Duet Night Abyss

Warning: This will be a long and thorough review and will contain no spoilers. Feel free to read this if you reaaaally care about trying this game. TL;DR: This game brought a fresh air into the gacha games market, both in terms of content and monetization. Should view it as a normal JRPGs, not a mobile gacha game. Would recommend if you are a JRPGs fan. ****Background: I came across this game quite accidentally having no idea what the game was about, but the non-gacha factor was appealing enough for me to go in blind. I am a diehard JRPGs fan, and had also played a lot of gacha games in the recent past. I have spent 30 hours in this game at the time of this review, have finished the story and pushing late game contents. Seeing the current reviews made me sad, so I decided to write this for anyone that cares enough about the game. ****Visuals and Artstyle: 8.5/10. The immediate impression I got was this resembled Hoyo games. Character designs are similar, environment is kinda similar. But once I played deep enough into the game, the game strayed further from that path, and in a good way. The town/city/spaceship has their own uniquity. Monsters, especially big bosses, are quite distinctive. Boss fight zones are well designed with sufficient size, but might be repetitive because they are mostly circle-shaped. There are moments in story bosses' fights that are super dope and reminded me a lot of JRPGs. ****Graphics & Animations: 7/10. Nothing to write home about. Not too bad, not too good, it's decent for a 2025 "mobile" game. There are hints of unpolished environments, the physical interactions with characters are pretty poor. Face impressions are stiff and lip-sync is mismatched a lot of the time. That said, those are not enough to put me off, maybe I'm just easy going in this domain. ****Story: 10/10. The story in this game is the spotlight. The world setting is well laid out, the story telling heavily resembles JRPGs - and is one of the factor that drift this game apart from so-called Chinese gacha games (Genshin, HSR, WuWa etc.). It is hard to put it into words, but if you have played both gacha games and JRPGs (and not a story skipper) you would notice it immediately. More abstract, more symbolical, more poetic, something along those lines. Mysteries are done very well, plot twists are well hidden. I like the fact that despite being a typical online RPG with self made protagonist, they still manage to get it right - it is linear enough to give the protagonist a proper personality without being drifted away by multiple choices conversations (like Metaphor). ****Sounds: 10/10. Another ten. BGMs are the cherries on top of the amazing story telling, they help construct a solid foundation and immersion for cutscenes and the environment. Almost all songs are in minor keys, which gives a somber and melancholic feeling throughout the game - and it fits well into the story. They give a very Nier vibe to it, I suspect the composer is Japanese but I haven't dug into credits yet. Sound effects are good but not outstanding, but they did well in mixing and post productions that there are almost no screeching sounds that would deafen your ears in combat. The VAs are great, I played in EN dub and the British voices are very familiar to me as a JRPG fan (Xenoblade spoiled me). ****Combat: 8.5/10. The combat is pretty fluid, and they keep it simple enough for mobile players (maybe a bit too simple?). Not that many 'skills' or 'combos' to use. The grindy stages are a bit too vast, thankfully there are drop increased scrolls that you can use to lessen your grinds. Boss fights are amazing, both in and out of story. They are veeery much alike some of the more recent JRPGs (namely Nier and FF16) - epic in stage settings and diverse in bosses' moves. ****Overall: 9/10. A very distinctive experience for a game that was categorized as mobile gacha. Even with or without gacha, this game still brings a fresh air to the current mobile games market, set it apart from Hoyo games and alike. The story, musics, or just the overall vibe from the game are more akin to a standard, non-live service JRPG. If you view it from a mobile gacha game perspective, you might be disappointed as the current character roster, combat and graphics are lackluster. Yet from a JRPGs fan standpoint, this is certainly one of the best game experience I've had in 2025. My personal thoughts: If only this game was more polished, and reformed as a standard JRPGs, it would have gotten more success. But time will tell.

This game can get better, and I hope it does. The story is better than every hoyo game story, period. People be dropping like fly in this one. What it lacks is attention to detail, good scene translation and a good director of which i dont blame them considering chinese censorship kills creative freedom. If the game survives, hopefully they will improve upon the presentation like wuthering waves. The combat is fast pace and responsive. However, the game either feels way to easy, or you fight a boss that's a big damage sponge. There's no chance of dying until you start running bosses that are level 60 and above. I've never played warflame, to me, the dodging system feels mid and should be more satisfying. I think they should've simplified the game after they removed the gacha aspect, there are way too many mats to keep track. The grind in this game is more than I like. Killing waves and waves of the same harmless enemies over and over do gets old. Lastly, I want to talk about my personal preference. I am not fan of the playable character designs so far. Honestly I say the best designed character so far is the Mc. Most playable characters looks like temu version of a existing character of a different game. I suppose if they all looked good, no one will buy the skins. After checking the ingame shop thoroughly, there was not a single thing in the shop that motivated me enough to put in my cc. Good for f2p, but it worries me that the game might eos. If it were up to me, I'd definitely lower the brainless grind fatigue, give dodge like a brief timeslow effect and release better characters with better skins asap.

I feel like I'm playing a beta version. The fact that the only gacha system is for clothing is great, but the game needs polishing. There are many systems based on Warframe, but that's not a bad thing. What I like: - No gacha system for characters or weapons - No energy - The weapon animations are good - All characters can use all weapons - The user interface is really great - At least for now, there are no sub-stats on equipment - Bullet jump What I don't like: - Melee attacks and abilities are performed in the direction the character is facing - The faces are expressionless. The characters' faces lack expression, but the NPCs' faces are the worst: their mouths and eyes don't move - Aside from the bullet jump, I can't use parkour - The city feels static and lifeless. The NPCs don't move, and, for example, I did a quest helping an old woman find her children, and the old woman keep repeating the same phrase every time I approached.

the only "silver lining" of this so-called game is that there is almost no gacha. the same old anime tropes, soulless character designs, rampant fanservice...i can go on for a LOOOONG time. since most people who pre-registered for this horse manure ONLY play gacha games and have standards lower than the Earth's core, the devs most likely make no effort to develop a cohesive and impactful storyline. I'm telling y'all, this game WON'T survive next year.

Unfortunately, the game did not exceed my expectations, if anything, it showed me just how polluted the new “gacha” anime-style game genre is. Unimaginative designs, a dull and a thousand-times seen world that seems lifeless and empty. While I do applaud the developers of taking a new approach, of having characters locked behind story-lines rather than a pay-wall - the reach for the new should not be an excuse to glue the rest of the concepts like a haphazardly made 2nd grade crafts project and package it as something revolutionary. The game still has a long way to go - it feels incomplete and aimless, picking and choosing ideas as if rummaging through a lost and found. Optimisation needs work as well - a game made in 2025 should at least have a concise And useable settings menu - but muchalike the rest of the game - it feels like an afterthought. What shocked me is that there is no way to uninstall it naturally - you have to through hoops and bounds to fully get rid of the game from your PC. Disappointing, soulless and remarkably unimaginative is the current state of this game. One can only hope that the developers will see these short-comings and try to do better - or, perhaps, they’ll take a more easily threaded path of regurgitating mediocre content, hoping that their tasteless customisation options will keep this game afloat.