Wasn’t sure I’d be able to review this one! Let’s jump straight in with the tl;dr:
| New Units | |
 | (Free unit) combo unit that’s designed to pull the enemy into range of the rest of your team |
 | Glass cannon that can reboot and try again |
 | Budget 5★ Typhon – Charm at Magic-range |
 | Resilient Blow-range unit built around Taunt |
 | Pulls enemies in, and completely ruins their day |
 | Rapidly-scaling disruptive support/damage-dealer (that will probably trivialise wide maps) |
No AR this time around – I can’t say I’m too upset by this.
Yamasachihiko seems to have been designed entirely for players with very limited long-range options – so much of his value lies in his LB1 that it’s not really worth running him for anything else.
That said, I actually think he’s a great addition to the roster, especially for a free unit; utility units like this make the early game that much smoother for newer players.
The range on his Protection is a little clunky – it would have been nice to see it extend in front of him so that he could support frontline units a little better (even though it would only actually help for hits after the first, since units in front of him get hit before he does).
He’s got a little bit of self-sustain, and a bit of extra damage (which is most likely to work best with his CS), but again, I’d really only recommend using him for his LB1: pull the enemy in, slap them with Break, and let your short-ranged teammates go to work.
I was going to make a sharks with frickin’ laser beams reference, but then I realised that the movie it’s from is turning 23 this year, and felt old ;_;
Apparently, 2020 is the year of bonkers water-attribute ladies – first Leanan Sidhe, now Otohime.
Otohime is pretty straightforward, but very strong – guaranteed ATK Up, Crit/Crit+ and access to Crit+/Crit++ is going to put out a stack of damage, and reliable Double Lock is great to have on hand.
If she gets hit, you’ll have to spend a couple of turns waiting for her to come back online, but even then you’ll probably manage to get some use out of her kit – 50% chance to Charm enemies that damage her is pretty great, especially since she’s got nothing else to do while disabled.
I’m not really sure there’s a ton for me to say about Algernon – Beach Typhon is still known as one of the better disruptive supports, thanks to his ability to reliably Charm a bunch of units. Though his trigger chance is lower (30%, compared to Typhon’s 40%), Algernon will still very much fill the same role (and even if he doesn’t Charm the enemy, Dazzle helps a bunch in making up for it!).
This is a pretty strong kit – but there’s not much else to say about it.
His LB3 reads a bit funny: it’s basically -5000 HP in a snipe range in front of him, and -3000 HP in the columns on either side of that.
Given there wasn’t exactly a lot to work with with his vanilla kit, I’m impressed that Lifewonders managed to create an interesting variant for Hombre Tigre.
Building around Taunt is a bit swingy in this game – given how poorly the AI moves their units around, it doesn’t always work as well as it should.
That said, when it does work, he’s pretty good – thanks to Taunt Strengthening, he’s got guaranteed Limit every turn, guaranteed CP gain (and a lot of it!) whenever he gets hit, and an 80% chance to get Guts after receiving damage, all of which work very well when you have a stack of things trying to hit you.
Charm, Crit, and Taunt from his CS all play nicely into his kit.
Ultimately, I think he falls on the usable side of the gimmicky blow unit spectrum, though he’s probably going to fall flat more often than you might like.
Hephaestus is not a difficult unit to parse. He is also ludicrously strong.
Hephaestus pulls enemies in, and either straight up kills them with Concentration, Combo, and Crit, or he Charms them (and the enemies behind them), allowing him plenty of time to kill them.
Defensively, he gets Evasion with alarming regularity – if you’re only taking two turns on each phase (which I can see happening – see above), then there’s a good chance that he’ll have Evasion up for the entire fight.
He also boosts his and his adjacent allies’ CP by a pretty fair amount, though this is pretty much a footnote.
His CS does pretty much what the rest of his kit does, just with more damage.
(Update: his CS does indeed add 5 stacks of Stackable Poison – most of the time, this is enough damage to wipe the board, but for those few enemies that don’t, Shennong comes down on them swinging at full strength).
Shennong is pushed just as hard as Hephaestus here, but takes a little bit more to unpack.
Right off the bat, he slaps on Poison and Stackable Poison every time he hits an enemy. He gets damage boosts to both of these effects, meaning his damage multiplier starts at 2.8x. He’s probably also still got Poison on himself, meaning he’ll be getting an extra 2x from his almost-guaranteed Poison Reversal (we’re at 5.6x).
If the battle continues, he gets an extra 1.4x multiplier every turn (for free!), capping out at 5 stacks of Stackable Poison. At this point, he has a damage multiplier of 21.5x. With the exception of some of the more gimmicky challenge quests, I don’t think there’s a unit in the game that can even survive the 5 turns it would take to get to this point, let alone repeated hits after it.
On top of this (oh, you thought we were done?), he also has a Charm effect (it’s apparently the Charm gacha) that scales very quickly with the number of units – with a full row, the edge units have a 65% chance of being affected, the next ones in have a 76% chance, and the unit in the middle an 83% chance. In case this wasn’t enough, this effect also extends backwards. Update: I got the range wrong here – his Charm effect only extends in a Slash+Thrust range, but it’s not any less good from this (it’s a shorter range, but a better chance to affect the enemies within range).
For more sparsely populated maps, he’s also got Dazzle, but I honestly think he’ll be Charming too much for this to be overly noticeable.
So, to recap, he locks most of the map down with Charm, and then destroys them with Poison. Without having any When Moving skills. Any questions?
Some very good stuff in here. The two 5★ units, of course, are incredibly strong, but the 4★ units are worth a look, and 3★ Otohime has potential to be one of the better 3★ options in the game right now for damage. Would definitely recommend a roll or two, if you’re not saving for something particular.
Good luck to those rolling!
The@Housamo 