Warning: Game Spoilers!
Production I.G., Toho Games, Akatsuki Games and backed by the creator Naoyo Matsumoto, comes Kaiju No. 8 The Game. Fight as the Kafka Hibino and three other characters in this turn-based strategy Gacha JRPG.
Here you’ll be facing waves of kaiju as low as the Trichonephilia to the legendary Kaijus of the past, like the dreaded No. 2 and up. Released on smartphones back on August 31, the game has now been released on Windows via Steam on October 1. For continuity, we played on the Steam version for quality and to avoid draining this writer’s phone battery.
Main characters’ origin stories, such as Kaiju No. 8, Reno Ichikawa, the whole Shinomiya family and some characters not yet mentioned, for those who aren’t far enough into the series, will be available for viewing.
Under Missions, there is a category called Memories, which covers at least the first five volumes of the manga or the first season of the anime of Kaiju No. 8. Since Kaiju No. 8 the Game is a gacha game, it may be hard for players to increase their rank, since they must put so much effort into grinding.
Overwhelming Skill
Nothing says “Where did the time go?” like having a game within a game within a game. Kaiju No. 8 introduces Expedition, a side-scrolling protect-the-base metroid-vania mini game where players fight kaiju in a never-ending survival deployment match. It’s treated ironically as a video game created by Suited, the CLOZER organization’s weapons development specialist. She guides you, or rather the defense forces’ top anti-kaiju combatant Ryo Ikaruga, to play her game as she ‘collects data’ on you, or him, as the game progresses through the stages.
The game is simple enough: kill everything, make money, deploy and enhance your soldiers, enhance artillery support strikes, get overrun by kaiju, repeat. Why play the mini game? Expedition has a countdown timer that generates the lightning bolts needed for Training sessions. Even when you’re not playing, the counter will go down until either the timer ends or you claim the rewards it gives and then the timer will reset.
Also, the more you play the mini game, the higher the rank you will get in the game, the more rewards you will unlock, the faster you can get back to grinding in the Training sessions and so on. Spend your funds wisely, and you may last longer every time you play.
Got Caught by the Gacha
Now, knowing full well that these types of gacha games are particularly grindy, they had the foresight to add good quality-of-life features to the gameplay, such as autoplay for cutscenes and fast-forward for combat. And the best gift of all, when the combat gets too tedious for you, there’s a Skip button for the combat sequence so you don’t have to sit through Kafka’s “Ultimate Strike!” cutscene over and over again.
So far, there haven’t been any noticeable glitches, just the rare connection drop or ‘Invalid Error’, which isn’t really an error. More like a ‘you stepped away and left the game idling for too long, so we’re going to drop you from the server’ kind of error.
Manga creator Naoyo Matsumoto was credited for the game; however, he didn’t have a direct hand in its production. He had been credited for work on previous games such as Kingdom Hearts: Unchained, Fashion Dreamer, and Doraemon: Story of Seasons.
Overall, Kaiju No. 8 The Game has proven to be an entertaining experience for fans seeking more content from the series. The game was recently released on Steam and can also be found on mobile versions.
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