Sword of Convallaria is one of the many gacha games currently available on the market. When it comes to gachas, it is normal for new players to be drawn to the game with the most hype about it, which most of the time ends up being one of the HoYo games or Wuthering Waves. However, as a gacha player of several years, I’ve come to realize that the best gacha games, or at least the ones that I enjoy the most, are not the ones that are often talked about. One such game is Sword of Convallaria, which I recently decided to pick up, and oh boy, do I regret waiting.
Table of Contents
What is Sword of Convallaria?
Sword of Convallaria is a pixel gacha game like any other. You play through the game to get gems/diamonds, or as SoC calls them, Luxites, to then pull on the characters you want. You then proceed to level up these characters so that you can use them in various modes.
In Sword of Convallaria, the combat takes a different approach from the fast-paced action genre that most gacha games lean on nowadays and focuses on a more turn-based, tactical system, which is reminiscent of games like FF Tactics, Octopath Traveler, and Fire Emblem. While the tactical gameplay is nothing new, we don't often see it translated to gacha games, and Sword of Convallaria does a great job of bringing it to the market and actually making it fun.
I’ll be honest, at first, I didn’t pick up the game mainly because of its gameplay. I usually don’t play tactical games. I suck at them. But I was looking for a new gacha game to try, and Limbus Company didn’t really feel like it would scratch the itch at the time. Seeing as how SoC was getting closer to its anniversary, I decided to pull the trigger and venture out of my comfort zone to try it, and I found it surprisingly fun.
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What Makes Sword of Convallaria Good
Combat
Well, first off, it’s the combat. While I’m not an expert in other tactical games that use similar combat mechanics, I can’t professionally judge whether SoC implements this gameplay loop well. As a beginner in the field, I can say that it is tremendously enjoyable, and that is what I care about. The game does a good job of introducing the tactical gameplay loop in bite-sized chunks and allows me to grasp the mechanics while not overwhelming me. At first, I found it hard to get a grasp of how everything worked, but once I did, it felt like everything clicked, and playing became even more fun. So if you’re a beginner when it comes to this genre, Sword of Convallaria does a great job of getting you up to speed on how it works.
Characters
Sword of Convallaria has a ton of units you can pull for, and while there are tier lists, and yes, I admit, I’ve slowly started to descend into the meta-slave mindset, you can clear the whole game with the free units that the game gives out. There are a ton of videos on YouTube of players doing unreal feats with the lowest-tier units and clearing the hardest content in the game, so if you want to torture yourselves, you can certainly do that. Apart from this, the artists do a great job at delivering how the characters look with their captivating art style, which also conveys well to the pixel models of the units when you actually get to the combat part.
Story
I honestly think that the story is the strongest selling point for Sword of Convallaria. Not often do you get to find a gacha game that tries to polish its story in a way that will capture players and make them want to find out more about the world that they’re being thrust into, and SoC just does that wonderfully. I’m not always a fan of story in games, but Sword of Convallaria managed to get me hooked in the very beginning, and now I’m just sitting here, glued to my screen, waiting for the next line of dialogue and twist.
The game offers hours, and I mean hours, of content when it comes to story. It does this by presenting the story in two completely different modes. For one, there’s the main progression, or the Fool’s Journey, as SoC calls it. Here, you get bits and pieces of the story of certain characters as you pass through stages where you are required to spend energy to unlock them. This part of the story is cool, but it only offers a glimpse as to what Sword of Convallaria really has cooking, and most of that is revealed in the other game mode known as the Spiral of Destinies. Spiral of Destinies is an interesting mode for a gacha game, and the first time I’ve seen where the story is being implemented in this way. This mode houses the chunk of the game’s story, and unlike the stages in the Fool’s Journey, in the Spiral of Destinies you don’t use stamina to unlock stages and clear them, but take charge of building up and managing your mercenary group where you can level it up, go on quests, do dispatches, interact with the town, and much more, all of which don’t require any energy and can be played as much as you want. And the best thing is the game forces players to make choices that impact the story and lead them to different endings. That’s right, Sword of Convallaria has a plethora of different paths to the story you can take, all of which reveal a different part of the world and get you even more immersed. I’ve spent 10-20 hours in there, and honestly, I’m nowhere even close to done with reaching my first ending, let alone exploring the others. Putting it into words is hard, and it is mostly something you have to experience for yourselves to understand its sheer scale.
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Closing Remarks
Honestly, I don’t think I did an impressive job of going over everything that Sword of Convallaria does well. I didn’t even touch upon the events, how F2P the game is, and the amazing community. As of right now, I have only one gripe with the game, and that is that their battle pass and monthly currency pack (think of the Welkin in Genshin) are all quite underwhelming. I’ve been wanting to give them my money for the game, but their packs just seem god-awful. Apart from that, I find it hard to describe how much I like the game, so if you haven’t already, please give it a shot.
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