Been playing E7 on the side since it came out, some impressions:
- the rates are horrendous. I didn't feel like rerolling on the Destina banner but now I'm regretting it. Got Sez and that's it. 45 pulls on the Destina banner later and I didn't get a single 4* character, let alone a 5*. But it's fine, the free light healer kid you get from the lobby is great and there's some other useful 3* chars. Still hurts lol, I never played FGO but I guess the rates are similar? game definitely doesn't give you a lot of chances to play around with a lot of useful chars.
- again never having played FGO this came as a surprise, but this is basically a single player RPG? Not a whole lot of multiplayer stuff, and the competitive aspect is almost non existent. I have yet to see a great use of PvP, guess you get some good stuff in higher leagues? Dunno, but this makes the shitty rates hurt less. it is similar to Dragon Blaze, a game I have played for a short while, but I think this is better, at least for now, since the story is more involving and important, which brings me to my third point
- while the writing is typical anime crap, the world is very nice and lively. i appreciate the fact that there are towns with sidequests, game really reminds me of Legend of Mana with its fairy tale-esque approach to the characters and their side stories. you wander around, meet people in dungeons randomly and get tiny quests from them, not bad.
All in all, it's a nice game, but one you can play on the side without much investment, I can't imagine anyone whaling on this, unless they really want certain chars for the design or whatever.
It's definitely not replacing GBF as my number 1 gacha (although the game has been dead for a few months now, waiting on new high level content or anything new that's worth spending time on basically, fucking Dragalia Lost ruined everything lol), but it also won't replace my newest unexpected gacha favorite - Tales of Erin. The only bad thing about this game is the advertisement company they hired - they basically use artwork from other games to promote ToE (Granblue, Ys), which sucks and turns off a lot of people and started rumours about stealing assets from other games which are not true. Other than that, the game is superb. it takes A LOT of inspiration from Granblue, but streamlines it, while adding tons of new twerks that actually make the game better in a lot of aspects. The gacha is fair (3% rates for 5*, useful 4 stars, and you can buy 5 star chars once you collect enough currency from pulling), they're generous with gems, constant updates and new events (with good free 5* chars), and the guild/multiplayer aspect is great, game is as competitive as Granblue, but takes tons of less time to get good and start dealing with HL stuff, very convenient to play, you can auto the easier stuff, but harder content (even story missions) require manual play. Also, the JP version just got a BlazBlue collaboration event which lets you recruit 6 BB characters, hopefully it shows up in the global version, it should attract more people. Anyway, highly recommended, not as high budget as E7, but a much better game overall.