In case you hadn’t worked it out from the title, Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY is an adults-only affair.
This is kind of a shame, since a whole swathe of the gaming population won’t get to enjoy its slick presentation and occasionally innovative gameplay. But you have to admire developer USERJOY Technology for sticking to its principles.
A spin-off of the popular anime and manga franchise from publisher Hobby Japan, Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY is a slickly presented gacha-RPG that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
In place of the usual generic fantasy monsters there are clowns on unicycles, flying sheep, bobble-headed toddlers, and a whole medley of characters you wouldn’t expect to find in a typical mobile RPG.
Storywise, you’re involved in a complicated plot full of twists and turns, involving a dizzying array of characters. The gist of it is that the fallen angel Lucifer is trying to escape her exile and rescue her human companion, who has been kidnapped by a dirtbag called Belial.
A Fun Cast of Characters
The main characters in Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY are bosses based on the seven deadly sins of Christian theology: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Pride is Lucifer, wrath is Satan, gluttony is Beelzebub, and so on.
There’s also a fourth-wall breaking announcer called Dixie who provides a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the game’s events while getting involved in the characters’ shenanigans.
For the dialogue-skippers among you, none of that will matter. But it’s clear that a lot of time and care has gone into the story holding the game’s battles together, and it’s well worth reading along.
The graphics are harder to miss. Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY looks great, even if you’re not partial to revealing garments and jiggling anatomy. The game’s many characters are all rendered in 3D, and the backgrounds are all polished and distinctive.
Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY has a fun, punky, neon-soaked comic book aesthetic that’s a welcome respite from the usual fantasy fare.
Familiar Gacha-RPG Gameplay…
In terms of the gameplay, Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY is a serviceable gacha-RPG that will be familiar to fans of the genre. It sees you locked in a cycle of winning battles, claiming rewards, spending those rewards on levelling-up your fighters, and summoning new fighters into your stable.
Each fighter has its own class, attributes, rank, skill level, transcend level, and so on. You can upgrade your fighters through training, skilling up, ranking up, and transcending. Plus, you can inherit skills from other fighters, and unsummon fighters who aren’t pulling their weight.
On top of all that, each character has its own karma level in battle, dictating what their rewards will be at the end of the bout.
The standard rock-paper-scissors is in play, with just three affinities to manage: STR, AGI, and TEC. You can also bring a helper into battle with you.
Battles themselves, meanwhile, can take place in the main campaign, the arena, the daily dungeons, limitedevents, and Kizuna quest stages. You can play them manually, choosing when to deploy skills, or you can tap the ‘auto’ button and sit back.
Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY is both accessible and innovative. The game gives you every opportunity to automate the process of fighting and levelling up, and it doesn’t overwhelm you with thousands of different equipment items and upgrade paths.
…With a Few Twists
But it throws a couple of less familiar elements into the mix, like the karma and helper systems outlined above, and a Shard system, which gives you three types of shard to unlock, upgrade, and equip for special effects.
Then there are the little QTEs that see you tapping the screen to finish an opponent off, or the choose-your-own-adventure moments of dialogue where you can pick a response and receive a karma reward. There’s no shortage of variety and flair.
As with any gacha-RPG, there’s a lot going on in Seven Mortal Sins X-TASY, and you can choose to become a master of detail, a casual autopilot, or something in between.
It will appeal to anybody looking for a punky presentational style, a deeply silly story, casual gameplay, and lots of risque imagery and innuendo.
If you’re not already a fan of gacha-RPGs on mobile, this won’t be the game that changes your mind. But it’s a solid addition to the genre. You can find it on iOS and Android by clicking here.