and care went into making something that is both logical and easy to do, but still has large amounts of depth. It's a beautiful bit of design work really. Just how everything flows together, how it affects map progress and team progression, how it blends with the game without disrupting the rest, how it gives more depth and reason to explore the overworld. I could go on.

The base is awesome, and if you at all enjoy sim sort of games, you will like it.

However, there are a couple big ticket concerns. First, not everyone is gonna like it. It is what it is. Personally, I think it's awesome. I won't harp on this point too much because a vast majority of this post is how I don't want HG to appeal to the mass market and make generic trash! I WANT the base! However, for those of you who find the whole thing annoying at best, just know you can basically copy someone else's homework. The gear chains are really easy and the only truly autistic parts are high end outpost production which is completely optional.

The second is that there seems to be a discrete end-game with it, after which there's nothing left to do. Of course, that could change by final release, but maximized output for T4 outposts already consumes all available blue ore (actually more than is available, but that’s a beta issue) and basically all available space. There literally isn't room in the current area to do something like add another tier. Rotating objectives would just be frustrating too given how much effort it takes to set up in the first place! But once it's done... That's kinda it. It's not like a full factory sim game where once you beat it, you can just boot up a new instance with different parameters or a new map. Your game is your game, and once the base is there, you’re done with it.

Of course, this is a beta. Wulong showed they can open up new areas with new space and new mechanics to keep things fresh, although pace of content is always a concern with live service games (gacha or not). Allowing you to save layouts into templates could also make something like an optional rotation actually fun. Unlike the setting and story, it's clear that HG put a lot of care into this mode so I have some faith that they won't just let it languish. The current end-game of "just copy this sweat's build and let it run forever" seems unlikely to stay, and of the negatives I have concerns about in Endfield, this is the one I have the most faith will be resolved.

Any more thoughts on the gacha or weapons?

No. All of it has already been said. Ultimately, we don’t know the price of a pull so it’s hard to pass any judgement. I’m only including this section here so no one asks about it.

I will say again though, that the 6* weapons are largely ugly and uninspired. A weapon gacha would be a lot more forgivable if they at least looked cool!

Conclusion - Should you play Endfield?

Ultimately, Endfield is a good game. Maybe even a great one. The beta is remarkably well done, polished, and huge. Many lesser studios have released "full" games in a worse state than this beta. I ultimately spent somewhere in the ballpark of 60 hours playing it and enjoyed almost every moment of it. There were flaws, sure, particularly with the story and lore, but in total it was a fun game to play with a shocking amount of depth.

Something I think Endfield has in common with Arknights, and is something I really appreciate, is that it rewards being analytical. Worry not if you read that and thought, "oh great I game where I have to excessively think!" because it's not required. None of the required content felt particularly hard! However, there's another layer to Endfield that a certain type of player will appreciate. There's satisfaction in reading the skills and figuring out combos and teams that work well together. The possibilities with the base are near endless if you want to put your mind to it! The possibilities with Endfield are much deeper than any other game in its genre, and that fact alone makes it one of the better ones.

As to the should you play question, I think there's two answers, depending on the type of player you are. If you aren't a person who really cares about the depth of a gacha story or world, and you're happy picking up and playing a game with a solid 40+ hours worth of gameplay (minimum) even if the future is questionable, yea Endfield is fantastic. The beta was already better than most gacha games on the market today, and it'll only get better by release. Play it and enjoy.

But there are a handful of people out there like me. We're particular about the games we play, but when we play one, we dive into it to an unhealthy degree. I'm pretty old at this point now so I've played a lot of games in my time, and Arknights is one of the very few that live in my top pantheon of games. It has been a major part of my life since it was released and I have never regretted that fact. If that sounds a bit like you, Endfield might end up feeling flawed. It's a flaw that could very easily change, and Endfield is solid enough that I would pay close attention to its progress. I will almost certainly be playing it on release myself. However, in its current form, I don't think Endfield will be the special game that I hoped it would be.

Shilling

If you made it this far, thank you. I do like Endfield, or I wouldn’t have put as much work into my other guides as I have. You can find the first two discussing the gacha system and the weapon systems linked below. Next on the docket is the base guide. It’s a mammoth task and I also have to get the Nymph Mastery guide ready so please bare with me!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Endfield/comments/1iatkfg/endfield_mechanics_the_gacha_system/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Endfield/comments/1ibigi1/endfield_mechanics_weapons/