Blue Archive

Blue Archive is a tactical gacha RPG from Nexon Games, set in Kivotos, a city-state built out of academies where students carry halos and assault rifles and school disputes get settled with gunfire. You play Sensei, a teacher the SCHALE office brings in to keep the chaos in check while the General Student Council President stays missing.

Combat runs in real time and mostly on autopilot. You field a squad of six, four Strikers up front and two Specials in support, and your only real input is when to fire each skill off a shared cost bar. Fights are decided before they start: attack and defense types beat each other rock-paper-scissors style, and every map favors a different terrain.

The weight of the game sits in its writing. Story chapters run long, use visual-novel presentation and full voice acting, and that is where its reputation for storytelling well above the genre average comes from. Skip the dialogue and you skip half the game.

It is free to play with gacha recruitment. The premium currency is Pyroxene: 120 for a single pull, 1,200 for a ten-pull, and it comes from playing (story, missions, events, compensation mail) as much as from paying. It also refills AP and resets hard-mode dailies. The monthly passes hand out around 2,368 Pyroxene spread across the month.

Its reputation for generosity rested on a 3★ base rate among the highest in the genre, on never needing duplicates to field a student, and on Recruitment Points, which at 200 let you cash in the featured unit of your choice. On July 29, 2026 the Japanese version swapped them for a Genshin-style charge counter: guaranteed 3★ at 100 pulls, guaranteed featured unit at 200, and a reset the moment any featured unit drops. Global still runs the old system, with no switch date announced.

The builds are regional and separate: the Japanese one, published by Yostar, runs about three months ahead of Nexon's global release, and there is a Chinese version on top of that. Content lands roughly every two weeks, rotating events, reruns and main-story chapters. The PC version reached Steam on July 4, 2025 for the global client, with Japan getting its own on January 20, 2026. There is no public roadmap beyond the stream announcements.

That Steam launch opened Overwhelmingly Positive; the all-time score now sits at Mixed, with 59% positive reviews, while recent ones have fallen to 8% after review bombing over the gacha change. Executive producer Kim Yong-ha publicly apologized on July 28, 2026 for how the change was communicated, but the patch shipped anyway and nothing was rolled back.

Steam numbers only cover a slice of the game: the all-time peak was 27,077 concurrent players in September 2025, down to around 3,300 by mid-2026. Most of the playerbase is still on mobile, and most of the revenue still comes from Japan.

This one is for players who want a gacha they read more than they play: the story is the product, and a session's combat is over in minutes. If you want something tactically demanding, look elsewhere. And it pays to know which side of the gacha change you land on: global still has the system that built the game's reputation, but the Japanese precedent is on the record and nobody has ruled out a repeat.